Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (22 page)

There are records of people living on the Levels for almost six thousand years, and in 1970 a peat digger called Ray Sweet
discovered a pathway in the bog: here, between the autumn of 3807 and the spring of 3806 Be, the dwellers on the Levels first
figured out how to make a flat surface. They needed to construct bridges and pathways to connect areas of dry land. First
they cut stakes which they would push into the earth in an X shape, driving the bottom tips deep into the peat to give the
structure stability. They then laid branches between the two arms of the X. But that winter they did something that, as far
as archaeologists know, had never been done before. They used axes to makes splits in the ends of oak logs and, with wooden
mallets and oak wedges, forced the splits open till they had planks, some of them up to fifteen feet long and three feet wide.
It was these traces that Sweet discovered a little over thirty years ago, preserved by the peat over the centuries and able
to be dated so accurately through the growth rings still visible in the wood.

By nine-thirty I am starving. At a stall selling pies, cakes and jams I buy a couple of sausage rolls, the flaky pastry meltingly
delicious, the meat well-flavoured and juicy. Sue Warrington used to be a full-time rep for a medical supplies firm as well
as a mother of three. She'd learned to cook as a child and had always made her own jams, chutneys, jellies, pies and juices.
But three years ago, her fifteen years in the medical business suddenly seemed like absolutely long enough and she chucked
it in to become a full-time producer of home-cooked food.

'It was amazing, it just took off,' she says, as she unloads yet another box containing pies made of chicken and leek, spinach
and ricotta, lamb and apricots. 'Four months after I stopped working, Keith gave up being a metal broker to join me. Then
we thought we'd have another baby and went and had twins.' She laughs. 'That wasn't in the plan. With four boys and a girl
under ten, I'm often cooking in the middle of the night and the twins always start yelling just when the jam is hitting boiling
point. My seven-year-old has become a dab hand at labelling the pies.'

In their garden they grow their own vegetables as well as green tomatoes for chutney. They have apple, pear and plum trees
which, with storing or freezing, fill their pies throughout the year. Sue is at Montacute on her own, as Keith is manning
their stall at another farmers' market at Axbridge. In addition to her own products, which include cakes as well as the pies
and the jams, she's also selling a friend's cheeses. It's going to be a non-stop day, without a minute to sit down. She reckons
that she now works far longer hours and knows that their bank statements never look as healthy as they used to. 'But I wouldn't
change it for the world. The kids eat better. The community in our village of Chedzoy is lovely. I like being outside. I like
being in charge of what we do. I like coming to the markets, you get to know people, they all value food and knowing where
it has come from. Traceability, that sort of thing.'

At ten o'clock the punters start arriving. Many are elderly, careful with their money, eager to snap up something delicious
to eat for the weekend and clearly enjoying the chance to turn the mundane Saturday morning food shop into an interesting
outing. When I first met Colin Rolfe he had told me that most of his mates at Hygrade went to buy their meat from the Barley
Mow, the farm shop just out of Chard on the road to Honiton. Colin initially went there because, after seeing what happened
on the production lines, he couldn't face eating processed meat. But he was totally taken aback to discover that, gram for
gram, it was no more expensive to buy meat there than it was to buy it at the supermarket. And, he said, he likes shopping
there: it makes him feel good to know that he is feeding his kids proper meat, and, in the process, supporting the local economy.

Looking round the bustling stable courtyard, it is hard to imagine anything more different from the world I was in at last
night's meeting. Both are part of the modern food industry, but where Hygrade stands for cheaper food, Montacute represents
the other extreme: food that has been lovingly made and sold with pride. Charlie is much more down to earth than I am about
the supermarkets, seeing them as a necessary part of our modern life, but I find myself becoming increasingly angry as I learn
more about their practices and the effect they have on our health and our communities. I know that what's going on in the
courtyard, while charming and wholesome, will never be the way we feed nations. But there are towns in America where the only
shop is a Wal-Mart and the prospect of that being replicated by Tesco in parts of Britain is so depressing that I resolve
to carry on with the markets, even if they make us only a small amount of money.

We make our first sale at about ten minutes past ten: two pots of mint and one of salad burnet. Charlie turns out to be a
born salesman, offering advice about how to plant the herbs and how to cook with them. 'Make sure you don't put the basil
out yet; there might be another frost and that will finish it off entirely,' I hear him say to a hesitant customer who goes
on to buy two plants. 'Sorrel makes a delicious sauce to eat with fish,' he tells another. Business is OK, but it cannot be
described as brisk. Brisk is what is happening at the stalls that sell food and offer free tasters - bits of sausage, cheese,
chocolate, burgers, bread or sauces which can be scooped out of jars with plastic spoons and spread on broken bits of water
biscuits. There are jostling queues at the Orchard Old Spots table, where Sue Tutton is selling variously flavoured sausages
and burgers as well as joints of pork all from the offspring of her five Gloucester Old Spot sows, Brenda, Dorie, Sue, Joan
and Molly. Sue and her husband Mark live near Kingsbury Episcopi, and in 2004 they bought the orchard next to their home after
hearing that the picturesque plot was going to be sold to developers. It cost £27,000 and they had to find a way to pay back
the loan. The first year they earned a meagre £260 from the apples, so in 2005 they bought five female piglets and a large
white boar and went into business. Mark still works for Vodaphone, but, if they can get a grant to convert a shed into a 'clean
house' where they can make their own sausages, burgers and salamis, he plans to chuck in his job and get into pigs full­time.

I'm still smarting from our own pig debacle, so I examine the fat content on Sue's pork. Maybe a half-inch, not enormous,
but more than on ours. 'Why do you cross the breeds?' 'So they don't get too fat,' she replies. God, there's a lot to learn.
On the table beside the saucers full of sausage slices, which I'm tucking into while we talk, are two small jars. The bottom
of one is just covered by a layer of set, white fat. The other is almost full of a gunky yellow liquid, viscous enough to
cling to the sides of the jar. On the first is a label saying: 'The fat collected after grilling eight of our sausages and
three of our burgers.' On the other it says, 'The fat collected after grilling eight Tesco sausages.'

We didn't have any real idea of what we could expect to sell and by one o'clock, when the crowds started tapering off, it
is clear that we have brought far too many herbs with us. It is also clear that what attracts punters to the stalls in the
first place are the free snacks. Next time, we decide, we have to bake herb biscuits and offer bits of them on saucers to
anyone who comes by. Our friend Yseult Hughes has written a recipe booklet for us explaining how to grow and cook with a dozen
different herbs. Yseult and her husband Mark Ogilvy are brilliant cooks and the recipes are original and good. Full of optimism
that this £1 masterpiece would fly off the table, I'd brought 150 copies along. We sell eleven. The market ends at two o'clock
and it takes us almost as long to load up as it had to unload in the morning. We have made £183.50. Sue Warrington has sold
every single pie, all her cakes, two-thirds of her jars of jams and jellies and a sizeable quantity of cheese. She tells me
that their record taking at a market was £1,005. Still, £183.50 is roughly equivalent to 1,500 eggs, or one medium-sized pig
sold to Mr Bonner. There are five more markets this year at Montacute and we've signed up for all of them. Perhaps we need
more marketing: if we'd said 'buy five and get the sixth one free', and clearly displayed a laminated sign listing the prices
(they were all £1, except for rosemary and sage, which sold at £1.25) and offered free biscuits, then I reckon we might have
sold about £220 worth of plants. On our feeble income stream, this is pretty good money.

9

Bluebell Gives Birth

On 5 April, a dead swan is discovered in Cellardyke, a small coastal village nine miles from St Andrews. The swan is infected
with the highly pathogenic
HS
avian flu. The Scottish authorities quarantine the area, setting up a protection zone of three miles around the village. All
bird-keepers inside the area are instructed to bring their domestic flocks indoors to protect them from wild birds. Measures
to restrict the movement of poultry and eggs are put into immediate effect.

The dead bird was taken away for tests to discover if the strain of flu that had killed it was H5NI, which can infect humans;
by lunchtime on the 6th that had been confirmed. Thank heavens, I thought selfishly, the swan came ashore six hundred miles
away in Scotland. Since January the government has investigated forty cases of bird flu in the UK, but while a teal shot in
eastern England was found to have a low pathogenic strain, it wasn't H SN I. The other cases weren't even carrying
HS.
Charlie, David and I had all started believing that bird flu was going to miss Britain. It's been fourteen weeks since it
was first found on the borders of Europe, where it had swept in from South-East Asia, leaving 104 people dead in its wake.
The first European victim was a fourteen-year-old Turkish boy called Mehmet Ali Kocyigit, who died on New Year's Day. His
sister Fatima died three days afterwards and a week later a third sibling died too. By the middle of January the virus claimed
two more local teenagers. Mehmet and his family had had very close contact with their chickens, picking them up frequently
and breathing the same close air. Zeki, the children's father, told a local news agency that the whole family had eaten sick
birds, but that only the children had become ill.

By mid-February
HsNI
had spread to France, Germany and Italy. By the end of the month cases had been detected in Greece, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia
and Slovakia. Two dead ducks heralded the virus's arrival in Sweden on the last day of the month. And although David King,
the government's chief scientific adviser, warned that bird flu would arrive on our shores, the long gap since those two ducks
were discovered in Sweden had led me to believe we were going to be OK.

David has laid an old piece of red carpet across the entrance to the farm, soaking it in disinfectant and covering it with
straw. We keep the gate shut and there are buckets of disinfectant at the entrance to both of the chicken runs to dip your
wellingtons in before going through the gates. Three years ago, when Britain had been gripped by a brief panic about the possible
spread of the SARS virus, 45,000 gas masks had been bought in Scotland within days of the first reports of a possible pandemic. Then, as now, there was
talk of huge numbers of people dying and of how the government was going to dig mass graves to bury the infected corpses.
I was editing the
Express
during the most serious health panic, BSE. It was a fear that ran throughout the 1990's and the science suggesting that the
disease could be passed to humans was indisputable; indeed, new variant CJD has killed
I55
people in Britain, though the peak for these deaths was in 2000 when twenty­eight people died. So far this year there have
been two deaths. Tragic, but far less tragic than some of the stories I remember publishing, which warned that there might
be up to 130,000 people with the fatal brain infection.

In 2005, 3.1 million people died of AIDS worldwide and 1.2 million died in traffic accidents, almost three thousand of them
in Britain. But pandemics, like bird flu, accelerate us into panic. One reason is that we know we have no control over viruses
and that they don't respond to antibiotics. BSE and bird flu also play into another fear, a general worry that modern farming
is fiddling with nature in dangerous ways. Is disease our reward for cheap supermarket food? The disgusting use of mashed-up
bovine remains as cattle feed, a form of unnatural cannibalism which resulted in BSE, did indeed turn out to have deadly consequences.
In vast battery cages, where our cheap chickens lead their miserable little lives, the flu virus can spread like wildfire
and infect humans. The government has been at pains to tell the public that it is quite safe to keep on eating chicken and
eggs, but in Italy, after the discovery of a few dead birds, chicken consumption fell by 70 percent. However, when I ask
Mr Bonner how his chicken sales fared during the weekend scare he reports business as usual.

On the farm we have a surprise: Bluebell has suddenly given birth. No one had thought she was pregnant since she remained
quite slender throughout, and although David had suggested that I should pop along to the chemist and buy a pregnancy testing
kit as he was too embarrassed to go himself, we didn't get round to it, assuming that her mating hadn't caught. But it had,
and at 8.30 p.m. on a Friday in April she produces six perfect, evenly sized little piglets. We get to the Dairy House very
late: at roughly the time that Bluebell went into labour I was sitting in the make-up room at the BBC, getting ready for that
week's
Late Review.
Charlie picks me up just before midnight and we drive through the night, comparing notes on our respective weeks. He has been
in the House of Lords, pleading a case concerning illegal immigrants and their status under UK law, especially where it relates
to divorce. Family law is now his main speciality and I know he finds it a welcome relief after almost twenty years working
primarily on cases of child abuse. I like these times in the car: sometimes we hardly see each other during the week and the
two and a half hour journey is the time we catch up. It is one o'clock before we pass Stonehenge, the mysterious stones clearly
outlined in the moonlight, standing like guards marking the real beginning of the West Country. An hour later and we're turning
off the main road and into the park. In the headlights the eyes of the sheep glow like fireflies in the darkness.

The next morning we find David, Adrian and Bob clucking around Bluebell like a group of proud dads at the maternity unit.
She's been moved into the biggest hut, which will be hers for the next two months until the piglets are weaned. She is lying
on her side, the six small pigs searching frantically for her teats, sucking, gasping, squealing, clambering over each other
to gain a good purchase. They are about six inches long and four inches high with stubby wrinkled noses; their pink skin is
covered with the finest white hair and they have flattened little wrinkly ears. Their black spots are clearly marked, so precise
they could have been drawn on their bodies with a kohl pencil. Bluebell is quite unconcerned by the attention as we all stand
round her, cooing our admiration. I sit down on the straw and rub her behind the ears and on the snout. She grunts contentedly
and looks at me through her long-lashed eyes. Pigs' eyes are very human. Unlike dogs and horses, whose eyes seem more like
pools of liquid darkness, pigs' eyes have pupils and irises and they study you in an unblinking and measured manner. Bluebell,
who has always struck me as a wayward creature, seems resigned to motherhood. She might not have wished for it, but now that
it has arrived, she is going to do her best for her piglets. There is something touching about Bluebell and her piglets, a
sort of innocence; animals always manage to teach us that we are not superior to them in any way, and it is humbling to sit
beside her and watch how perfectly she deals with her babies.

Later in the morning, I go to Mr Rendell's greengrocer's to buy her a treat: a bunch of carrots, a sweet potato and a huge
parsnip. It's Grand National Day so I go to make my annual bet. Since I always base my selection purely on names I like, I
look for a name which relates to the pigs. Nothing. But since she has had six piglets, I back one called Number Six Valverde.

During the afternoon Charlie and I are in our small vegetable garden, planting seeds and preparing the ground for the summer
vegetable harvest: from over the field I can see a series of cars arriving at the farm, disgorging excited children to visit
the piglets. But after the race, which Bluebell's horse amazingly wins, I go back to see her. It is quiet now and I sit down
on the straw beside her to give her the carrots, the parsnip and the sweet potato, which she guzzles enthusiastically, making
Wilbur-like sounds of slurping, chewing and chomping. It is warm in the shed and it smells of a mixture of clean straw, dried
grass, milk and something indefinable which I can only think of as the smell of sweetness. I curl up beside the pig, my head
on her shoulder, the little piglets making small squeaks and barks beside me, and think how astonishing it is to feel so comfortable
beside such a huge, strange beast.

Things had been happening to friends of mine this week which weren't good. On Monday an old chum of sixty-three suffered a
colossal heart attack and was lying in a west London hospital in a coma; no one knew whether he would survive. Another friend
has been trying to get pregnant through IVF and the attempt ended in a miserable miscarriage. Another was undergoing radio
therapy for cancer of the throat. A very dear girlfriend has dislocated both shoulders and broken her arm in seven places
in a skiing accident. Just two days ago I met with another friend, who has been having a tough time coping with her drink
problem: she was on her way to residential care and I wonder how she's doing, remembering my own first few days in the treatment
centre and how frightening it had seemed. Another's father has died after a long and depressing period of dementia. And Chris,
the estate manager here at Dillington, has had to go suddenly to Newcastle as his brother's child died yesterday after a long
illness.

Two years ago, I had little faith in my own ability even to survive, let alone to thrive, and if anyone had told me that one
day I'd
be lying in a pigsty next to a nursing sow and her babies, I'd
have told them they were hallucinating. Life feels incredibly fragile and terribly precious. Bluebell seems to have fallen
asleep, her slow breathing interrupted by deep grunts and snores. I shut my eyes, aware that the sunlight is dancing on my
eyelids, and suddenly I am back on the bench in the treatment centre, under the heavy boughs of the copper beech, thinking
that the tree breathes out what I breathe in and I breathe out what the tree breathes in. I don't believe in a god as he is
manifested in the ordered religions of the West, but I most certainly believe that something has a hand in ordering this world
and that there is a time and a place for everything, and if you let go and let the river of life guide you, you will find
yourself precisely where you are meant to be.

Bryan Ferris and Mike Fry-Foley have fixed up a meeting with Norman Campbell, the mayor of Ilminster, in a last-ditch attempt
to try to reverse the planning decision which would create the proposed one-way system in the town. I ask to tag along. Heading
off to meet Bryan at his shop, I bump into Mr Bonner on his way to work. It is the first time I've seen him since the pig
fiasco, and he immediately tells me to come and see him to collect the money he owes us and in the next breath asks when the
next pigs will be ready. I tell him we've had our first piglets, but such is small-town life that he already knows, as he
also already knows that I am on my way to the meeting with the mayor. He's just walked down to the far end of Shuddrick Lane
to see for himself how far away the new car park is from the butcher's. 'It is bad news,' he says, 'our shop is as far away
as possible - at least two-thirds of a mile. No one is going to pop up and buy their sausages from us if they've parked all
the way down there.' Mr B and I are standing outside Isle Books, owned and managed by Chris Chapman. Chris is in his eighties
and most days the store shuts down while he takes a long lunch. There's a press cutting from the
Daily Mail
stuck to the window with Blu-Tack. Underneath the headline 'Now Blunkett Is Set to Make Millions from a Tell-All Memoir' a
story reveals that the ex-Home Secretary is planning to tell the world the secrets of his affair with Kimberly Quinn. Next
to the cutting, Chris has added a handwritten note, also Blu-Tacked to the glass: 'In the unlikely event of any of my customers
requiring a copy of this book, I would prefer them to get it elsewhere.'