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

by Jacqueline Yallop

  For now, though, I’m taking a trip. The mornings are already heavy with dew; the hoopoes and orioles have flown, the last of the swallows flit and twitter on the telephone wires. The evenings have emptied into quiet: no frogs, no crickets. Soon it will be difficult even to remember, accurately, the heat of summer, and it will be too late for this kind of beach holiday. So, for the first time since they arrived in January, I’m leaving the pigs. Perhaps this is part of the process of withdrawal, of estrangement, that will need to happen over the next few weeks and months if we’re going to kill them. I find myself wondering if they’ll notice our departure at all, or if they’ll simply continue in the woods, as they always do, their ears, eyes and snouts fixed on the fall of acorns. Big Pig and Little Pig, getting fat without me.

  Fattening a country pig is about working with the seasons, taking full advantage of the abundance of fruit and nuts in late summer and autumn. But if you’re in the middle of a town – no orchards, no acorns, no trees at all – where the seasons are blighted by smog, and uniformly fruitless, and you still want to raise a pig, then you have to think again. While farmers and cottagers found it increasingly difficult to fatten a country pig as rights to pannage were curtailed and forests denuded, those who moved into the growing industrial towns discovered new ways of bringing up hogs among the terraces and in small backyards. Nicholson’s pig was not the only pig accustomed to urban living. As far back as the 1690s,6 husbandry manuals were including ‘Instructions to Fatten Swine in Towns’ but it was during the nineteenth century, as the Industrial Revolution took hold, that pigs began to be a common sight in the domestic streets that were packed around the mills and factories. By 1850, as many as 3,000 pigs were recorded in the potteries district of North Kensington, in London, while during the 1860s, the parish of St George the Martyr, in Southwark, launched a campaign to discourage the keeping of pigs in such a built-up area: ‘their condition and surrounding were filthy,7 as negligence and want of convenience could make them,’ noted the parish Medical Officer. ‘There were also public sties in which from ten to forty pigs were huddled together, and the smell from which the winds carried far and wide.’

  In France, measures to ban pigs from the street were first introduced in the thirteenth century but proved ineffective and impossible to enforce. Frequent trials took place in which wandering urban pigs stood accused of causing damage or accident. What strikes us now as the bizarre custom of putting pigs in the dock – and often sentencing them to death – arose partly because there were just so many pigs loose in the towns, and their activity quite often conflicted with human interest. Horses, donkeys and cows, rats and even insects were also subject to lawsuits but pigs were the serial offenders, simply because they were so common and so boisterous: from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, pigs were executed for offences ranging from sacrilegiously eating consecrated hosts to chewing off ears or killing children. The public executioner in Paris was permitted to seize any loitering pig and cut its throat unless its owner paid a ransom of 5 silver sous.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, New York City passed its first law banning pigs from the streets in 1648, but this was largely ignored and almost two centuries later, in the 1820s and 1830s, there were riots against the ‘hog carts’ sent to round up some of the thousands of animals still free ranging. An early nineteenth-century aquatint of one of New York’s smartest areas, Broadway and the City Hall, shows pigs roaming among the elegantly dressed couples and expensive carriages enjoying the spacious streets and tree-lined parks. But while this demonstrates that wealthy districts were not pig-free, pigs in towns, as in the country, were generally animals of the poor, and they quickly became associated with the worst of the slums. Working in the squalor of Manchester’s industrial neighbourhoods in the 1830s, James Kay-Shuttleworth, a doctor and politician, recalled how common it was to find destitute families sharing their yards and alleys with their own pigs, and even with those being raised commercially:

  The houses of the poor sometimes surround a common area,8 into which the doors and windows open at the back of the dwelling. Porkers, who feed pigs in the town, often contract with the inhabitants to pay some small sum for the rent of their area which is immediately covered with pig-styes and converted into a dung-heap and receptacle of the putrescent garbage which is now heedlessly flung into it from the surrounding dwellings. The offensive odour which sometimes arises from these areas cannot be conceived.

  For many of those clamouring to watch Nicholson’s sleek black pig, it was the contrast between his lovable animal and the sad, reeking creatures of the city slums which came as such a surprise. They were accustomed to associate pigs with the dirtiest habits and conditions: a print by Thomas Bewick, for example, made around 1797, shows a man sitting in an outside toilet, with his trousers down, defecating energetically into a pig enclosure. Such works suggested that pigs were fit for nothing more than feeding on, and living in, waste and excrement. But here was Nicholson’s pig, rising above such assumptions and showing itself to be – well, human? In Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories for children, one of the ladies watching the pig perform finds the disparity between her expectations and what she actually sees upsets everything she thought she knew about animals:

  ‘I have,’ said a lady who was present,9 ‘been for a long time accustomed to consider animals as mere machines […] but the sight of the Learned Pig, which has lately been shewn in London, has deranged these ideas, and I know not what to think.’

  If a dog or a cat or a horse had displayed such talent then it would not have become a sensation (indeed, as we’ve seen, talented dogs and horses and cats were frequently paraded on the stage to lukewarm receptions) but a pig, a pig; it was its very pigness which was both the attraction and the repulsion, causing enough of a stir to thoroughly ‘derange’ the most settled of ideas.

  Writers, cartoonists, artists and those in pursuit of any kind of celebrity picked up on the strange attraction of Nicholson’s pig, and decided it was worthy of attention. In addition to those queuing for tickets to see the act in person, there was a remarkable flurry of references to it in prose, poetry and print: ‘the learned pig was in his day a far greater object of admiration to the English nation than ever was Sir Isaac Newton,’10 noted Robert Southey, the Victorian Poet Laureate. Following the death of Samuel Johnson, The Morning Post, among others, compared the age’s portly figurehead of wit and wisdom to Nicholson’s show pig, running a poem that claimed ‘Another hog is come / And Wisdom grunts at Charing Cross’. The poet William Blake referred to the Learned Pig in his notebook, and William Wordsworth included reference to it in his long poem The Prelude, as an example of the ‘out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things / All freaks of nature’ which were entertaining London society and pandering to ‘man’s dullness, madness’.

  Poking fun at the absurdity and vanity of the crowds who gathered to watch the pig seemed to keep the intelligentsia more than comfortably entertained. The caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson drew Nicholson’s protégé hard at work picking out alphabet cards surrounded by fat and grotesque spectators displaying many hog-like features of their own; his friend Samuel Collings drew a chaotic scene of a pig leading a cavalcade of carnival performers to overthrow the classical muses in ‘The Downfall of Taste and Genius’. Even the prime minister, William Pitt, was frequently referred to, and drawn, as ‘The Wonderful Pig’ or ‘The Learned Pig’. The best British traditions of art, debate, theatre and learning, the satirists suggested, were being ignored or debased – and what better illustration of such calamity, of such popular ignorance and degeneracy, than a pig.

  Nicholson, however, seems delighted to derange people’s ideas. He’s astutely silent on any controversy surrounding the act. I find no comments from him about its place in cultural life or even about its unexpected popularity. He simply goes doggedly about his business, performance by performance, thriving on the debate his pig is causing. The more received opinions are crazed and disord
ered, the more his black pig is talked about. Satire, caricature, poetry: it’s all the same to him; it’s all publicity. Fame. Soon the faddish gaze will shift; before long, the ton will tire of him and his animal and he’ll be returned to obscurity. The pig will have to be fattened for lard. But for now he has poets and philosophers ridiculing and berating him, which is all he needs.

  But the pig in all this, the patient black pig that once slouched below Samuel Bisset’s Belfast bar, a reluctant pet, has begun to fade. Physically it’s much the same as ever, thinner than it once was perhaps, older, though still a good-looking, polished pig. But we don’t hear much of it; it’s begun to vanish from its own story. Since its refusal to perform to order, counting honest gentlemen or those of its select audience without mortgages, it has become little more than a poster pig. There it is, right enough, unmistakable in newspaper clippings and cartoons, but it’s come to be something else, a symbol, a cipher, with the disillusion of a dying century piled upon its sinewy shoulders. It no longer seems to me a real pig, with piggy traits: we see nothing of its impudence, its spirit, its cleverness. We don’t know how it lives, or what it does when it’s not performing. No one is interested in the mundane habits of a metaphor.

  After more than a year at the heart of the London scene, Nicholson takes a break, keen for some country air, perhaps, or wary of exhausting the capital’s attention. The pig tours again: Banbury, Oxford, Bath. It’s autumn in the Cotswolds, crisp and appley, but the pig passes through those grassy pastures without pausing; it belongs entirely now to the towns. There, it does what it’s supposed to do – tells the time, reads thoughts, picks out maidens – but the tricks are worn now, too well learned to entertain a curious pig; the crowds are the same all over, brash and noisy, apt to poke it. The pig performs; repeats; performs again, over and over. You can almost sense its weariness from here, two hundred and fifty years later.

  And in the winter of 1786, quite suddenly, the pig disappears. It does not perform; the newspapers are free of it. No matter how hard I look, I can’t find any news of Nicholson or his travelling menagerie. There are reports of other spectacles, and plenty of interest in the ubiquitous Sarah Siddons, playing the tragic muse in a Shakespearean pageant at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, but nothing about the pig. There are not even questions about its fate. No posters, no reports, no bookings. I begin to think something must have happened. Has Nicholson retired? Has the pig run away? Died? I discover that it was a severe winter, one in a series of bitter winters, with heavy snow falling as early as October and the Thames freezing over. Not good conditions for an itinerant performing pig. But still I’m surprised that news of its sickness or death did not reach the papers. How can such a famous pig just vanish?

  At the seaside, the weather is dry and hot. We loll in the sea, like pigs in wallows, and we get some good news. I’ve sold another novel. I had a hopeful email from my agent a few weeks ago; that turned into a more hopeful phone call; a long wait. And now, at last, a contract on its way. This is hardly the kind of deal you might read about in the newspapers – my advance is small; the whole negotiation low-key – but for Ed and me, it’s momentous. Even modest amounts of money can be life-changing, and the windfall has bought us another few precious months here at least. It’s an uneasy, impermanent solution but we’re becoming skilled at evading the future, and instead of worrying about the long-term, we revel in the relief of an escape. The income from my novel will trickle through in instalments over the next eighteen months or so. We do the calculations and come to a decision: we’ll put aside all thoughts of moving, all job adverts, all family negotiations for another full year. During that time, we’ll treat everything as certain. We’ll not allow ourselves to doubt or fidget. We’ll just enjoy being here. One more year will give us time to see things through properly with Big Pig and Little Pig; it will allow us to make the best use of the meat and to benefit fully from a store cupboard of home-raised pork. After that – well, who knows?

  As we drive back inland, we’re buoyed by our new certainty, eager to see the pigs again after the break, looking forward to making plans. The verges brown and crinkle. It’s been unusually warm everywhere, an illusion of summer, and when we go round to the enclosure, the field is dusty again; the pigs have pulled the shelter apart, opening the flaps of plastic to allow more air to circulate, and loosening the straw. Jean-Claude is in his vegetable garden, crouched in the dirt, running the parched soil through his fingers.

  Where are the pigs?

  He shrugs: ‘In the woods. Keeping out of the heat.’

  But the pigs are not in the woods. We’ve called them and they haven’t come. We’ve gone down the hill, pushed through the trees to the very bottom of the slope, checked in their favourite spots under the tall oaks. There are no pigs.

  Jean-Claude is sanguine. He mentions something about boar. About the start of the hunting season. La chasse was out around here on Sunday, he says.

  La chasse. A powerful local force, the seat of an old-fashioned, much-respected authority, it meets twice a week, occasionally more often, from late summer through to spring. A trail of muddy 4x4s, ancient vans and assorted trailers rattles around the lanes, announcing its arrival. The vehicles peel off along the tracks until they’ve encircled a stretch of woodland, and the men – it’s only men, here – unlatch the cages to let out the hounds, which don’t bark or bay but just trundle through the trees, purposeful. The hunters lean against the bonnets of their vehicles and smoke, their fluorescent caps and jackets the only real disturbance to the landscape. For long stretches of time nothing very much happens. It’s an amiable way to pass a bright Sunday.

  But mobile phones have stacked the odds. A hound, some distance off, perhaps a mile or more away, begins to bay; an animal has been spotted, a deer or a boar. Phones buzz; one huntsman calls the next; the circle of vehicles is pulled tight by the voice on the end of the telephone: here, over here, this way. What used to be a sport of skill and signals and stealth is now a full-on show of force: the cars race towards the sighted prey, throwing up mud and stones, the phones still ringing. One of our neighbours, a boy of eighteen, has a gun which can shoot a boar at a distance of over a kilometre. ‘I have to aim down, towards the ground,’ he says, ‘otherwise, you know …’ and he gestures vaguely towards the houses to suggest stray bullets.

  It’s not unusual for Mo to find deer carcasses when animals have been shot but have escaped la chasse to die later, perhaps days later. I once traced a trail of blood along a series of tracks, following the steps of a wounded boar. I traced it for a long time, perhaps an hour or more. What began as a drip, drip, drip became a steady deep red line and then a Pollock-esque study in violent mark-making. I eventually lost the trail as the animal cut away from the path and into thicker undergrowth. I presume it died there, among the brambles and wild strawberries.

  Could Big Pig and Little Pig have got caught up with la chasse? Could they have been mistaken for boar? They’re the same colour, after all, and the same shape; they don’t move with quite the same erratic, high-shouldered shuffle as boar, but in the woods, from a distance, they might have seemed the perfect game. Even if they weren’t targeted, they would definitely have taken fright at men trampling through the trees, at the sound of gunshots, at dogs. They bolt in panic if we surprise them in the straw or when they’re head-down in the earth, snuffling for bugs; how much more terrified would they be if they were caught up in a huntsman’s ambush?

  We’ve discussed before the risk of getting the pigs tangled up with la chasse. Why hadn’t we done more – somehow? We’re angry now. With ourselves and with the men with guns. And how do you begin to look for two lost pigs? I remember the morning I found them in the Mas de Maury enclosure, spooked and frantic: if they’d found their way out on that occasion, I’m sure they would have just scattered, wild, instinctive; skirted open ground and buried themselves in deep thickets. From here at La Graudie panicked pigs could run in all directions: along the stream and in
to the valley, then up on to scrubby dry hills; or away behind the village, climbing through the woods and across the main road, breaking free on to the endless stretches of oak causse; or back through the hamlet and into the scruffy farmland fields with their dense hedges and copses.

  The phone rings just as we get back to the house.

  We’ve got your pigs in our garden.

  They’re near the lane. Eating the damsons.

  As breakouts go, it’s a modest one. Little Pig and Big Pig have made it only as far as the next hamlet of houses, Mas del Sol. From their enclosure, if they retraced our worn trail through the field to the lane and kept going, it was the first place they’d come to.