Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (2 page)

We didn't think about it for long. Both Charlie and I were already spending some of our happiest weekends digging, pruning,
sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings. Charlie loves growing plants and vegetables and he seems to have a knack of making
them flourish. Green fingers, my father used to say, as he'd watch Charlie tidy up his much loved and once immaculate garden
on the weekends we used to spend with him.

We were too old to have children together and, even though we had the dogs - my daughter Daisy's old Battersea rescue dog
Bingo, and Dylan, the Labrador that Charlie had bought as a puppy for his daughter Francesca - there was something hugely
appealing about the prospect of a project which we could build together. We had first met in 1965, in Ludlow, where I spent
most of my childhood. Charlie was an old school friend of the vicar's son, Robin, and when his own parents divorced he became
a regular visitor to the tall Georgian vicarage which stood beside the River Terne in the village of Ashford Bowdler. My own
father, frustrated that he had never had a son, liked organising cricket matches on the village green and one summer Charlie
pitched up for a game. He turned up every summer after that and when Charlie and Robin decided to travel round America in
the summer of 1969, I asked to go too. I was only eighteen but, after a great deal of persuasion, my protective and cautious
father decided to embrace the proposed adventure with surprising gusto and helped us plan our trans-continental journey with
military precision.

Before I left, he handed me a Greyhound bus ticket, valid for three months, for use in any state of the union. In the event, I was the only one with such a ticket and, after travelling over the New Jersey Turnpike to Indiana late one night,
bundled together on the back seat of an overcrowded bus, I was easily persuaded to ditch all ideas of the Greyhound bus network
in favour of sticking out my thumb. A mutual friend flew out to join us and Charlie and I found ourselves hitchhiking together,
crossing the vast plains of the Midwest in an old green Chevrolet with a group of dope dealers, being marooned on a rattlesnake-infested
mountain outside Salt Lake City by a gun-toting cowboy, and meeting up with a Harvard student who, weeks later, would be joining
Charlie at Cambridge.

My late teenage years were promiscuous in the extreme, but those weeks with Charlie were special because they were wholly
platonic: ours was a deep friendship which had been well tested by frustrating hours on lonely roadsides and moments of real
danger. We developed the easy-going camaraderie that results from days spent in someone's company: neither of us can recall
having a single argument in all those weeks. But when we came home, Charlie returned to Cambridge and I went off to Kent University,
to begin a course in pure mathematics. In my second term I dropped out, fled to London, found a job on an underground newspaper
and, a little over a year later, founded
Spare Rib
magazine. Our lives diverged: he married, had Franky and Alex, and divorced. I married, gave birth to Daisy and divorced.
Twenty-seven years later, chance - this time in the form of a nudge from George Carman - brought us together again.

My father was delighted. He didn't like growing old and seeing his youngest daughter as a single mum, and, though by the time
of our wedding Alzheimer's was steadily claiming his sanity, he made it through the day, cheering hugely as George stood up
to make a speech. Charlie's son Alex was our best man, his daughter Francesca and my daughter Daisy were bridesmaids. Luke,
my stepson from my first marriage, was an usher, as was Charlie, the husband of my stepdaughter Miranda. Robin, who had introduced
us all those years ago, was also an usher. Bingo followed us up the aisle with a huge yellow bow pinned to her collar.

Now, almost five years later, those two teenagers who had once thumbed lifts on interstate slipways were setting out on another
adventure. Charlie had discovered both his love of plants and his skill in nurturing them; my own interest in the politics
of the countryside was growing. The more I discovered about the stranglehold of the supermarkets, the insanity of 'food miles'
(the distance that food travels from where it is grown to where it is bought), the lazy greed of our consumer society which
demands strawberries and green beans in January without thinking of the environmental consequences, let alone the taste, the
more I felt a sense of anger and sadness. It seems to me that we live in increasingly schizophrenic times: wanting our countryside
to remain for ever like the pictures Constable lovingly painted so long ago, yet standing by while agri-business, responding
to our demands for ever cheaper and more available food, rips up hedges and chemically destroys our wildlife. Every year,
twenty-one square miles of countryside, an area the size of Southampton, is lost to developers. Investing in a nursery seemed
a good way to start to redress the balance.

David is a proud and conscientious single parent, and lives with his nine-year-old son, Josh, for whom he is the primary carer.
They live in a sprawling village called South Petherton, which is about four miles from Dillington and boasts a fish shop
and a deli. He did have his eyes on a floundering nursery there, but it quickly became apparent that buying an already existing
nursery made little economic sense. Over 50 percent of the £90,000 asking price was for the plant stock, which would have
been hard to turn a profit on. The idea lapsed, but not for long. At the end of November 2004, David arrived one Saturday
morning with a new idea. Across the park, to the north of Dillington House, was a Victorian walled garden almost two acres
in size and unused since the early 1960s.

In the pale, late autumn sunshine we walked over to inspect the site. The walls were made of mellow old red brick, marks still
visible where once ornate glasshouses had stood. It was built on a slight slope, angling downwards to the north, which allowed
the heat of the day to pool into its corners. Even in the thin November sun, the bricks on the north wall were warm to the
touch and as we leant back we could feel the heat stored within. To the west the wall had collapsed - a previous estate manager
in a hurry had driven straight through it to provide easy access to the lower pastures - but apart from that they stood solid
and intact.

Inside the old tumbledown potting shed, a wooden door was covered with spidery inscriptions, records of the weather and the
movements of migrating birds, dating back to the 1850's: 'April 12, 1851, first swallows arrive.' They had been written by
James Kelway, then the eighteen-year-old head gardener at Dillington House, later to become one of the great Victorian gardeners
and founder of Kelway's Nurseries at Langport, breeder of peonies and irises and inventor of the cineraria plant. When Kelway
came to Dillington the house was owned by an ancestor of Ewen's, Vaughan Hanning Vaughan Lee, a keen gardener who built two
grape houses and grew peaches, melons and even bananas in the walled garden. He was particularly partial to his grapes, and
one day while shopping in Jackson's of Piccadilly his eye was drawn to a display of large, especially succulent ones. Recently,
he had been annoyed that his own grapes weren't as perfect, so he decided to buy them to show Kelway just what really good
English-grown grapes could look like. On enquiring where they came from, he learned that these were the 'famous Dillington
grapes', possibly the best in the whole of England. Later that night, Kelway was unceremoniously sacked for stealing.

Ewen was happy to extend a long lease on the walled garden and the surrounding five acres, which comprised a very old orchard,
and two wooded areas to the north and south. Our rent was set at a nominal £1 for year one, to compensate for the amount of
work needed, rising to £3,000 by the third year. Old fridges, dead sheep, countless plastic sacks, bits of metal and other
assorted rubbish had been dumped in the area immediately outside the garden over the last few decades. Occasionally local
people, like David's brother Mark and his girlfriend Louise, had arranged to keep their sheep in the garden, but apart from
that the whole area had remained untouched and derelict since the early 1960s.

The clearing began in earnest in January 2005: Mark and David borrowed a digger from the estate, and the rubbish was soon
safely sunk twelve feet down. We rotavated the rest of the ground. Inside the nursery, years of couch grass broke up under
the blades into tiny little white roots, each one a new weed. There was no option but to delay planting while we zapped the
weed with Round-up, the most powerful weedkiller on the market. What to do with the woods? We all wanted to keep pigs, so
the wood to the north was fenced off, a timbered house erected and muddy wallows dug out along the path of the underground
spring. The first three Gloucester Old Spots, Bluebell, Bramble and Guinness, arrived in early April. Chickens were the next,
seemingly logical, step, so a half-acre site outside the walls, once an old orchard but now just an unused area with a walnut
and chestnut tree, was fenced off and secured from foxes by an electric wire circling the enclosure a foot above the ground.
More huts and coops needed building. We didn't stop at chickens: twenty noisy geese, seven ducks and an assortment of 'rare
breeds' arrived at regular intervals over the next three months. Josh Bellew's grumpy angora rabbit, Gus, moved in as well,
as David couldn't cope with having yet another animal needing feeding and cleaning at home. Most days Gus sits with his back
to the assembled throng, occasionally joining in round the feeder when he's hungry.

Inside the walled garden, the old shed was stripped down, re-roofed and re-pointed. We divided it into a tiny office, storage
and potting shed. We bought and erected three poly­tunnels inside the garden, where tomatoes, cucumbers, cour­gettes, melons,
peppers, chillies and three types of lettuce were soon sprouting in the almost tropical heat contained in the plastic frames.
Seed planting began in earnest in the spring and by June there were rows of carrots, beans and onions outside the garden walls,
sandwiched into the space between the chickens and the pigs.

And, of course, with more animals and more vegetables, we needed more help. By midsummer, David's mother Anne had quit her
job as a cleaner and was working in the nursery twenty hours a week. His father Dennis looks after the small blue tractor
and the electrics, feeds the animals when his son is not there and helps out with the planting. Since Dennis was waiting for
his hip replacement, what he could do was initially circumscribed. Ian, a fireman from Taunton, helped out periodically and
Stuart, a friend of David's, did shifts. Charlie and I made some fifteen hundred cuttings over the summer, starting the long,
slow but ultimately rewarding process of building our own plant stock. Hydrangeas, boxes, bays, different herbs and herbaceous
plants were snipped off at the growing point, the leaves trimmed back, the stems doused in rooting powder and planted in potting
soil in seed trays.

There was a moment in July when it looked like our little farm was growing out of control, too many small feet moving in too
many directions and all too fast. Certainly that was the view of many of our friends, who saw our hobby, as they called it,
turning into a hugely expensive exercise that would ultimately go nowhere. But it wasn't as haphazard as it sounds. It seemed
to Charlie and me, as it seemed to David, that to make a smallholding work in the twenty-first century you have to try everything
and be prepared for some things to fail. We weren't just looking at intensive farming of a small five-acre plot, we were looking
to make every square inch become as productive as possible and we were looking to find as many ways as possible to generate
an income.

On a monthly basis the costs in early July 2005 worked out like this:

David is paid £1,000 (but this obviously needs to increase as soon as possible).

Anne is paid £384, as is Dennis.

Animal feed: £80