Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (7 page)

Nine months after my accident, I went into hospital for the five-hour operation. When I came round I was in agony, not just
from the wires that had been drilled through my bones. There was no guarantee that this would work. No miracles had occurred
on the operating table to alter Bob Simonis's original verdict. All that was certain was that there was no certainty and I
had no inner resources to deal with it.

When I was in my twenties, I studied Buddhism under a Tibetan teacher called Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. With my then boyfriend
John Steinbeck, the author's youngest son, I'd
lived in Boulder, Colorado, where Trungpa had set up a university and spiritual teaching centre. I'd wrestled then with the
notion of impermanence, which the Buddhists understand as the only guaranteed condition of our lives. All sadness, they maintain,
comes from failed expectation, from regretting what has happened and waiting for circumstances to change and make you feel
better. By living with one foot in the past and another in a fantasy of how things might be, we fail to live in the present.
And that way a sort of madness lies. I knew intellectually that everything in life is impermanent and that all we truly have
is the moment in which we live, right here and right now. And that it is within our gift to live in that place and thus to
feel and see all that is fine and right in our universe. But there is a huge divide between understanding something intellectually
and finding a way to live it. I found it almost impossible to accept what had happened; I wanted to rewrite my story, to make
it more palatable. Charlie is much more realistic than me, good at coping with consequences and facing reality. Thirty years
of being a lawyer, of listening to people say, 'If only this hadn't happened,' have bred in him a rare ability to face the
music fair and square. Now his once determined and focused wife was wallowing in egotistical self-pity, turning his own life
into a nightmare not of his making.

The dull winter of 2004 turned into spring and the days were drifting past, like flotsam in the tide. I had no connection
with them. My life just seemed to be a matter of getting through from dawn till night, lumbering around on my frame, eating
too much, sleeping too much . . . waiting, waiting, waiting, sentenced to a kind of limbo which would only, I believed, be
altered by external events. I was still occasionally drinking and I couldn't see how to stop. The long years that I'd spent
sober felt like a foreign country for which I'd lost the visa. So at the end of May I went to get some help.

Mr Simonis, who I saw regularly every month, had told me that the only thing I could do for my leg was walk on it. I needed
to walk a mile a day, preferably without crutches, though using one would be acceptable. The fact that the wires made my feet
bleed when I walked couldn't be helped; bones need weight on them to encourage healing, the more weight the better. As he
explained, animal bones mend fast because they continue to stand up and move despite the fractures. The lumps and bumps that
you see on a sheep's leg are the result of their bodies forming calcium deposits around the breaks. Not pretty, but wholly
functional.

I went to get help at a therapy centre in Woking, run by Americans who I instantly trusted. There was a red-brick path running
through the garden and every day I'd aim to walk up and down it twenty times. The bricks were laid in a herringbone fashion
and halfway along the path there was a huge copper beech, its branches providing shade from the sun and shelter from the rain.
The path was to become my own little road to Damascus. Walking along it one day, I saw how much I needed to change. Not the
world, not other people; I could do nothing about them. All I could change was myself and my reactions. The walking hurt,
but I was doing it and so, I reasoned, I wanted to get better. I was physically and spiritually sick. I'd stopped seeing the
trees, stopped seeing the way the sunlight made patterns on the bricks beneath my feet, stopped hearing the sounds of the
birds or watching them fly. I remember sitting down on the bench under the beech tree, its generous silvery branches reaching
away above me. I have always found that trees are excellent listeners. They've been here so long that there isn't much they
haven't seen. In the past trees have been worshipped and wars have been won and lost on the ready availability of timber.
In the dining-room of my late parents' home there was a huge, curved oak beam holding up one wall. It had been cut from local
Shropshire oak, used in a ship which sailed against the Armada and then, as had been agreed, returned to its place of origin
for use in house-building. When I was little I used to daydream about that beam and the places it had been. Sitting under
that copper beech I found myself thinking: the tree breathes out what I breathe in and I breathe out what the tree breathes
in. That interdependence is part of my equation for living on the planet. I began to get better.

In
our wood there's an old oak tree. It's dying and when in full leaf in the summer its dead branches stand out from the crown
of greenness, like gnarled bony arms reaching up towards the sky. The oak is probably about three hundred years old and it
stands next to the pond, casting its long shadows across the water. I like leaning against its trunk. The knobbly bark reminds
me of an elephant's skin. It's a tough tree, resilient, able to keep on living proudly even while it's dying. Right now, up
in a crack just where the main boughs grow away from the trunk, two hornets hover at the entrance to their large nest. By
standing back, you can see the papery structure, balanced in a gap in the rough bark. Hornets always keep two guards in place
in front of a nest, checking for intruders, allowing only their friends to enter. Last summer wasps made a nest further up
the tree. Its branches are home to birds, the cracks and crevices in the bark shelter a myriad of insects.

We're all tenants of this land and when we garden we plough something back. It's a way of saying thanks. If gardening were
just growing a row of pretty flowers then it would be meaningless. But it's not. Planting and sowing and digging are the ways
in which muddled people connect their lives to something bigger, to all our joys and sorrows, because when you push a bulb
deep into soft wet earth it is always a symbol of hope. Hope that nature will not fail; hope that you will still be alive
to see the bulb burst out of the ground and unfurl its delicate leaves, opening the way for the miraculous flower. It is always
about the future, but about a future which you can only hope for. Maybe you won't see the flower in all its glory, but someone
will. Gardening connects us to a bigger picture, in which we are small, but crucial, players. It also offers a solace against
much that is tough today. Many of us have little control over our working environments: we're hostages to the mortgage, the
boss, the kids. Gardening is something private, with its own triumphs and disasters, and our gardens are our retreat from
those problems. When we step out under the sky and into our own space we can leave behind some of the pressing clutter which
makes modern life so stressful.

It's late 2005 and in three weeks' time we're going to kill our first animals. We've got an order for ten geese from Charlie's
old friend Rowley Leigh, who is the chef at Kensington Place restaurant. Rowley and Charlie were at Cambridge together and
in the last few years they've become good friends. We're lucky to be able to sell our geese to him. Kensington Place is fantastically
successful and last year Rowley opened a fish shop, housed in a glass-fronted annexe on the side of the restaurant. Half of
the geese will be sold whole through the fish shop and the others will appear on the menu, accompanied by braised red cabbage.
Rowley is a brilliant cook and KP's ever-changing and always interesting menu has ensured packed tables for over twenty years,
no mean feat in London's febrile restaurant world. We'll get better money from Rowley than from Mr Bonner, but while that's
important, it is not just a financial matter. Rowley has huge clout in the restaurant world and if he likes our geese - and
in time, our pigs and vegetables - then it will be easier to find other outlets.

'How do you feel about shooting the geese?' I ask David as he sits in our kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee and rolling a cigarette
of Woodbine tobacco in licorice-flavoured Rizla.

It is a Saturday morning in early December and last night there was a sharp frost. The weather has been topsy-turvy. It's
been raining and it's been freezing but the trees with small leaves, like the oaks and the apples, remain resplendently green.
Temperatures in October were about 2.5°C above the thirty-year average, and in November the hours of sunshine were 50 per
cent above the norm. Most years the fall in temperature through the autumn is the catalyst for trees to start slowing down,
drawing the chlorophyll out of the leaves and exposing the carotene pigment, which produces their vivid reds, yellows and
oranges. The mild autumn, followed by the sharp frosts of early December, further confused the trees. Those with big leaves
-like walnuts and horse chestnuts - have shed their big, fleshy leaves, but smaller, tougher leaves - like the birch, oak
and apple - are still clinging on. The mild weather meant there was poor colour this autumn: trees need cold nights to bring
about the change.

But already, according to David's reckoning, there have been as many frosts in ten days as there were in the whole of last
winter. The brugmansia, which grew all summer in a large, heavy pot on the terrace, is dead. In the vegetable garden, the
leaves of the parsley plants and the spinach have wilted, as though struck by lightning. This time last year we still had
roses in the garden and we mowed the lawn in mid­December, but now the garden lies dormant.

'This is what it's all about, isn't it?' he says. 'If you can't kill animals and do it quickly and cleanly, then you can't
do
it.'
I know he's pleased with the geese. They've been a success, easy to look after, fattening quickly and well. We're keeping
two ganders and six females to breed from next year and David wants to add some turkeys to our mix of fowl.

'I want to buy two girls and a stag,' he says. 'They'll cost £80.'

'What do you call a lady turkey?' I ask.

'I dunno. Mrs?' he replies. David's been over-working and he's lost weight. The doctor has told him he's putting in too many
hours and not getting enough time off. Charlie has suggested that we approach the prison in Shepton Mallet and see if they
would be prepared to let someone near the end of their sentence come and work on the farm. His long years in the law have
led him to believe that prison rarely helps to rehabilitate its inmates; working on the farm would mean gaining a trade as
well as hopefully discovering some of the therapeutic benefits of rearing animals and growing vegetables. I like the idea
and we clearly need some extra help.

The chickens have laid a little better this last week, though we're still only getting about two dozen eggs a day when it
should be almost four dozen. Apparently it is better to have your chickens reach point of lay in the spring as they'll get
into their laying routine while the days are long. If they mature in the winter, it is hard for them to establish a good routine,
even with lights coming onin their hut atfive in the morning. Wetfeetmay be another problem. Chickens hate being damp, and
the big­footed geese have churned up the ground, killing off most of the grass. After Christmas we're going to have to move
them to another run, along with the ducks. The spring that feeds their pond will have to be run through a pipe into their
new pen.