But then I look at them again – two lovely hairy pigs cuddled together in a jumble of straw and black limbs – and I think, perhaps, I’m kidding myself.
I leave them sunbathing and go to work on the new piece of land. It’s at the edge of the neighbouring hamlet, La Graudie, which perches on the edge of an escarpment, the last outpost of the high causse before it plunges down to softer, lusher ground and the river. There’s a field, bumpy and overgrown, long fallow, surrounded by untidy hedges of blackthorn, spindle and brambles; this is where the shelter can go, under the shade of a big old ash tree. At one side, the field becomes woodland, a steep bank of oak that finally opens up just short of the fontaine; a path along the boundary runs directly into the village. The woods are overgrown, unmanaged; there are fallen trees, sick trees, ancient trees with gnarled massive girths. It’s perfect land for pigs: interesting, fruitful, a playground; they can work their way through all this mess, tidying up as they go, exploring and eating what they find.
But first we have to nudge and wrestle a way through the undergrowth with the trail of wire for the electric fence. We’ve got a container of small black plastic eyelets to screw into strategic trunks, a bundle of posts to fill any gaps, and over half a kilometre of wire coiled on a bobbin. Slowly I work my way from tree to tree, trying to find the easiest route for setting a fence. I start at the top of the slope, precarious, and slide down from one point to the next on the dry, leafy soil, securing the eyelet, passing through the wire. It feels like some kind of giant knitting, weaving the thread through the trees, passing it around trunks: knit one, purl one. Ed is working on the other side of the woods, bringing the fence in the opposite direction. I can’t see him or hear him unless he whistles, which he sometimes does; Mo runs wildly back and forth between us, ecstatic about this new game in a new place.
Like the walled patch at the Mas de Maury this is abandoned land, neglected and forgotten. It feels as though no one has set foot here for very many years. But these precious woods were once tended for timber and grazing; there may well have been other pigs here, cattle certainly. Working alone in the quiet, I have something of the same feeling I had at the fontaine, a sense of repetition, perhaps even communion. In the spring warmth, I catch glimpses of the church spire through the greening trees; the bobbing calls of tits collide with the steady old toll of the bells. For a moment it seems as though I’ve been here, part of this, for a very long time. But in the quiet euphoria of such a feeling there’s already, instantly, a sadness, too, because here in this elusive glimpse of shared lives and continuity there’s also a nagging sense of rupture and disappointment and ending. We still haven’t managed to find a solution to our work troubles; reluctantly, we’re beginning to talk about the possibility of heading back to the UK; we’re keeping an eye on job adverts in the newspapers. As I knit myself through the trees, binding myself into a labyrinth with a coil of twine, there are questions pricking in my head: will we have to move now? Where would we go, and to do what? Can’t we just squeeze a bit more time here, a few months more? Can’t we have the summer at least so that we can see the fruit of all this work; so that we can follow the smallholding experiment through to the very end? I slip down the slope to the cluster of smaller trees near the boundary – hawthorn and rowan, spindle and hazel – and I decide that all I can do is place my hope in the pigs; trust them to keep us here. Big Pig and Little Pig securing us to this little plot of land and all its many ghosts; Big Pig and Little Pig compelling us to stay.
The pigs’ new enclosure is next to a farmhouse, the last building in La Graudie, sitting on the edge of the hamlet where it peters into rocky fields, the woods opening out beyond. Jean-Claude lives here with his wife, Camille. They’ve never farmed – he used to be the district postman – but every year they have an immaculate vegetable garden; they have a busy flock of chickens and ducks, some goats, a woodpile of sculptural beauty. If I walk past with the dog in the misty dawn, they are working in their garden. If I pass again in the settling dusk, they’re still working in their garden. They grow beans and peas in weedless straight lines; their strawberries tumble over the drills in handfuls; their artichokes thrust high and straight. They dig and tend, cultivating order, precision, abundance; putting the rest of us to shame.
Pigs are disorderly and untidy, noisy, unpredictable. But Jean-Claude and Camille insist they like the idea of having Big Pig and Little Pig as neighbours: they’ve agreed to let us run a hose over the wall from their outside tap so that we can have access to plenty of water as the weather warms up, and they come to the top of the woods to watch as we put the finishing touches to the fence. Camille remembers when all the hamlets around here had pigs; there were pigs everywhere, she says, in the lanes and foraging in the tracks, or lazing on the warm stones by the farmhouse steps. Everyone had a pig. As a child she used to take turns with neighbours’ children to look after them, sitting with them after school, trying to keep them out of the way of the grown-ups doing their chores. She liked it best when she was allowed to ride the big old sows, sitting astride as you would a squat pony, trotting down the shady paths. Her younger sisters whooped and hollered alongside, driving them on, giggling. She talks fondly, with energy. Pigs and childhood. Pigs and family. Pigs and home.
According to Camille – and supported by other material I’ve read – things changed not long after her childhood years, sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the directives of the Common Agricultural Policy took effect even in these old farming heartlands: pigs started to become a crop like any other, raised on an industrial scale, economically and in bulk. The village pig started to disappear. What had once been a symbol of a thriving homestead, of good husbandry and a healthy family, became indiscriminate cheap meat. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, popular French art was bemoaning the loss of the traditional pig to the forces of modernization: a series of belle-époque postcards, for example, shows a variety of unfortunate pigs being run over by cars, bicycles or trains; one shows a bosomy peasant in a long skirt gazing at the rear end of a pig that’s been trapped under a steam train, railing in traditional patois against lai valaine invention, ‘the nasty invention’. By the time the new laws came into force the pig was already a potent symbol of a life lost to mechanization and speedy living, a reminder of the way of the paysan, a connection to land and community, to le terroir.
Big Pig and Little Pig are a hint of an unrecoverable past; they’re welcomed because they are already almost familiar – with the slippery, defective memory of nostalgia, our neighbours connect themselves to our pigs, trace old associations that don’t really exist, make our animals part of their own histories. And so it seems fitting that Big Pig and Little Pig should mature here, as part of a hamlet community, reviving, if only for a few months, an old tradition, an historic intimacy. They’ll have Jean-Claude and Camille’s grandchildren playing on the other side of the wall; they’ll have the scruffy collection of hamlet dogs coming and going through the patch of field; they’ll be lullabied by the steady thrum of tractors and chainsaws, strimmers and rotavators, the particular low-note muzak of daily life.
Many of Camille’s stories are about thrift and old-fashioned housekeeping skills. Pigs were largely animals of the active poor. Not just here but across Europe, the wealthy hunted for game, raised beef cattle, and could afford to buy meat, if necessary, from the market; they could have a fresh supply more or less whenever they wanted it. But the working classes had to make do with their pig – a single pig, usually – for a whole year. A pig was a promise that they would not starve.
During both wars, when thrift was a matter of patriotism, local councils in Britain urged people to join pig clubs, grouping together to share the cost of feed and scraps from the kitchen in return for some precious pork. There were almost a thousand pig clubs by the time war broke out in 1914 – encouraging discipline, respectability and good behaviour as well as frugality – and during the Second World War, the Ministry of Food was givi
ng the pig responsibility for the future of the Empire:
Because of the pail,
the scraps were saved,
Because of the scraps,
the pigs were saved,
Because of the pigs,
the rations were saved,
Because of the rations,
the ships were saved,
Because of the ships,
the island was saved,
Because of the island,
the Empire was saved,
And all because of
the housewife’s pail.
The importance of bacon to the everyday diet is reflected in the fact that it was included in the first round of rationing in 1940, along with butter and sugar, as the staples most in demand. In response to such a miserable edict, the cartoonist Heath Robinson offered suggestions on ‘How to Make the Best of Things’. He proposed a ‘neat garden cabinet for growing bacon and mushrooms’:5 his cartoon shows a bald man in a waistcoat offering a bowl of leftovers to a perky pig ‘installed in the fireplace of the spare bedroom’, with mushrooms sprouting on the mantelpiece and a box below which ‘will also lay the foundations of a fine Minestrone’ with the simple addition of ‘the contents of the carpet sweeper’.
A comic French film, La Traversée de Paris, again shows the import-ance of the pig during the Second World War: it tells the story of two men who defy the city’s curfew in 1942 to deliver suitcases stuffed full of pork. In our part of France, the occupying Germans outlawed the keeping of pigs for family use, taking any animals for themselves and forbidding private slaughter, with the intention not only of feeding their soldiers but also, no doubt, of further disheartening hungry households. So the killing of a pig became a secret, dangerous affair, an act of defiance and desperation, a link to life before the war: the men took the pigs out into the far fields at night, under the brilliant winter stars, the women following after with their tools and buckets; the animals were dispatched in silence, quickly butchered under the trees, the meat wrapped and stowed in barns and cupboards before first light. Camille remembers this, even though she was very young. She remembers the cold and the smell of the blood in the night air and the intense, fearful listening. There were gendarmes you could trust, she says, and those you couldn’t.
And even then, especially then, when the meat was acquired with such risk, nothing could be wasted, not the blood nor the intestines, the head or the ears. It was not just the pig itself which was treasured, but also the savoir faire that meant it could be fully used and enjoyed. Just as it had always been, soldiers or no soldiers, war or no war, in the days after slaughter, each pig was transformed into pâtés and saus-ages, puddings and terrines, and the nuanced range of cuts and preserves which make up the charcuterie (chair cuite, cooked meat): lardons, saucissons, saucisses sèches, hams. Affluent Romans had a taste for good ham and the Roman army carried copious supplies of salted, dried and smoked pork; by the Middle Ages, the French had established a medieval charcuterie guild to regulate the production of processed meat and ensure its quality, placing the craft on the same basis as farriers or armourers, masons, tanners or bakers – those who made daily life possible. One of the most hated of French taxes, la gabelle, was the tax on salt, introduced in the fourteenth century and not finally repealed until the country’s liberation in 1945. Its unpopularity was testament to the importance of salt in a cuisine that relished la charcuterie. With salt in short supply, or ruinously expensive, and hams to be cured, smuggling became rampant, often organized in a military fashion, and on a national scale, by French troops. The gardes des gabelles, the salt-tax guards, were frequently overrun, and in our region, le pays de petite gabelle, several wooded routes were established to allow smugglers to avoid main roads between major towns. A local mid-seventeenth-century uprising, which saw 10,000 croquants (literally, ‘crunchies’ or ‘crispies’ – more accurately, and pejoratively, ‘yokels’) lay siege to the town of Villefranche-de-Rouergue in 1643, included la gabelle among a list of hated taxes to be reformed. Protesting with tambours and trumpets, the insurrection perhaps had more of a party tone than a revolutionary one, and the leaders were duly broken alive on wheels during public executions, their heads later displayed on the town walls.
With such a long history of protecting ancient charcuterie traditions at all costs, the inconvenience of foreign occupation during two world wars was unlikely to put a stop to them. During the First World War, a series of wonderful letters from Sister Joachim (a young British woman, Margaret Anne Shippam) at a convent in occupied Ooigem, in western Belgium, shows that even the nuns were willing to defy German orders in the quest for good ham: ‘I told you we were having a piggy salted,’6 she wrote in 1915 to her family back in Chichester:
Well, his arrival was Accompanied with great solemnity and triumph, at ½ past 7 am Wednesday. Just as we were going to take down our frugal breakfast, piggy arrived in a big cask, carried by three men and a woman. Happily the G’s did not get hold of our piggy.
During the occupation in France almost thirty years later, hams were still being made and shared among friends with ‘great solemnity and triumph’. Camille remembers a burgeoning black market, but also speaks fondly of the gifting of charcuterie between neighbours. There was always a special cut, she says, for le curé, the priest, and echoing Sister Joachim, she recalls her parents leaving a ham on the convent steps at dawn so that the village nuns would find it when they woke. ‘We were better off here than in the towns,’ she says. ‘We had pigs still, everywhere, even though they weren’t allowed. In Paris they ate guinea pigs.’
Jean-Claude takes us into his storeroom under the house, a dry dark room with onions and garlic hung from the rafters, carrots in straw, jars of pickles arranged on shelves. With some pride, he shows us the box he made many years ago for salting hams. It’s plain but well made, with clean dovetail joints in good wood, like a small coffin. ‘You just fill it with salt,’ he says, ‘pop in the leg of meat, seal it up and leave it. Beautiful. You’ll never taste better.’ We suggest that we might send our hams somewhere to be dry cured. He looks at us and shrugs. For Jean-Claude, the keeping of a pig is a practical way to save money: he can’t understand that we might worry enough about the quality of our ham to pay someone else to cure it for us, when we could just as well salt it for free in the garage.
This is a place of self-sufficiency, of proud independence and of making do. Nothing is bought, no product or service, when it can be made or done at home. Camille makes cheese and matures it above the fireplace. She forages for mushrooms, dandelions, sorrel, fruit of all kinds, a variety of nuts: a dealer from the city pays her €2 a kilo for the walnuts she gathers. She has her own eggs, vegetables, rabbits and poultry. She’s another of the old women giving this place a sense of stability, doing things as they’ve always been done, respectfully upholding tradition and country living. But when she talks about her activities it’s already with a hint of nostalgia and weariness – she knows such ways are unsustainable both for herself and for the area as a whole. She’s winding down. She’s fed up, she says, of scratching the fields for walnuts to sell or podding enormous quantities of broad beans for soup. She still goes to market every Thursday, but largely to meet her friends and marvel at the rising cost of living, rather than to barter for staples. She remembers the excitement of going to market as a child, piling into the back of the mule cart and rumbling along the valley in a queue of farm traffic. ‘It’s just not the same any more,’ she says.
We’re almost ready to move the pigs. Together, Ed and I have cleared as much as we can around the new fence in the woods and tested it to make sure the current passes right along its length: we’ve lifted twigs from the wire and listened for the telltale click, click, click that indicates a break in the circuit – a leaf nudging up against the string, wet grass drooping on to it after rain. On the flat patch of meadow at the edge of the trees, we’ve built a new shelter, roomier than the first, a more solid affair constructed of planks and o
ld wooden pallets, lined with plastic sheeting and roofed with lengths of unwieldy bitumen. We’ve run the hosepipe round from Jean-Claude’s outside tap and set up a drinking trough. We’ve collected two full buckets of acorns from the tracks, winkling them out of the earth where they’ve lain since last autumn. We’ve set aside a supple solid length of ash, a pig stick, something that appears to give the whole process an air of authority and professionalism, the kind of staff that looks like it might have come out of an eighteenth-century woodcut of a proper pig drover. This all seems good.
On Thursday morning, market morning, we go as usual to do our shopping, and our general air of excitement is reinforced by the sudden prosperity of spring stalls. In winter, this town belongs to the bleak heartlands of central France: business at the markets is hurried, frugal, the square hard and bitterly cold, traders braving the ice to set up sparse displays of turnips and spinach. But within a few weeks of spring arriving, the marketplace is suddenly bustling again: stalls are packed with asparagus and cèpes, crumbling fresh cheeses, new-season carrots, piles of multicoloured radishes, strawberries, seedlings, flowers, lettuces. Shoppers take their time, pausing, filling their baskets carefully with the delicate produce. The cafe terraces are full and rumble with the burr of patois. This is one of the few ordinary occasions on which you still sometimes hear Occitan spoken (although this is less common now than when we first arrived) and groups of old men in berets gather in the shade of the halle to keep an eye on things and chatter in the tangles of their old language. Traders put up their striped awnings, red and green, because the sun can be hot by the middle of the morning; from now until late October this is a place of the south with painfully blue skies, warm stone and deep shadows, relaxed and generous, bountiful.
Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France Page 8