Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France

by Jacqueline Yallop

  But after a while, Mo makes his way back. He comes to the door, feet firmly planted outside, but leaning in as far as he can, watching the two strange interlopers. He’s disgruntled but curious; after a minute or so he gathers his courage and comes towards the wire, edging towards the pigs, staring. In turn, Big Pig and Little Pig are equally curious. They shuffle a step or two and then make their way towards him in a wide circle, closing in slowly. They hesitate for a moment with the shelter between them, a line of defence, and then, finally, they sneak to the fence, together, side by side; they come as close as they can without their snouts touching the wire. Mo is at the fence too now, on his side, also close, his nose also more or less up against the wire. Big Pig: Little Pig: Dog. They all stand nose-to-nose, regarding each other quietly but intently. Noses twitch, much sniffing goes on. And in time, somehow, something is agreed: this is all right, they concede, this is acceptable. Immediately and silently an affinity is asserted and everything is settled. All part of the same pack.

  And this is probably the first time I really become aware of the pigs as different to each other. This is when the pair of black weaners becomes clearly and intriguingly two black pigs. Big Pig: Little Pig. It’s not only their size, I realize, that defines them. It’s not even their size. The variation in stature, in fact, is the least different thing about them. What really sets them apart, one from the other, is the way they react to things. They do, it’s true, have characters. It’s Little Pig, I notice, who runs further when Mo makes his entrance; it’s Little Pig who trembles and makes more noise. He’s a scaredy-cat and perhaps also something of an exhibitionist, a drama queen. Big Pig is calmer. He has a steadier gaze; he is wary and surprised, but reasonably unflustered. Big Pig is the brave one.

  But then Little Pig gathers his courage and returns to his position at the wire and while Big Pig moves away, going back to his rummaging through the ivy, Little Pig stays. Big Pig turns his back in some apparent disdain and sets his mind to truffling out insects from the layers of soft earth, but Little Pig is interested in Mo. Not just curious, although there’s plenty of curiosity, but interested. It’s as though he wants to make friends with Mo. He wants to be sociable. There’s an affability about him; he’s open to the idea of another companion, charmed by another potential playmate. It’s only the fear that Big Pig has unearthed a secret cache of tasty bugs somewhere on the other side of the shelter that finally pulls him away.

  So then, already, Big Pig is not just Big; Little Pig is other than Little. We’ve got an extrovert and an introvert. I’m taken with the discovery. It makes me want to know more about each of them. It fuels my obsession with watching them. But at the time, this revelation that the weaners have character is just amusing and fascinating, a talking point. Little more. After all, dogs are much the same: each new puppy has a different character from the last. Horses, too, I suppose, although I’ve never kept a horse. Perhaps even hamsters, for all I know – I’ve never kept a hamster, either. But if you’re raising an animal for slaughter there are implications, of course. There’s a difference – isn’t there? – between the thought of killing an unidentified, unidentifiable pig, just another animal, and the prospect of killing a particular pig, Big Pig, say, or Little Pig, an animal which you recognize by its actions and reactions, by its character, an animal which you could pick out from a scrum of other similar animals because you know it.

  But I don’t think of this. Not yet. The plan’s going well. Big Pig and Little Pig have adapted quickly to their new home and seem healthy and contented. We know they are already growing. Weighing a weaner on any kind of scales is a tricky task; weighing a fully grown pig is more or less impossible. But we need to keep track of their growth every couple of weeks in order to know how they’re doing and when they’ll be ‘ready’ with good meat, so we loop a piece of string under each pig in turn to measure the girth – the ‘heart girth’ – just behind the front legs. Then we measure the length of each from the base of its ears to the base of its tail – we square the heart girth and multiply this by the length, then multiply the final figure by 69.3. There’s some fumbling with string and wriggling of pig, some bumping and barging and miscalculation, but in the end we have it: the weight of each weaner. And yes, just as we already guessed, Big Pig is big, and Little Pig is little: the difference is not enormous but it is significant. Big Pig weighs 24.5kg; Little Pig is almost exactly two kilograms lighter.

  This is what I think of: weights and measure, practicalities. Not pig character, or the nature of the individual. After all, we resisted the temptation to give the pigs pet names, because we didn’t want to become too attached to them. We wanted to be businesslike about this, disciplined. It’s like planting seeds in the vegetable garden: a pleasure, of course, but only worthwhile, only possible, because we have half an eye on the end product, on harvest and yield. So, Big Pig and Little Pig, putting on poundage, a crop, an intention, a purpose; that’s all.

  Winter days are quiet, slow; winter evenings shut-up and chill. We don’t see much of the neighbours unless we bump into them coming and going to the pigs. There’s only really one social event of the season: the quine (Bingo) run by the parents’ association at the school to raise funds. There are just over thirty children at the school, aged from two to eleven, taught in two classes with a maternelle for the infants, and they’ve outgrown the cramped stone schoolhouse nestling in the centre of the village, just below the church steps. The intention is to convert a larger building into a new school, with a yard for playing games and space for project work. Several years ago, the last nuns were moved out of the tall grey convent which sits in a dip alongside the stream, the stone wash house on one side and the land rising to the old well on the other. The move disturbed the settled landscape of the village – a disruption I took as inspiration for a novel – and now it’s this ugly place of draughty corridors that’s been earmarked for the new school. So money needs to be raised; plenty of money. But most likely there would be a quine anyway – all the local villages have them through the winter, whether or not they need a new school. For a long time, the quine has been an important way of keeping in touch during those months when life closes in on itself.

  We go along on the Sunday after the pigs arrive and take our seats at one of the long trestle tables that stretch the length of the village hall, the salle des fêtes. We never quite know how long we might be able to sustain our lives in this place. Sometimes it seems as though we might be here for ever – already the silver birch behind the garden pond, which were pale saplings when we arrived, are taller than the house; the pines have matured and drop huge cones; we can mark our time in the growth of things, and it’s easy enough to imagine being present each autumn when the walnuts fall, for every spring planting, trampling footprints in every snowfall. But work continues to be precarious, our income meagre and unreliable. We’ve made our plans to stay at least for the life of the pigs, and the freezer full of meat afterwards, but sometimes even this seems too ambitious; we find ourselves treading gingerly from week to week and month to month, pausing in amazement to find ourselves still here. We want to belong. We want this place to be home, with all its connotations of intimacy and constancy and comfort, but for now everything feels uncertain, a bit rickety, and more than ever it seems important to take part, to be part, while we can. And so we’re here in the chilly old hall, on hard benches, on a Sunday afternoon playing a game of Bingo; we’re here, and many people we hardly recognize nod at us in solemn approval.

  Two girls come and sell us a packet of bright yellow plastic counters; their mums follow along a while later with the bingo cards. The hall is packed. There is much chatter and long greetings – this is a three-kiss part of France and it can take some time to work your way round a table of friends, three kisses at a time – but in the end the numbers start to roll: French numbers, tumbling, spiky with local accent, tricky. Quatre-vingt-douze. Soixante-dix. We play for a while without winning. When we think of taking a break, our
language skills losing their nimbleness in this torrent of figures, we’re pressed on by those to either side of us who point at lines on our cards or flip yellow counters in our direction. No time off, no let-up – this is quine played intensely, energetically, with determination.

  After several hours there is a pause. The fire is stoked with logs and the bingo caller climbs down from the blocks which have been set up at one end as a stage. Outside the long windows, dusk is falling. Players shift, stretch, move around. More cards are sold. And two burly young men parade the star of the afternoon: a jambon de pays, a local ham, aged, we’re told, for nine months. Glossy in the lights, solid, the surface mottled dark, the ham is hoisted from table to table by its trotter and we’re encouraged to guess its weight in order to win it. It’s not an enormous ham – I guess at just over six and a half kilos – but it’s a good round shape and the meat has the deep tone of old wood, and it becomes clear over the next few minutes that some people have come to the quine solely with the intention of winning it. Playing the numbers was fun – winning trinkets, biscuits or bottles for lines and ‘houses’ kept the afternoon ticking along – but this, this jambon, this is the reason our elderly neighbours have put on their best coats and hats and left the comfort of their cosy séjours to spend hours in the bare, draughty salle des fêtes. This is competitive now: weights are whispered, tried out on the tongue. It’s not permitted to touch or lift the ham, so this is a test of an experienced eye. Squint, peer: turn the ham. Time is taken, a long time; the ham moves only slowly from group to group, from table to table. Even when it’s moved on, some ponder their assessment, not yet putting their guess down on the list, waiting, reflecting. This leg of aged meat is such a luxury, such a delight, that it’s worth any amount of time and trouble: the bingo caller is ready again at the microphone, all the cards have been sold, the children are back in their seats, but still the ham is on parade.

  This is an expensive prize. A jambon of this size and quality would cost at least €100 to buy in the shops and I can’t imagine any of my neighbours ever having bought one. But it’s not just about the financial value. A whole ham is a mark of plenty, of indulgence; it’s a mini, self-contained store cupboard against the threat of lean times; it’s meat to share with friends and family as an act of generosity. This is a prize worth winning because it means something: in a village where older residents still talk frequently and with horror about the deprivations and starvation of the years of occupation during the Second World War, this ham is a guarantee of one of the finest and most comforting pleasures in life: a full table.

  Eventually, the ham has done the rounds, all the guesses are recorded, the men haul the prize on to the stage – and the weight is announced. Much applause, some grumbling. Is that right? That can’t be right! Let’s see them weigh it. The delighted winner – a short, very old man in a black beret and a brightly patterned jumper – more or less leaps on to the stage in his excitement, grabs hold of the shiny trotter and stands with his trophy like a Formula 1 Grand Prix winner with his magnum of champagne. Eyes down: the numbers are beginning again. But there’s still the faint rich whiff of ham circulating among the players, and for some time our neighbours are distracted by the thought of the prize lost.

  And with the scent of ham in our nostrils, talk turns to pigs. Our pigs. Big Pig and Little Pig. The sight of fine jambon has got everyone reminiscing: ham as it used to be; pigs raised in the old way; sturdy, hardy, family pigs. Between the jumble of numbers, we’re asked a lot of practical questions. What do we feed them? How will we fatten them? How much do they weigh? When will we kill them? This is what people want to know. No one asks us if we like having pigs or how we feel about them; no one asks us what we’ve called them. They assume, I suppose, that they don’t have names at all. Practical, not sentimental. This is how we want it, of course; it’s how we expected it would be. Everyone here appreciates that these are animals raised for meat. But Big Pig and Little Pig: I notice that we talk about them with pride already, and with enthusiasm. With fondness.

  The weaners have lice. When I tease aside the thicker hair on the ridge along their backs I spot small clusters of whitish-grey eggs glued near the skin; where they’ve knitted together they’ve formed a yellowy crust. I look closer. There are more eggs, around the folds of the neck and the ears, on the flanks, too. And now there are adult lice, crawling, each one about the size of a ladybird but more unpleasant, with grasping, scuttling legs and an odd transparent sheen, a tiny alien.

  The lice are not our fault. It’s nothing to do with the shelter we’ve built or the rickety old picnic table or the scruffy patch of land. They must have been endemic in the herd and were probably passed on from the sow, or from the scramble of older pigs at the food troughs. It explains the energetic rubbing. Just like in humans, lice are an irritant: if they’re left untreated, the pigs might eventually rub so hard and so long that they scour patches of bare skin; if they go on rubbing even then, they will open up flesh wounds which may fail to heal under the constant attrition. A severe infestation might prove so stressful that the weaners would fail to grow properly.

  And so Big Pig and Little Pig are shampooed.

  It’s not yet February. The weather is cold, and we don’t want them to be chilled, so we choose a sunny day and make sure there’s enough time for them to dry before dusk falls. The church bells have just rung out the angelus, twelve noon, into a high blue sky; the sound reaches us already, echoing. In all but the most shaded of ditches the frost has melted, and there’s the gentle crackling of leaves from the row of old oaks along the lane. The trees turn a charred bronze at the end of the autumn and their leaves remain stubbornly attached through much of the winter, providing some extra shelter for small birds; during a heavy midwinter hoar frost, the ice clings in crystals to the edge of each leaf, sparkling repetitions of silver and gold, stretching out for miles and miles across the causse.

  It is quiet; silent. It can be silent here, sometimes, really, truly silent. In the heavy heat of summer or at night. The absolute absence of noise. At other times, sound springs and bucks and elongates and you can hear someone clicking a door latch half a mile away. Today, when the bells cease ringing, there is nothing for a moment or two, longer: no cars, no breeze, no voices. A family of long-eared owls has set up home in a copse of hazels just beyond the ruined barn, and they watch us, sleepily, but they, too, are silent; their watching only serves to thicken the sense of quiet. The light comes and goes on their dappled plumage and on the thin branches clustered around them, so that they sharpen and then fade and then sharpen again, their wide surprised faces sometimes seeming close and vigilant, sometimes becoming invisible.

  But such peace cannot go on. There are pigs to be deloused. And washing weaners is a messy, splashy, wriggly affair – and noisy. They’re taken by surprise by the sudden flurry of wet sponges, and they’re indignant; they squeal and chunter and shy away, flustered. Pigs like to be snug and warm; they dislike draughts and are careful to keep out of the rain. It goes against the grain for them to be slooshed in this way. They kick up a fuss, and the owls, in response, flap away, swooping through the trees to quieter perches.

  We can only deal with one weaner at a time. I straddle Big Pig and try to keep him still between my knees, holding him as gently as I can so that he can be doused all over with the mixture. He’s resigned; after the initial protests, he stands placidly enough and allows us to work the treatment through the coarse hair and on to the skin. Even when we let him go, he does not move far away but loiters to watch us repeat the process with Little Pig, to offer moral support perhaps, or to gloat. And Little Pig, too, is well behaved. He stands and sniffs at the air, the mixture, the sponge. He nibbles the zips on my overalls, and then the fabric. He grunts and snuffles to the touch. And I realize that after their initial chagrin the pigs are enjoying their baths: they allow us to sponge them all over, their stomachs and their heads, behind their ears. The bottom part of their legs, towards the trot
ters, is stiff and bony, lice free, but we tackle around their tails, their eyes, their snouts. I marvel again at the feel of their hide: soft, elastic, coarse, warm, dry like old paper; something you might want to stroke, just for the satisfaction.

  This is in part a getting-to-know-you game, an indulgence perhaps. But there are more serious matters to consider. If conditions in the breeding herd have allowed for the lice infestation then other parasites may also have thrived. We worry, in particular, about worms: worms in a young pig can cause severe illness; they can even be fatal. Worms can burrow into the internal organs and even the flesh; they might still be there, much later, when you come to butcher the pig or eat the meat. It would be a waste of time and money to raise a worm-infested pig: a shame, in the fullest sense of the word.

  The pigs seem fine. There’s been no hint of any symptoms – coughing or vomiting; stiff movement – but we want to be sure. We do our research on the Internet and discover that there are laboratories that will analyse faeces and send us a report detailing any anomalies or infestations. This seems sensible, scientific; responsible. But for some reason, no longer quite clear, we decide we prefer the look of a UK-based service. I can’t recall the exact reasoning. Perhaps similar services don’t exist in France; more likely, they’re more expensive. Perhaps we doubted our ability to adequately translate the technicalities of faeces analysis. But while I don’t remember how the decision came about, nor the apparent logic which drove it, I do remember the consequence. A few days later I have a meeting in London with my agent. I take the pig poo with me, wrapped in a freezer bag. Pig faeces are dense and dark and sticky; in the case of our pigs, the remains of their grain diet is evident. The lump I have in my hand luggage is not unlike a dollop of good-quality haggis, black and oaty. The Customs officers at Gatwick Airport show no interest; there’s no telltale smell on the Tube; my agent displays only moderate surprise, and no distaste, when I explain what I’ve brought with me. I keep the pig poo with me while I go about my meetings, in and out of the shops along High Holborn, hurrying through the respectable, pristine gardens of the Inns of Court on my way to the station, and at the end of the day I finally send off a special plastic envelope to the laboratory. This is twenty-first-century London, largely pig free. But the city, like every other, was once a place of animals, as well as people – from commonplace pigs, dogs and horses to exotic birds and reptiles supplied by popular menageries. It was once a place of pig poo and horse manure and general stench. So it seems quite fitting, a nod to the past, to bring this tiny piece of Big Pig and Little Pig with me into the heart of modern commerce. And by the time I return home, a couple of days later, the laboratory has sent back the results: the pigs are worm free. Worth a small celebration.