How fair are these judgements? How sound? I’ve no way of knowing. Ed has come to similar conclusions, but we could both be mistaken. These are our first pigs. How can we hope to really understand them? Can we ever understand a pig, or are we just indulging in careless anthropomorphism? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Except that because I’ve come to know so much about Big Pig and Little Pig, I’ve begun to treat each of them as individuals, as characters. I’ve formed a bond; well, two bonds. And isn’t this like an executioner falling for someone on death row? These are pigs for meat: Big Pig and Little Pig, not pets, not companions. We haven’t even hinted at any change of plan – neither Ed nor I have so much as raised a doubt. We’re thoroughly enjoying the pigs, but when the time comes, as it must, we’ll kill them, ourselves, at home. That’s the intention, still, unaltered.
But when I go back to my reading, I’m struck again by the brutality and trauma of the slaughter.14 Take this account by Flora Thompson, for example, like a review of a horror film, with the emphasis on blood and shadow: ‘the killing was a noisy bloody business […] the whole scene, with its mud and blood, flaring lights and dark shadows was as savage as anything to be seen.’ Or this, from an Essex cottager recalling the terrible noise of a frantic pig: ‘[I] lifted the pig to the slaughter […] kicking, squealing, anticipating its end, and struggling to get free […] there was a louder scream and blood spurted.’ Time and again when I come across historical reports of pig-keeping, I’m confronted by pain, fear, panic, and I wonder how I’ll feel when it’s me in the midst of all the din and gore. I have no experience of anything like this: I save bees and butterflies that find their way into the house; I rescue injured birds. Am I really the sort of person who will kill a pig: Big Pig or Little Pig? In the accounts I read, the task is often regarded as too violent and stressful for children to watch, even in farming families who might be considered to take a robust attitude to livestock: in Scotland at the end of the nineteenth century, one woman recalled that ‘we were sent away from home the day the pigs were killed, we went to Grandma’s house because the pigs were – you know, pets […]’ Pets. Animals you’ve grown to know and love, kept for pleasure, companionship.
But the reading makes no difference. The end is still fixed. That’s what I tell myself. Big Pig and Little Pig will be killed, by us, quite soon. I can’t see an alternative; it’s surely not worth thinking about changing our plans. What on earth would we do with two hungry, fully grown, unruly pigs if we don’t kill them? The children of nineteenth-century Scottish farmers clearly didn’t want their pet pigs to die but their attachment made no difference in the end, because practical necessities demanded the slaughter go ahead. For us it will surely have to be the same: we’ll just have to face up to our squeamishness and press on, won’t we? And so I watch them nudge each other forward into their new enclosure, brushing through the meadow, heading towards the bank of celandines, a sprightly yellow at the edge of the woods, and in the new promise of spring I think about death, their deaths.
Two pigs to be raised and killed at home. How difficult can it be?
3.
I’m resigned to the dissatisfying disappearance of Bisset’s pig. That’s it, then. A doleful end to a brief career. But I can’t help rummaging, reading on, and I quickly find more accounts of a performing pig. They’re confused in places, a bit uncertain, but it’s a black pig, they’re agreed about that, and they date from the summer of 1783, just after Bisset’s sorry death. Suddenly the story begins again, refreshed, reconfigured; the same but not quite the same, fattening like a sow in acorns. And there’s a new hero. For a long time, I know him only as Mr Nicholson. He has a fine troupe of performing animals. He has a hare that plays the drums and a tortoise that can fetch and carry like a dog, only more slowly. He has six sprightly turkey cocks that toddle through a country dance to much acclaim. Eventually, a chance piece of research throws up his first name – John – and confirms what the newspapers were suggesting: he is now the owner of Samuel Bisset’s prize pig.
John Nicholson is a professional, that much is clear, a seasoned impresario, already sixty years old, short, bald, rotund. Perhaps he was in Dublin to see Bisset perform. Perhaps he’s been tracking his rival’s career through the newspaper reports. Perhaps it was chance that found him in Chester in August 1783 when there was a bereaved black pig for sale, although I wonder how, in that case, he discovered the animal’s talent for spelling and telling the time and reading minds. However it happened, Nicholson sees an opportunity and steps in, takes over. He sniffs out a fortune. And the pig finds itself with a new home, a new master, and a resurrected career.
A year passes while Nicholson imposes his own training regime and tweaks the spectacle to his own tastes. The pig, as ever, practises, learns, performs. It’s a good pig. Does it miss the old days in Ireland, slouched on the floor of the pub under Bisset’s bar? Does it miss Bisset? There’s no way of knowing, of course, and Nicholson has no time for such questions. He’s off with his new menagerie. They try the spa town at Scarborough where the wealthy take the waters and bathe. This is a genteel resort, a far cry from the rough-and-tumble of Dublin’s theatreland; a long way heading east from Bisset’s last stop at Chester. The show goes well; it’s a promising start. Nicholson, like Bisset before him, begins to realize just how much people like the pig. The stylish Scarborough citizens want novelty; they have a taste for absurdity and excess, but they like to seem learned, too, and abreast of the very latest progress. The pig panders to their vanity and their curiosity; he cannot fail.
Nicholson takes the troupe inland to York. Avoiding the butchers’ shops on The Shambles, they set up with the strolling players and run through the routine: ladies and gentlemen, the unique, the astounding, the marvellous Black Pig. A few nights; a good crowd; a decent profit. And they’re on the move again. It’s the season of country fairs, when farmers and labourers, parsons and merchants, townsfolk and countryfolk converge in the hope of finding work or love or trade or entertainment, and Nicholson and the pig roam from one fair to the next, working their way south from York through rich green pastures and towns gossiping of Industrial Revolution in the offing.
At Michaelmas 1784, Nicholson and the pig arrive in Nottingham. Their act is beginning to find its way into the popular press; they’re attracting attention. And the Nottingham Goose Fair offers a big opportunity to become even better known. Here, they have the chance to reach an audience of all types and professions and classes. There is wrestling, dancing, a marching band; booths, tents and stalls for eating and drinking; gambling, peep shows and puppet shows. There are pigs for show, pigs for sale, greased pigs for sport, and among all those pigs one that stands out: Nicholson’s pig, Bisset’s pig, our pig. And in the flurry of the fair, it’s not just the raucous pleasure seekers who flock to Nicholson’s show, to lap up the unusual and the absurd, but the cultural elite whose approval could give the act respectability, even prestige, and who might just secure the black pig a place in the history books. One of those who see the show, for example,1 is Anna Seward who lives with her family in the Bishop’s Palace at Lichfield where her father is the cathedral canon. Anna is a poet. She’s part of a literary circle that includes Sir Walter Scott and Erasmus Darwin, and she corresponds with Josiah Wedgwood and the politician and inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth. After her visit to the Nottingham fair, she sits down at dinner with Samuel Johnson and regales him with an account of the ‘wonderful learned pig’ she witnessed in action that afternoon. She is enthusiastic about what she’s seen and clearly intrigued by the pig’s apparent abilities. And Johnson, eager to hear all about it, is suitably impressed by her story of a black pig displaying such intelligence and style: ‘Pigs,’ he concludes on hearing her report, ‘are a race unjustly calumniated.’
As the pig’s achievements come to be discussed in the highest of circles and at the best of tables, it becomes clear that one of the reasons for its success lies in the puzzle of a paradox: here is an animal known for its
stubbornness, filth and perversity showing itself to be wonderfully docile and intelligent. One of nature’s most obstinate creatures has not only been tamed but is proving cleverer than those who pay to watch it, performing card tricks and reading minds in feats that even seasoned performers would struggle to pull off. Here is a stupid hog that can read letters well enough to spell – at a time when many claim it’s the act of reading which separates humans from animals and demonstrates humans’ innate superiority. Such achievements raise potentially difficult questions, so that for every pleasure seeker who takes the pig’s antics at face value there are many more who believe Nicholson’s act challenges the fundamental philosophies of the age. What does such a special pig mean, in an Age of Enlightenment, for our view of animal capabilities? What does it suggest about natural hierarchies and the human place in God’s world?
I’m impressed, and rather surprised, by the public’s faith in the pig’s apparent intelligence and its slick, seductive routine. I don’t come across many derogatory accounts of the sapient pig’s antics; remarkably few spectators dismiss Nicholson as a cheat or a swindler. There’s a little gentle mockery of over-eager audiences from time to time, but mostly this is offset by what appears to be genuine excitement at the pig’s achievements. What I do find, however, is that the pig’s demonstrable abilities are so unexpected and such an inversion of the accepted order of things, that some spectators are terrified by what they see and hear. They baulk at the unnatural talent on display and suspect black arts and witchcraft. Several commentators call ‘for the Pig to be burnt,2 and the Man banished’, since both are clearly in correspondence with the Devil. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Scottish folklore often put the Devil in the shape of a pig, referring to him as ‘The Big Black Pig’ who was in the habit of ‘visiting young people who played cards’;3 superstitious sailors, too, traditionally refused to carry pigs on board because their cloven hooves were too devilish for comfort. Since the middle of the seventeenth century, stories of pig-faced women had surfaced across Europe, telling of beautiful women whose faces were transformed by witchcraft – the spell could only be broken by the love of a man undaunted by the prospect of marrying a bride with the features of a hog, a woman who grunted and ate from a trough. By the 1670s, the folklore had been memorialized in a song, ‘The Long-Nos’d Lass’, which proved popular with ‘lovers of the monstrous’.4 The lyrics gave all the gory details of the poor bewitched heiress whose ‘visage was perfectly just like a sow’.
The connection between the pig and the Devil may have harked back to a verse in one of the New Testament gospels in which devils are heard to plead with Jesus: ‘If you are going to cast us out, send us into the herd of swine’ (Matthew 8: 31). However the association came about, it was unfortunate but by no means calamitous for Nicholson. If there was a frisson of menace or magic about the act, a hint of the dark and mysterious, then so much the better. It certainly didn’t deter the crowds. As the summer fairs drew to a close, Nicholson had cause for celebration: he had never been so wealthy, or so well known. The pig had performed impeccably. People had marvelled and chattered; word had spread. With his eye on the biggest audience of all, among the theatres and playhouses of London, he decided to take time to polish the act and withdrew his animal performers from the public eye for the winter. The pig was rested and, like any old pig, passed the short days in a cold sty. At one moment, reading his letters and adding up his sums, the pig was almost person. At another, quite simply pig.
I wonder which of my pigs would be the performer. Little Pig has a certain star quality: he shows off, flounces and pouts. But Big Pig is the one you might consider training, if you had to. He’s the one you’d stake your house on if it came to selecting the right cards to spell out a tricky name from the crowd. He’s the one that would listen to you and pick up on those tiny signals you’d spent months together perfecting.
I wonder about Nicholson’s act as I watch the pigs explore their new surroundings at La Graudie. They’re examining the shelter, flicking their noses against the plastic sheeting: they’ve never encountered this sort of plastic before, and they’re enjoying the new sensation, the new game. They rummage through the straw, as always, rearran-ging it deftly to their liking. They move around the back of the structure, nudge at the corners, scrutinize the planks, test it all. Then they move away. The field has not been worked for years. It’s so scruffy and overgrown that it’s difficult to determine the boundaries in places and impossible to be sure of the contours: the land inclines suddenly, throwing you off balance, or pushes up a hidden ridge, perhaps a lost wall or a piece of buried machinery. We hacked through brambles to set up the fence but there are plenty more, thick at the edges and in one corner; there’s a rampant hedge of blackthorn, spindle and elder; there are dense patches of weeds. None of this disturbs them. Little Pig ambles off, pulling his way through the brambles, eating, nosing, eating; Big Pig follows and they go on together, slowly, side by side, so close that they bump together at each step. They shove, grumble, explore. My pigs are definitely more ‘person’ since the move – or I think of them more in that way since our walk together – and I find myself watching them as Nicholson’s spectators must have watched his pig: look at that! How skilful! How clever!
If I’m giving them human attributes and human emotions then the pigs’ response to the sweep of woodland that shelves away at one side of the field can only be described as pure delight. I can imagine them – see them? – smiling. They certainly gambol. It takes them a while to discover they’ve got such a place. The trees are dense where they edge the meadow, stuffed with undergrowth; the slope begins sharply. For most of the day they ignore this margin and content themselves with foraging on the flat ground around the shelter. This would entertain them for weeks, I know; it’s larger than the enclos-ure they’ve just left and must conceal an enormous amount of good stuff. But I can’t resist showing them the woods, because I know they’ll like them and because their pleasure would give me pleasure. So I go to the edge and call them. And as they come towards me, I take a pace or two down, into the trees.
They stop at the brink. Together. Their experience of the world to date is flat. Here is something disconcerting: land that shelves, abruptly, steeply. Gives way underfoot. They’re not at all sure. But crossing the boundary of the electric fence earlier in the day seems to have given them a certain courage, or at least a grasp of the unexpected, and it’s only a minute or two before Big Pig plunges, Little Pig quickly following, both of them slipping on the dry precipitous ground, floundering on the stones; both of them knocking into me so hard that I stumble, too, and we helter-skelter through the trees in a bundle of surprise until I grab a trunk to steady myself. The pigs slide on some more before finally finding a way to get their footing on this unpredictable terrain.
And now they’re here, they’re delighted. Really, truly delighted. It’s the scale of the place, I’m sure, that thrills them, the sense of land stretching away and freedom; it’s an instinctive fondness for ancient woodland and everything it offers; it’s the novelty and the promise – but just as much as any esoteric reaction, it’s the acorns. There are some chestnut trees here, some rowan, one or two ash, but mostly it’s oak: tall, old oak. Just like the field, these woods have been unused for years, which means each autumn the acorns have fallen and lain unused, composting over time into a thick, rich mulch. The acorns from the last year or two sit on top, dry but intact, spiked with insects: a crunchy, tasty carpet. ‘My brothers and I had to collect acorns […] we used to go for miles with a little cart for acorns for the pigs,’5 recalled one East Anglian shepherd at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the Domesday Book, woods tended to be classified according to their capacity to hold pigs, with oak and beech woods at the top of the list. In the Middle Ages, villagers beat oak trees in the autumn so that the acorns would fall for the pigs: a page from the fourteenth-century manuscript known as The Queen Mary Psalter (in the British Library) shows two energetic
men wielding long clubs, and the fruit falling to a herd of brown spiky hogs below, some of them reaching skywards to catch the windfall and some of them quite obviously grinning at such a treat. Jamón Ibérico de Bellota, often considered the finest ham in the world, is made from black pigs that roam Spanish oak groves getting fat on acorns. Pigs and acorns: the affinity has been recognized throughout the world for centuries, and hardy breeds, like the Noir de Bigorre, were specifically developed to make the most of it, so that animals could be driven into woods in autumn and winter and left to forage. And here are Big Pig and Little Pig, installed in an ancient oak wood. A ‘pig in clover’? No, pigs in acorns. So much better.
Spring careers into early summer. On the ridges of high stony land the orchids are in full bloom, speckled pinks, whites and purples; there’s a cluster of trompe l’oeil bee orchids in the pigs’ meadow for a while, until it’s trampled. I hear golden orioles fluting in the woods in the mornings when I go to do the early feed; wrens and great tits nest in the walls around the enclosure, flitting backwards and forwards, fidgeting.
Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France Page 11