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

by Jacqueline Yallop

  The pigs, happily unaware of any life-and-death debate, throw themselves into summer with enthusiasm. As a result of their constant industry, their meadow is already more shorn than any of those being harvested by the farmers – the grass and weeds are trampled or eaten; soil is bare by the shelter and along the line of the fence, trodden and hard, turning dusty; the nettle bed has been conscientiously devoured – and in the woods they’ve begun to construct an impressive system of terracing as they work sideways along the slope, digging out things they want to eat and nipping off all the fresh greens. This is their place now, every stone and log explored, every fallen tree hollowed, every damp nook gouged. Sometimes we follow the electric wire as it winds through the woods to check it’s not been obstructed or broken, sliding down the hill from tree to tree to the flat land at the bottom where there’s younger, lighter growth and glimpses of the meadows that skirt the village, the church steeple visible beyond. It’s clear, then, how much work the pigs have done and how thoroughly they’ve inhabited the whole plot. What had once been marked only by our arbitrary fence-building is now different entirely from the woods on either side: balder, airier, neater. Traditionally, pigs have been used to manage woodland, to clear and regenerate it so that new growth can force its way through; here they’ve already made an enormous impact. Even though there are only two pigs in such a large stretch of woods their constant excavations have thoroughly tilled the soil to a depth of several centimetres, much more in places, and they’ve sorted weak from strong growth, opening up glades and unclogging the bases of the stately old trees.

  They’ve done a good job of the field, too. The nettle patch has gone; the stone wall behind is visible for the first time. Little Pig, in particular, has a taste for bramble flowers – preferring the pink ones to the white – and they both love blackthorn berries (sloes) so the hedges have been well trimmed back. They’ve dug away around fallen stones, revealing buried bits of this and that: a broken spade, a bottle of thick green glass, some kind of small iron farm contraption that looks disturbingly like a scold’s bridle. When they hear us coming now, they hurtle across the enclosure or up from the woods, unconstrained by thickets or weeds.

  And they plunge at us in expectation of something more interesting than grain. At home, the garden is nothing like as clear and tidy as the pig enclosure: it’s knee-high with docks and gripped by bindweed; brambles claw at us from all sides and torn netting trails from the blackcurrants. But this is a climate where even untidy gardeners can thrive, and we stumble up to the house every morning and evening with armfuls, bucketfuls, barrowfuls of produce. When we’ve sorted and stored, pickled and frozen, Little Pig and Big Pig get their turn, have their fill. But despite a pig’s reputation for guzzling anything in sight, they can be surprisingly picky. Empty pea pods they love; broad bean pods they hate. Tomatoes, melons, fruit of all kinds and pumpkins they squabble over with spite. Lettuce stumps they’ll tolerate, if there’s nothing much else; cabbage leaves they tend to pick at, disgruntled at being forced to tackle such fare; cucumbers they can take or leave. And they won’t touch courgettes. This is something of a disaster because, of course, we have far, far too many courgettes. We try cutting them up to reveal the seeds, dicing them, peeling them, hiding them at the bottom of the trough. But nothing works. At the end of every feeding time, the courgettes remain untouched, neatly shunted to the side of the trough so that they’re not in the way of proper food. But we’re desperate to get rid of some of the glut, so we resort to boiling them down in big vats until they’re a pale green sticky mush and we mix this with the grain. We dole the slop out like Dickensian schoolteachers, and the pigs tuck in. Suddenly it’s a favourite. Stewed courgettes – mmm, that’s different altogether; that’s sweet and tasty. And so we have a reliable outlet for the mountain of courgettes, which is a good thing, but now, in add-ition to all the other chores we do for the pigs, we have to cook for them.

  It’s hot now, really hot, a dry, inland heat that seeps silently up from the Mediterranean and hangs here, still and stately. Within days the verges are brown and hard. The hens stop laying and hide away instead, flopped under the conifers at the end of the garden; Mo staggers from sun to shade, sun to shade. In the house we siesta on the tiled floors, until they, too, get warm. As the enclosure field dries out and the vegetation becomes scant, and even supplies in the hedges and woods die back, the daily delivery of choice, organic garden produce seems to keep the pigs content. But food is not really the problem: it’s lack of water that could quickly cause harm. The local farmers trundle back and forth with metal water vats attached to the back of tractors. There’s a queue at the fontaine in the village. Water collected from roofs and drainpipes through the spring is channelled into barns and stables. We go to the enclosure three or four times a day to fill the drinking trough, and especially the wallow.

  The pigs have worn the wallow wider, longer, deeper. It now fits two pigs perfectly. The clay ground has been pressed smooth and hard, and so water gathers, creating a claggy layer on top, thick and cool. The tree roots at the side act as a kind of backrest. It’s all very comfortable. They spend a lot of time here, remarkably harmoniously, and as a result they’ve become brown pigs, a thick coffee colour on the rump and stomach, snout and ears, a more dappled black-and-tan above. When you pat them, or when they barge into you, a gritty dust puffs out of their bristles. In the heat they’re moulting, too, shedding the excesses of black hair, and so they seem sleeker all of a sudden. Brown and sleek: summer pigs.

  A couple of times a day, we hose them down. We stand just inside the fence, turn the water pressure high, fit our thumb over the end of the pipe and spew a shower into the air a foot or so above the pigs so that it patters down steadily all over them, heads and backs, turning the dust on their skin to mud, washing them clean for a while, black. Then, for fun, we make the water come with a rush and spurt it harder, directing it against a buttock or a shoulder, pummelling their toned limbs like a massage, soaking us as well as the pigs. The water is sparkly in the midday light, cool; it’s a fine sport. Everybody loves it: me and Ed, Mo, but especially Little Pig. He stands in the hosepipe shower and laughs with glee. I swear, he laughs with glee. He opens his mouth to catch the water; he shimmies in the flow; he ducks and splashes like a child in a fountain. Long after Big Pig has had a dousing and sauntered off to rummage in the woods, Little Pig is still demanding a soaking. When our visits to the enclosure are delayed, or simply when he feels the heat’s getting a bit much, he makes his discontent heard with a low, persistent squawk . Too dry, too hot; do something. And often Jean-Claude, who can’t fail to hear the full range of pig complaints from his side of the wall, kindly steps in and wields the hose. He doesn’t want to approve of it, this indulgence, but he can’t resist; no one can.

  I understand Little Pig’s delight. When the heat crushes us we swim in the river, seeking out the cold pools and currents. Kingfishers slide across us, and damsel flies, equally blue, flick past our arms as we stroke the deep black water. We’ll get hot again quickly, almost as soon as we’ve climbed up the bank, but for a while it’s soft and chill, and there’s always (always) the momentary tingling bliss of cool water on burning skin as we plunge in. So we treat the pigs to a similar pleasure. When it’s too hot and heavy to walk or cycle to the enclosure, and when Mo won’t leave the dampish shade of the pen under the house, we fire up our rackety old moped and putter around on the lanes, seated close together, sweaty. The heat hangs silent and the pigs hear us coming, almost before we’ve left home, and are desperate to be hosed: by the time we pull across the bumpy ground at the edge of the field they’re yelping in anticipation. Water in the sun, cool in the heat: holidays.

  Nights can be airless and sweaty, breathless, but we and the pigs all bask in the pleasure of the long, balmy evenings. Towards dusk they’re always to be found in the woods, among the hot-earth smells, bustling and purposeful, and we dig and prune and harvest long after the night crickets begin their burr.
One evening we go into town, where the municipality has organized a marché des producteurs, a kind of tasting market, where the stallholders sell plates of food to be eaten at long communal tables set up in the square. Each seller has to raise or make what they sell so everything is local and familiar, but there’s enough variety to put together a whole range of impromptu menus: goat’s cheese salad, charcuterie, or snails, perhaps, to begin; a choice of duck, veau, sausage or tripe to follow, cooked under the plane trees on a variety of barbecues and planchas, eaten inevitably with aligot – a creamy, cheesy mashed potato – unless the queue’s too long at the stall; finish with fruit or cake or ice cream; don’t forget the bread and the wine.

  We walk through the centre of the town, following the neat grid of medieval streets. This is a bastide, a close-knit fortified mesh of straight lanes and passages, too narrow in places for cars to pass. It’s a difficult townscape, unsuited to modern living and constantly struggling to attract people to make a home here. Most of the big old merchants’ houses have been divided into basic apartments, dark and draughty, let cheaply to families arriving from all over the world – Portugal, North Africa, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Cambodia – who find themselves enclosed tightly in the shadowy streets, battling the testing architecture of a previous age. In winter, the cold lingers in the narrow alleys, unshiftable, but after a scorching day the stones breathe heat on either side of us and we hurry through to the market in a square at the far side, where the buildings give way to the river, running slow and weedy, sliding up occasional currents of welcome cooler, damper air. It feels refreshing, at least for a moment, and we find a place to sit at one end of a wooden trestle table that stretches from the Resistance memorial to the bandstand, a length of perhaps thirty metres. For most of the time, this is a dusty, workaday square, where cars park and boules is played in the shade of the plane trees, but tonight there’s something soft and romantic, uniquely old-fashioned French, about the place: the stalls around the perimeter glint with colour, the smoke from the fires and barbecues drifts slowly towards the river, families and couples wander hand in hand. There are good smells everywhere.

  Ed and I collect our bottle of water and paper place mats from the little wagon run by the town council; we buy a bottle of pink wine and pour some into plastic glasses. Our first course, the apéritif, is going to be a farçou, a kind of griddled stuffing cake made mostly from breadcrumbs and vegetables, a traditional local filler that acts much like Yorkshire pudding in satiating appetite so that the meat coming later goes further. There’s a queue at the stall, with people clustering around the big planchas, so we wait. The band has been unpacking instruments and plugging in wires, but now it strikes up and is on the move. There’s an accordion, a trumpet, a tambourine and a singer, and they work their way from table to table playing rousing favourites to get the gathering diners in the party mood. An Occitan classic first, which we clap to; then ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ in its French incarnation and then ‘Y Viva España’, several times. The singer holds the microphone above our table, we sing a bit, the trumpet riffs, and off they go. On the dance floor in the middle of the square, by the bandstand, there are already plenty of couples twirling and swaying, sincere in their dancing.

  There are forty or fifty tables, each in turn seating forty or fifty, but there are not enough places; forlorn families squeeze through the makeshift alleys in search of somewhere to sit. We take turns to join the queues for food so that we don’t lose our chairs. The band finishes its circuit and settles into the bandstand; the dancers waltz; the evening drifts on. After our farçou we have truffade, a mountain dish of cheese and potatoes, some duck pâté, a slither of Roquefort, strawberries. It all takes a long time and when we’ve finished eating it’s dark and the heat of the day is finally fading. We give up our seats – only two, not a great prize – and wander with the crowds circulating the stalls. Benoît is here, the farmer from whom we bought our weaners. He has a cochon, a young pig, on a spit and is serving paper plates of juicy black-pig pork, each garnished with a nub of meaty sausage. He’s sweating with the heat from the fire, and under pressure from the queue waiting for him to carve, but he takes time to wave and greet us.

  ‘How are the pigs?’

  ‘They’re fine; they’re lovely pigs.’

  He gestures at a hunk of meat with the prong of his long fork. ‘When they’re like this: that’s when you know they’re worth it.’

  On the way home we call at the enclosure, stopping the car some distance away so as not to disturb Jean-Claude and Camille. The sky is high and densely spangled. Noise drifts on the warm air: church bells, owls of several kinds, the creak of a door, a dog barking. We can hear a mouse in the hedge, gnawing. The pigs, though, are quiet. And when we step over the fence we realize that they’re not in their shelter. We find them a yard or two into the woods, lying nose to tail along the length of one of their dug terraces, in the relative cool that sinks beneath the trees. They stir a little, but without enthusiasm. We’d all like to sleep outdoors on nights like this.

  Our pigs, like Nicholson’s, are a summer sensation. Our British vis-itors find them irresistible. We wander from our house to the enclosure with various combinations of friends and family who cluster by the fence while the pigs perform for them, nuzzling hands, chuntering greetings, showing off. Everyone loves it: they want to tickle Little Pig on the belly, hose them both, feed Big Pig a slice of melon and watch him snaffle the seeds. I’m not sure anyone believes we’re really going to kill them.

  The pigs, in turn, love the visitors, but they’re unpredictable entertainers. They’re strong and agile from their forays into the woods, heavy beasts weighing almost 100kg each now; confident, feisty. Little Pig has taken to nipping ankles and fingers and bums, partly for fun and partly to get his way, biting us just as he bites Big Pig when they tussle. He takes no notice if you shout at him and so we’ve learned to be wary, looking out for a strike on the blind side when we fill the trough or clamber over the fence. But visitors are easier game. Ed’s mother insists on coming into the enclosure and both the pigs trot up to her, like dogs might, but then Big Pig crushes against her, she stumbles and steps away into Little Pig’s path; Little Pig walks on, over her foot, and as she yelps and tries to pull back, he nips her thigh. The bruises swell and blacken. She hobbles in pain. For the remainder of the holiday she stays behind the fence.

  As we exhibit our pigs to our friends and share our pride at such fine entertainment, I enjoy reading more about the success of Nicholson’s pig. Since everyone seems immediately beguiled by Big Pig and Little Pig, I see how their eighteenth-century counterpart might have risen to such fame and popularity. No one, it seems, can resist a nice pig. And Nicholson’s tale continues to flounce and preen like a Georgian dandy. Buoyed by the swell of popular adulation, he’s found his pig a place in the circus performing at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. He’s top of the bill; the star. London’s pleasure-seeking elite are willing to queue for four hours in the stinking summer dust to catch a glimpse of the famed act, and London Unmask’d reports in awe on the pig effect that’s sweeping society:

  the proprietor is rapidly amassing a fortune,16 thro’ the sway of fashion, as it would be quite monstrous and ill-bred not to follow the ton and see the wonderful Learned Pig: it being the trite question in all polite circles, Pray, my Lord, my Lady, Sir John, Madam or Miss, have you seen the Learned Pig? if answer is given in the affirmative, it is a confirmation of taste; if in the negative, it is reprobated as an odious singularity!

  But for all its popularity, Nicholson’s pig, like ours, has its moments of impudence. At a special private performance, the pig is put to its counting task as usual and asked to indicate how many honest gentlemen are in the audience. The pig gazes at those circled around it, the dandies in their silks and powdered hair, the scholars in their dark coats, the drunken husbands and sozzled lovers, but otherwise does not move. Nicholson laughs, wipes his brow. He prods the pig between the shoulders, just below his glitzy
collar. ‘Honest men …’ But still the pig resists, tired or confused, sulking at some injustice or simply unable to discern an honest man among those gathered, and Nicholson laughs again, makes a small bow to the audience and begins afresh. ‘How many, then, are free from mortgages? Count that for us instead. Of all those gathered here, how many are unencumbered?’ But the pig can’t be bothered. It puts its snout to the floor and snuffles, ignoring the cards, ignoring the crowd, ignoring Nicholson. It will not measure debt any more than it will measure honesty. Nicholson puffs, prevaricates, but is defeated by his pig. He offers a lower bow, an apology, to those who have put such faith in him, but he sees the disappointment in their faces, and the disbelief, and he darts at his stubborn, disobedient companion, flailing with sudden rage and whipping the pig down the stairs.

  At Sadler’s Wells Theatre, too, the pig is causing disruption. According to press reports, it’s honoured with the loudest plaudits from the packed house, but the tightrope performers and acrobats object. They don’t mind dancing dogs, they’re accustomed to birds of various kinds, but they don’t want to be onstage with a pig. The acclaimed tumbler Signor Plácido along with his partner Jean Redigé, otherwise known as the Little Devil, the singer Monsieur Dupuis, the acrobat Monsieur Meunier and the famous rope dancer La Belle Espagnole, march into the office of Richard Wroughton, the theatre’s manager, to complain at the degradation, the humiliation, the unbearable ignominy of appearing with such a creature. The pig must go; they won’t climb another rope or turn one more somersault until it’s been dismissed. But, of course, Mr Wroughton has a drawer full of cash; he can look from his window and see the queue for tickets; he’s read the notices in the newspapers and heard the gossip on the street. There’s no way he’s going to sack the pig. Instead he sacks the company and keeps the pig.