Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (35 page)

By 7.30 p.m., Sophie and I have set up the pig roast on the grass outside the village hall. We've heated up three of the huge
joints, weighing about twenty pounds apiece, in our oven at home. I didn't realise that the small kitchen in the hall doesn't
have an oven and I've had to beg oven space off Margaret Morgan, whose house adjoins the gravelled car park. By eight o'clock
there's a hungry line of people scooping up chunks of pork, placing them on fresh white baps, then smothering the meat with
apple sauce and stuffing, coleslaw and lettuce, which we picked from the garden moments before leaving. Sophie carves the
pork and I sit behind the bowl of stuffing, ladling out portions as I am worried that it will run out if left to a free-for-all.
For fifty quid, I've hired the services of Ron, a musician from Beaminster who plays a medley of tunes on his accordion. 'My
Old Man Said Follow the Van' flows into 'Galway Bay', then 'Roger de Coverley'. Inside the marquee David has laid out straw
bales for seats, and by nine o'clock there must be over one hundred grown-ups and children, eating and laughing, and jigging
around the tent to the strains of Ron's increasingly Scottish airs.

Inside the village hall there's a small, cosy bar, home of the Whitelackington Social Club. Behind the bar, there's a row
of upended bottles along the wall: Glenlivet, Famous Grouse, Bell's, Smirnoff, Martini. On the wall beside the bottles there's
an old black and white picture of one of the village houses on fire. Underneath it says 'Fire at Bill Spinks' Forge, 1935.'
Another depicts the fallen Monmouth Tree, site of a legendary meal eaten by the Duke of Monmouth when he stayed at Whitelackington
Manor in 1680. Legend has it that a great lunch took place under the spreading shade of a chestnut tree, thought to have been
planted in the Norman Conquest. It grew to over fifty feet with a girth of twenty-five feet. Monmouth drew a crowd of two
thousand who pushed over a hundred yards of wooden palings in their eagerness to hear him speak. The tree survived another
two hundred years and was then destroyed in a hurricane on Ash Wednesday 1897. There are two well-loved pictures in the hall,
one showing all the villagers outside the hall celebrating the Queen's Jubilee in 1977 and another showing the village again,
twenty-three years later at the millennium. But tonight they're nowhere in sight, safely tidied away to make space on the
walls for the paintings and photographs on display for the art show. I find a small watercolour of our house, painted the
previous summer by Penny Hawkins, and I buy it for Charlie for our seventh wedding anniversary the following weekend.

I like being in the village, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have liked the village at all when I was twenty-one. I like
the feeling of safety it gives me, of being part of a continuous line of people who've lived, worked, partied, married and
died within the confines of this single street with its single row of small houses. It's a feudal place where Ewen, our landlord,
still owns many of the houses, as his mother and grandfather did before him, but it's all well looked after, with pretty gardens
and neat front gates and a sense of knowing who everyone is and where they fit in. Its cosiness could alternately succour
or swamp you, and I find myself thinking of the quote from Rebecca West's
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
that hangs on the wall of my study to the left of the window which looks out over our London garden:

Only part of us is sane; only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and
die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half is nearly mad. It prefers
the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set
back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

If Professor Lovelock is right, then the human race is hell­bent on choosing the latter option, and I know that in my life
I have veered between the two, frequently pulling the plug on safety and contentment for the seductive dangers of unknown
shores. The older I get, the more I realise that planning the future is a largely useless exercise, as full of the possibility
of disappointment as of fulfilment. The Buddha knew that all we can really count on is today and, just for today, I am happy
and I am where I want to be and that, for now, is enough.

12

The Return of the Large Blue

Charlie and I spend the evening of our seventh wedding anniversary, 1s July 2006, crouched together on a tartan rug, waiting
and watching out for badgers. We are with my old friend Mike McCarthy, who was the news editor at the
Independent on Sunday
when I first became editor and is now the environment editor of the daily paper. Mike and his two children, Flora and Sebastian,
are sitting on an adjacent rug, under an overhanging tree beside a stretch of open water in nearby woods. David has assured
us that it is a good place to see badgers.

There is a strong smell in the air, not the sharp, slightly acrid earthiness of foxes, but certainly of a wild animal. The
day has been hot and the sky is quite clear of clouds. A fuzzy crescent moon is slowly shifting through the lower part of
the sky, moving towards the west as the darkness falls. We sit quietly, listening to the furious chattering of the rooks,
the crows and the ra vens who are settling for the night in the trees above our heads. The darkness comes gradually, gently
sucking the blue out of the sky and reducing the trees to outlines, just shapes, the curves broken by tendrils and branches.
As the details fade, the English woodlands become as thick as any tropical jungle. A heron flies across the pond, its cry
more like a dog's bark than a bird's call; settles heavily on to the branch of the fir tree that hangs over the water and
perches there, poised against the darkening sky like a Japanese painting. Suddenly, the birds fall silent, as though they've
all decided it is time to go to sleep, and in the sudden silence we hear rustling noises from the trees behind.

Charlie sees it first: a snout peeking out from the long grass and the brambles which edge the wood, barely discernible amid
the dark shadows of the overhanging branches. But then it moves forward and is out on the path in front of us. It isn't a
big badger; he was probably born earlier this year and he moves at a fast trot, low slung to the ground, his thick tail bumping
along behind him. Flora and Sebastian gasp. He looks almost pure black but a badger's fur is actually white with black tips,
and as he moves there is an occasional flash of lightness. He heads first towards the pond, but then he hears us or senses
us nearby and breaks into a run, passing in front of us towards a dense thicket of brambles.

Round us, badgers are the most common road kill. Several times, driving home late at night down narrow Somerset lanes, we've
come across one on the road, startled in the car's headlights. My friend John Mitchinson, who lives in my cousin's village
of Great Tew, has eaten badger ham, which he said was delicious, and we once sat next to a woman at a Sunday lunch party who
claimed to have made an edible stew from a dead badger she picked up off the road. We stay there in the darkness long after
the badger has made his brief appearance. Flora and Sebastian fall asleep. I watch the moon move across the sky towards the
west, sinking lower and lower till it disappears below the level of the trees and the blackness becomes complete.

The following day we meet Martin Warren, head of butterfly conservation in Britain, and Jeremy Thomas, author of
Butterflies of Britain and Ireland,
to visit the sites where the Large Blue, officially extinct in 1979, has been reintroduced to the countryside. We meet in
the car park behind the pub in Compton Dundon, a small village just north of Somerton. Our destination is a steep bank at
the southern end of the nearby Polden Hills. We climb up a hilly path, through tangled trees and bristly shrubs where wild
pale-blue irises peek out of the boggy places under the heavy branches, through a hunting gate and on to a dramatically sloping,
south-facing meadow above the railway line where the London-Penzance train, the First Great Western, whistles by every twenty
minutes or so. The precipitous field is carved into tiny terraces, created over the centuries by snowfalls and etched further
by the travels of sheep. At first site it looks uninspiring, just an ordinary meadow, the grass kept trimmed by grazing sheep,
a scattering of trees and brambles breaking up the turf. But in the hands of our guides, it becomes anything but, and for
a moment I'm transported back to that day in Africa, looking down at the insects with Daisy beside me, touching my elbow and
saying, 'Mum, it's nature's SimCity.'

Beneath our feet the life going on is every bit as complex and interdependent as on the African veldt. We're all just too
snooty to realise that our own backyards hold such riches. We find flowers: the yellow bird's foot trefoil so beloved of bumblebees,
the purple sweet scabious which is also known as the Mournful Widow, yellow rock roses, wild geraniums, wild parsnips, clovers,
thyme, the delicate mauve and white flowers of eye bright, yellow spotted eat's ear, the pinky red pyramidal orchid, yellow
melilot, silver weed with its delicate leaves beneath its strongly coloured yellow flowers, spiky agrimony and salad burnet,
which we grow in our herb garden and sell on our herb stalls. There are chiffchaffs singing in the branches of a field maple,
swallows on the wing, a pair of magpies pecking the ground for grubs. We crouch to look into the tunnel of a funnel spider's
web, its tightly woven cone­shaped web opening out to create a landing place for unsuspecting insects. Martin gently touches
the outer edges with a piece of grass, sending vibrations back to the waiting spider. The small black insect quickly comes
out, looking around for the prey which he believes has landed in his lair. There are Brown Argus butterflies feeding on the
rock roses, a Six Spot Burnet Moth hovering near the brambles, an Emperor Dragonfly pulsing through the air. And then Jeremy
points to a small blue butterfly, fluttering slowly across the hillside, maybe a foot above the ground. It keeps changing
directions, hovering for a moment, then moving on, as though searching for something.

It is an astonishing colour. When at rest, with its wings folded up, it looks brown, with black spots and a blueish tinge
near its abdomen. But in flight it is a beautiful blue, shimmering in the sunlight, changing colour as it dips and flutters
through the sky. Jeremy follows the Large Blue as she drops down towards a low-growing bushy thyme plant and, closing her
wings, lands on one of the deep purple flowers. 'She'll lay an egg,' Martin says as he crosses the hillside to another mound
of thyme and points out a single tiny, white egg held between the rich purple flower heads. 'Look, here's one.'

The life cycle of the Large Blue is both bizarre and complex. Before laying her eggs, the female Large Blue will have mated.
She will have found her mate earlier in the day and, following a brief aerial courtship, they will settle on the ground to
pair for about an hour. When they part, she hides until her eggs are ripe. Then she sets off to look for a thyme plant on
which to lay an egg. This is what we are seeing now: the delicate blue insect twitching and rotating on the flower. She curves
her plump stomach almost double, pushing the tip into a young bud. This process ejects a single egg and she will lay, on average,
sixty eggs in a day.

Jeremy takes up the story: 'The eggs will hatch after five or ten days and the tiny caterpillars will burrow into the flower
to feed on the pollen and seed. Even though each egg is laid singly, many Large Blues may choose the same plant. It's not
uncommon to find four or five eggs, and I once found a hundred!'

But, he explains, most will die as the caterpillars are cannibalistic in their first life stage, and only one will ever survive
on each flower head. After two or three weeks, each surviving caterpillar will complete the skin changes and develop the organs
needed for the next phase of its life. The most important of these is a tiny honey gland which secretes minute drops of sweetness
to attract red ants.

Once its final skin moult is complete, and always in the evening, the caterpillar flicks itself off the thyme flower and drops
to the ground, where it hides beneath a leaf or in a crevice. 'By doing this,' Jeremy says, 'it greatly improves its chances
of being found by the red ants, who forage in the early evening.' When the ant does find the caterpillar, it taps its body,
causing the honey gland to produce more secretions, which excite the ant. It recruits others and they crawl all over the caterpillar,
milking the gland and licking up the juices. Eventually they wander off, leaving the original ant with its find. That ant
is possessive, and Jeremy says he has seen fights to the death when ants from different colonies try to milk the caterpillar
as well.

Eventually, the ant decides to adopt the caterpillar, tricked into believing that it is an ant grub by its touch, scent, hairiness
and size. Seizing the caterpillar in its jaws, he takes it down into the nest with the ant brood. Once safely inside, the
caterpillar quickly transforms into the parasitic monster he or she really is. Puncturing the skin of an ant grub, he starts
feeding on the fluid tissues. Between feeds, like an Eastern potentate, he reclines on a pad of spun silk. Soon the caterpillar
has become a bloated white maggot that dwarfs both the ants and the grubs.
In
the winter he crawls deep into the nest to hibernate; in the spring he resumes feeding. Bylate May, when it is time to pupate,
the Large Blue chrysalis is about one hundred times heavier than when he first conned the hapless ant. He will have eaten
about twelve hundred ant grubs, a greed which kills off many who have landed in nests simply not big enough to support their
appetite. In the last week of June or in early July, the adult Large Blue emerges between eight and nine-thirty in the morning,
when the ants are sluggish, to begin his five-day life on earth. As the hatching adult struggles to split open its pupal case,
it gives off rasping bursts of song, which whip up the ants into a frenzy of activity. Despite the Large Blue's murderous
assault on their nest, they accompany the insect along the narrow passages towards the light, milling around excitedly while
the butterfly makes its way up a shrub to inflate its wings. After a forty-five-minute rest, the wings have set hard and it
is ready to fly.

While Martin and Jeremy alternately tell us the story of this strange, convoluted life-cycle, I watch the Large Blues fluttering
above the thyme plants, occasionally dipping downwards, apparently checking whether this plant or that would make a good home
for their eggs. After they were officially declared extinct in 1979, Jeremy led a team to Sweden in the early 1980s to regions
where Large Blues were living in habitats almost identical to southern England. He brought back the grubs, placed them in
the nests of the red ants on these banks and brought the Large Blue back to life in the British Isles.

The proceeds from the fete and the pig roast have meant a good month's cash flow. The plant stall at the Dairy House took
£195, Dennis and I made £125 at Montacute and the honesty table earned £75. If it hadn't been for the problems with the pig,
the hog roast would have earned the nursery about £150. In the event, on that bit of the proceedings we have barely broken
even.