Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (20 page)

Rowley Leigh's pig doesn't reach London till Saturday. It has a complicated journey: Dennis drives the carcass from Snells
to Rowley's West Country fish supplier, who commutes up to London daily, delivering fish for the restaurant and the adjoining
fish shop. The pig is loaded up with the cod, salmon, tuna, hake, turbot, crabs and prawns and delivered to Kensington. I
ring Rowley after we get back from the bird market, worried that he is going to say we have sold him an inedible pig, but
all he says is that he's heard that the pig is huge (which, of course, it isn't, at least not in the way that a pig can be
huge). But there's still no word on the taste.

Charlie and I write a list of all the things that we feel aren't going right at the nursery, and just after nine on Monday
morning I pull on my wellingtons and head across the field for a meeting with David. It is drizzling steadily and there are
muddy patches in the park which suck at my boots. I can see David in the distance, feeding the geese and lonesome George.
In the dull wet weather this work is no picnic, and my grumpiness starts to fade. As I go through the gate, I am confronted
by the twelve little faces of the Wilburys waiting anxiously for their breakfast. I fetch their nuts and they squeal with
hunger and expectation, jumping in and out of the trough, on top of each other, pushing and shoving, until finally they each
have a place and there's a neat row of piglets, heads down, tails whirling, lined up along the feed trough. Earl and the Empress
come charging out of their caravan: the Empress, looking fat, almost knocking us over in her eagerness to get at her breakfast.
Bramble's stomach is heavy and hanging low: clearly a pregnant pig, due to give birth on 5 June. Robinson has been bonking
Guinness and Cordelia with gusto: hopefully two more pregnant pigs. We will get it right next time.

I make coffee and David and I settle down in the office. There are pleasing, discordant sounds: the chirping of the small,
newly hatched chickens in the storeroom, Radio 1 in the potting shed, the cackle of the rooks in the rookery up in the trees
between the nursery and Dillington House, the soft hum of the incubator standing on a bench beside the desk, full of eggs,
all due to hatch in the next few days. Any shreds of remaining grumpiness evaporate.

We go through the planting schedule for the year. To date we have planted:

26 kilos of onions which will, by the end of July, have grown to fill fifty bags of 25 kilos each. They'll be stored in the
new, long store house by the south wall and sold when needed throughout the winter.

19 rows of carrots which will be ready to eat by early June, weather permitting. More carrots will be grown every month through
to midsummer, resulting in enough to store to supply Dillington through the winter.

4 long rows of early potatoes which will be ready to eat in June. Chris Wilson, Dillington's estate manager, is uneasy about
us growing spuds out in the new field. As we're organic we won't be spraying for blight, and if our potatoes get it his crop
will too. So it probably isn't worth our while to grow anything other than an early crop.

6 rows of parsnips which will be ready to eat and over­winter in the autumn.

3 rows of Swiss chard in the tunnel which will be ready by the end of April. 4 more rows have been planted outside, to be
eaten at the end of May. We'll keep planting new rows every month as Swiss chard is popular with Dilling­ton's chef, Mark.

4 long rows of broad beans, a total of 2,000 seeds, ready for June/July.

Courgettes have been planted in the tunnels and will be ready in May. More will be planted outside as the weather improves
and we should have courgettes for sale from May till October. Aubergines, broccoli, celery have been planted and are doing
well. Indoor climbing beans have been planted in the tunnels, as have tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and chillis. They will
all be up by the end of June and should keep producing till the autumn. We'll try some tomatoes outside as I'm keen to see
if that changes the flavour.

We then make a list of what we'll plant in the last week of March and the early days of April: peas, spring onions, Swedes,
cannellini beans, runner beans, French beans, more purple sprouting, kale, pumpkins, butternut squash, radishes and turnips.
There'll be a huge, one-off planting of leeks out in the new field: Dillington wants between five and ten kilos a week throughout
the winter, which means planting up almost an acre. The indoor climbing beans - a cross between a runner and a French bean
- that we grew last winter were popular with the kitchen staff. They grow to almost a foot long and, unlike standard runners,
don't need their tough outside edges removed. We make a note to grow as many as possible for as long as possible in the year.
We're short of rhubarb: the house gets through five kilos a week and we won't manage that this year. Possibly we can take
some from our garden: just yesterday Charlie decided to force our new growth and upended a large flowerpot over the pink stems
which were pushing through the manure. In a few weeks, we'll have far more than we can eat. Six different types of lettuce
and salad leaves are being grown. I don't think there's enough, but David says that we're growing enough for the house and
there's no point growing more until we're sure of our outlets.

I sign cheques for chicken feed, pig nuts, two new tyres for the van, insurance for the Transit which we're going to need
to transport the herbs to Montacute on Saturday, wages, a vet's bill and diesel fuel. As I tot up the amount of money that's
going out, I wonder just how anxious we ought to be. Clearly, we've built something much bigger than we originally planned.
Equally clearly, not everything has gone right. We have a pressing anxiety about herbs. Many of the seeds that we planted
in January in the hope that they'd have grown into plants big enough to sell at the farmers' market in Montacute are still
too small. Only the chives, parsley, salad burnet, mint and chervil are OK. We have a few rosemary plants which look healthy
and even fewer sorrels which we transplanted from plants in our own vegetable garden and potted up. But the sage, basil and
oregano are still tiny and we need more rosemary and more sorrel. To supplement our stock, David bought in some plugs from
a nursery near Honiton and they're now stacked in rows in the greenhouse, growing bigger by the minute in the warmth, and,
we have to admit, looking fantastic. Charlie and I aren't happy about the plugs, even though they haven't been sprayed or
treated in any way. We never planned to go into a business whereby we bought up plugs, grew them on and sold them for 'a turn'.
But David is gung-ho: the herbs are only costing 20p a plug, which, he says, actually works out cheaper when you take the
labour costs into account. Charlie and I can see the sense and agree that it's a good plan to get us through a tight spot.
But we are not letting up on our own herb-growing programme.

The swallows come back in the last week of March, over two weeks earlier than the last date recorded on the old potting shed
door: 12 April 1852. They come in on the high south winds, straight from the Sahara to their old nesting grounds in nearby
barns. I see them first on the 27th, swooping and dipping across the pond at the village end of the park, their blue feathers
reflecting off the slanting evening light, the red patches on their heads appearing and disappearing as they turn and tumble
in the air currents. They look effortlessly graceful above the water, diving here and there to catch an insect, soaring back
up again to float aloft as if being carried by unseen hands. Suddenly, it seems, it is spring. There is the faintest green
flush in the hedgerows above the yellow bursts of primroses; the countryside feels full of magic and life, the chains of winter
giving way to the unstoppable miracle of rebirth and new life. The rains have cleared and the winds have pushed back the clouds,
revealing pale blue skies. The air is soft and warm, full of the sounds of birds through which the swallows' twittering song
is clearly audible. Costly it may be, but I don't regret this venture one bit.

The following day, back in London, I go to see Rowley at Kensington Place. 'It's a bit thin,' he says, as I follow him through
the back of the kitchens, across the road leading into the parking lot and into the restaurant's storage department and deep
freezes. He hauls the pig out of the fridge and lays it on a shiny metal table, then collects another, larger pig to put beside
it. No doubt, ours looks skinny and slightly floppy. 'I'll carve it into a loin, roll up this end, and use the middle for
a stew, maybe turn a bit into sausages, they'll be nice and lean.' I breathe a sigh of relief. It isn't a reject. A week later,
Rowley tells me that his meat chef, Antonio, reported that the pig was a lot better than anyone had thought. It might have
been a bit on the skinny side, but it tasted great and was very tender.

In the first week of March, Hygrade Meats, the meat-packing company in Chard that David used to work for in his early twenties,
suddenly announces that it is closing down with the loss of all 305 jobs. Unemployment in Chard currently stands at just over
one hundred, so the prospect of that number quadrupling when the factory doors slam shut for the last time at the end of June
throws the town into turmoil. Hygrade's owners, the Tulip Corporation, say the closure is a sign of success: they are relocating
to their head office in King's Lynn, where they plan to centralise all their operations to maximise profitability. The redundancy
terms offered to the workers are the bare minimum and, the company announces, they'll be on offer only to workers who stay
with the company till after 1 June. In a letter to the
Chard and Illy
in the days immediately after the closure is announced, Hygrade worker Steve Martin writes: 'The future for job opportunities
in Chard is looking bleak. I have no means of transport to travel to surrounding towns. Like others, I relied on this job
to support my family. After ten years plus, it has put me in a dilemma. Do I leave early and forfeit the redundancy pay I
am due for those ten years' hard work, or search for a job afterwards when 300 plus people are also looking for work? We all
put in a lot of hard work over Christmas, especially to keep up with Tesco's demand. As other factories weren't coping with
the workload, they sent extra work to us. We were praised for our hard work and team effort, but now it feels like our dedication
has been to no avail.'

Colin Rolfe, a friend of Tony Dowling, Hygrade's unofficial union rep as well as the Labour candidate at the last general
election, is seething when I meet him in the Portuguese cafe in Chard a few days after the closure. He'd just been down to
the unemployment office with his wife Zoe, who works at Oscar Mayer, and their two-year-old son Jack, who is recovering from
a bout of pneumonia. 'There were no jobs that would be any good for someone like me,' he says, 'I'll get the job seekers'
allowance of just £56.' Colin knows that the closure of their firm, where he's worked for the last two years, is directly
connected to the ever-expanding power of the supermarkets. Many workers feel the supermarkets' continual drive for increased
profits has been a major factor in the decision to close. Hygrade isn't closing because it has gone bust, it is closing because
they can make more profits by relocating two hundred miles across the country. Tony Dowling told me later that 'many producers
for Tesco are driven into the ground in order to keep prices down and profits up. There is nothing realistic about buy one
get one free. It may be free to the customer and low-priced to Tesco, but somewhere, you know a producer is being squeezed
- and then squeezed again.'

Keith Milton, the GMB branch president for Somerset, sums it up in another letter to the
Chard and Illy:
'How many more factories must close, jobs be lost and lives changed for ever before big business realises they have a moral
responsibility to their workforce which is not just motivated by more and more profit?'

There is another sinister thread running through this story. In 2003, when Oscar Mayer first started employing Portuguese
labourers to work in their factories, filling the jobs with the dismal wages they were offering in their expanding empire,
the town was targeted by the BNP. They renewed their campaign in February 2005.

Who, if anyone, gave Oscar Mayer Ltd the right to change the face of Chard? . . . Oscar Mayer Ltd acting, presumably, in the
pursuit of profit, has over the last few years brought in hundreds of foreign workers and their dependants to work at their
Furnham Road plant. . . . it is widely understood that Oscar Mayer has done so without seeking the views or opinions of local
residents and with apparent scant regard for the impact their employment policies are having on Chard's social fabric, services
infrastructure or local employment opportunities. Oscar Mayer's excuse for importing foreign labour, we are told, is that
they cannot find enough suitable labour locally. Could we suggest to them they try increasing their pay rates to a level acceptable
to Chard folk and in so doing contribute a little more to the British economy rather than to the Portuguese one?