Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (18 page)

Our next port of call is a small farm at the bottom of a steep valley. Richard Fox's farmyard looks old and scruffy, with
pigs living in sheds around the four walls. The little weaners we've come to buy are clustered together for warmth on a deep
bed of straw inside a stable. We pick them up one by one, carrying them by their back legs to the trailer. We'd asked for
eight, at £20 each, but Richard throws in the other four for an extra £20. After filling out the purchase forms and handing
over the money, he shows us his prize boar, Little Richard, who stands about three feet six inches tall and eight feet long.
'That's what Robinson will look like in a few months' time,' David says cheerfully, stepping neatly out of the way as Little
Richard lunges towards the open door. I wonder how on earth we're going to contain a pig that big on our farm.

I fall asleep in the back of Dennis's warm car on the drive home and when I wake up we are bumping down the track to the nursery.
Even though it is still freezing and the sky is stony grey and bleak, our farm looks extraordinarily chipper. David is an
incredibly tidy man. Our fences aren't falling down, our gates are neat, the pathways, even in winter, are level and dry.
Even the recycled two-litre plastic milk bottles which hang from the wire fences, doubling as water troughs and feeders for
the rare-breed chickens, look efficient and useful. We carry the little pigs down to the big shed which has been divided in
half by a two-foot-high wooden wall. They're sharing the space with Robinson and one of the grown saddleback gilts, as well
as Guinness. They settle in quickly on to deep, clean straw, noses immediately in the trough which had been filled with nuts.
Earl and the Empress move into the pen vacated earlier that morning by the four now-deceased Gloucesters. Sue had told us
that the Empress, while an excellent pig in every respect, has a funny habit of sticking her tongue out when she isn't actively
engaged in eating or rootling. I watch her investigate her new home, looking inside the small house, checking out the water
supply and, seemingly finding it all satisfactory, she again looks about, her little pink tongue protruding from her mouth,
every inch a curious young woman who's quite pleased with life.

The following morning, Mildred falls into the duck pond and can't get out. When we find her she is perched precariously on
a stone, wet, cold and miserable. George waddles around proprietorially as David carries the bedraggled turkey into one of
the chicken sheds where she settles down in the straw, next to a goose sitting on her eggs. David has seen an advert in a
local free paper offering grown chickens for just 75P each. They are a year old and have been living as deep litter birds
in a huge group of some six thousand squashed together in one enormous barn. Reared like this, chickens will produce almost
one egg a day for the first year of their lives; then production tails off to about four or five a week, at which point most
birds are converted into soup or stock or turned into filling for cheap pies. But 75P for a full-grown chicken, even one that
doesn't lay to her full potential, is incredibly cheap and, since we lost some of our birds to the viral infection, David
decides to buy one hundred.

They are a sorry bunch when they arrive: their feathers are falling out, their eyes runny and their combs floppy and dull.
But they quickly improve, venturing further and further from their coop, setting off in groups of four or five to explore
the rows of old vegetables at the bottom of their run, digging out a central dust bath in which they take turns to dig, scratching
up the earth and sending it in showers over their feathers which keeps them both clean and healthy. Within ten days, they
are laying sixty eggs a day, their feathers are fluffing out, and their eyes are distinctly brighter.

Twelve years ago, when Daisy and I had moved out of the home we'd shared with her father and into our own house, we'd gone
to Battersea Dogs' Home to get a dog. We walked through the rows and rows of cages, assailed by barks and whines and pleading
eyes, until Daisy suddenly decided on a small, thin, uninspiring white mutt with brown patches. I wasn't that keen, but she
was determined, so we filled out the forms, paid our £50 and left with a little bitch we called Bingo. We were warned not
to let her off the lead for at least two weeks, but our first stop was Hyde Park, the sun was out, and we decided to let Bingo
have a good run. She never left our side and she's never left it since, turning from a shy little runt into an incredibly
sweet and loyal dog, who has blossomed on a diet of cuddles and new-found security. Looking at our rescue hens, I am reminded
of Bingo's inauspicious beginnings: she'd been abandoned on a south London street and had already been waiting in Battersea
for over four months before she caught Daisy's eye. I always feel that Bingo somehow knows that she's been lucky and I wonder
if the hens have a similar feeling.

By the middle of March the lateness of the spring is generating newspaper headlines such as 'where have all the flowers gone'.
Down in Cornwall the annual daffodil festival at Cotehele Manor has been postponed until April. The average mean temperature
for March has been just 2.4°C, about 4°C below recent years and that's meant that many early-flowering flowers such as crocuses,
daffodils and hyacinths are still keeping their buds firmly closed. Only the snowdrops have flourished, flowering for far
longer and growing far larger than anyone seems to remember. I know that we're not alone, but as the days creep by and the
ground in the market garden refuses to warm up, nothing can be planted. Seed potatoes, onion sets, carrots, cabbages, beans,
parsnips are all waiting to go into the ground, but without a sustained period of warmth when the temperature stays above
6°C for a number of days, there's no point in sowing anything.

Charlie and I write cheques for wages, pigs, animal feed, telephone bills: by the first official day of spring on 21 March,
our investment totalled £86,540, much more than our first 'limit', more than our second one too. Our bank in Yeovil, the NatWest,
has been a lousy partner in our small business venture. At Christmas, they bounced three cheques, charging us £37 every time.
I negotiated a small business loan of £1,000, explaining to the manager that we often had a shortfall between paying necessary
bills and new investment. Charlie and I bank with NatWest in London and our main accounts act as surety for any loans. The
manager, Lee Chapman, agreed, but two months later, he bounced another three cheques, charging us again for the privilege.
My normally mild-mannered husband hit the roof. I went to ask David if he knew what was going on. He told me that when he
and his wife Tracey split up, the bank wanted David to clear the debt on their loan. He had asked to renegotiate the repayments
but the bank hadn't got round to doing so, and now the banking system at the nursery was being penalised. It was an explanation
of sorts, but Charlie and I were still furious with the bank and argued to have the bounced cheque charges refunded.

Our income stream remains tiny: 800 eggs a week, a small amount of vegetables and now four pigs, which will make us about
£500. There's not much chance of having many vegetables to sell before June, and I know that it is only Wayne Bennett's patience
and belief in the project that is making him keep faith with us as suppliers of all Dillington's vegetables. Charlie and I
have stopped talking about what our limit is in terms of investment: neither of us would pull the plug on the project, but
I'm
worried. The cold weather has put our earning potential back a good few weeks. Bluebell is definitely not pregnant, and that's
another financial setback. The newly hatched rare-breed chickens won't be big enough to sell till May, and if bird flu is
found in Britain then not only will the bird markets be cancelled, private sales will be impossible as well.

But the cold weather isn't deterring the birds from mating. All the females are laying and the incubator in the office is
full to bursting with seventy-two eggs in various shades of brown and white. Unlike that of the pigs, who mate for a full
half­hour, chicken sex is fast and furious: they just need to position themselves correctly so that the sperm can enter the
female vagina. All animal copulation takes place in full view of the other animals and zoologists have learned that the sight
of others having sex can work as a powerful aphrodisiac.

The most bizarre experiment I ever heard about took place in Japan. Researchers put two female and two male quails in a pen
together. The female birds showed a definite preference for one of the males, so the rejected male was removed, filmed having
sex with a third female and then the resulting video showed to the two lady quails, who immediately developed an overwhelming
interest in the porn star. The Japanese researchers had no idea why the film helped the birds to change their minds, but concluded
that female quails are, like humans, affected by watching sex and seem to prefer males that have demonstrated their sexual
dexterity.

I had begun to wonder if the fear about a supermarket opening in Ilminster was just that. Time had passed and there'd been
no signs of movement from the developers and no firm announcements as to which of the Big Four would be moving into the site
on Shuddrick Lane. But now in early March there is a report from the Office of Fair Trading that shoots the whole issue into
the headlines. In 2005, the OFT had ruled that there were no grounds for probing the power of the supermarkets; now that decision
has been reversed. A report from the Association of Convenience Stores said that they were stealing the identity of our towns
and cities.
In
the year leading up to May 2005,2,157 unaffiliated independent retailers had shut down, compared with only 1,079 the year
before. MPs expressed fears over this unchecked expansion, which they warned could lead to the closure of 40 percent of small
shops by 2015. The 2003 decision to allow Tesco to buy up high-street convenience chains has further strengthened their market
share of Britain's grocery business and the report recommends that the issue should be reopened by the Competition Commission.
For the first time in my memory, supermarkets led the evening news on the BBC. One morning shortly after the report's publication
I am in Lane's Garden Shop, talking to Bryan Ferris. We express our optimism that this might mean that Ilminster will be spared.
But on 16 March the
Chard and Ilminster Gazette
tells a different story. A colour picture of the Shuddrick Lane site reveals a barren stretch of land, scored by the deep
marks of tractor wheels. The trees have all been felled and bulldozers have flattened out the bumps. As reporter Laura Thorpe
notes, 'The face of Ilminster is set to change for good as work begins on a controversial supermarket development.'

'No one had any idea this was going to happen. The workmen just arrived.' Bryan has come round to the Dairy House for tea,
with his friend Mike Fry-Foley who, with his wife Patricia, runs a small hotel in Beaverbrook's old village of Cricket Malherbie.
Bryan and Mike have just sent a letter to our local MP David Laws, asking him to attend a meeting to protest about the one-way
system. 'I know we've lost the battle over the store, but we can at least keep fighting about the one­way system,' they wrote.