Sam and Chester

by Jo Bailey

  Sam leaned forward and gave him a kiss on the snout.

  ‘I love you, Chester,’ he whispered, loud enough for us all to hear.

  Sam closed the front door behind him and then stood on his tiptoes to take one final look through the window. I didn’t want to hurry Sam, as I knew how important it was for him to know Chester was going to be OK, but the November chill was biting and I didn’t want the boys to catch a cold. I blew on my hands to keep warm and my hot breath billowed through the cold evening air.

  ‘Night night, Chester,’ Will and Sam chorused together.

  Chester didn’t make a sound, which meant he was already nodding off to sleep. That was our cue to leave. We all tiptoed back into the house and closed the door.

  Later that night, when I was snuggling under the duvet with Darren, I reflected on the day’s events.

  ‘That went more smoothly than I expected,’ I said brightly, pulling the blanket up to my ears. Although our barn was beautiful, it was quite drafty and it was nice to have Darren’s warm chest close by to snuggle into. It was a cold night out there – and that got me thinking. ‘I hope Chester will be warm enough,’ I said: one last worry before my eyes grew too heavy to keep open. I drifted into a deep, peaceful sleep.

  The next morning, I woke up feeling fresh as a daisy. As the light teased its way through the gap in the curtains, I had a strange flashback.

  ‘Did you hear a banging noise in the night?’ I croaked to Darren in my just-woken-up voice.

  ‘No,’ Darren groaned, rolling over to catch some extra lie-in time.

  I must have dreamt it, I thought.

  Then I sat bolt upright. Bang! Bang! Bang! I wasn’t dreaming that! It sounded like someone was battering down our door.

  ‘Darren, can you hear that?’

  We both jumped out of bed and grabbed the nearest clothes to hand. I threw on some jeans and one of Darren’s big knitted jumpers. It drowned my body but I didn’t have time to care.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  This time the thumping was followed by: ‘Oink! Oink! Oink!’

  Chester.

  Sam, closely followed by Will, came running into our bedroom.

  ‘Chester is trying to break into the house, Mummy,’ Will announced calmly.

  He wasn’t exaggerating. We all piled into the atrium just as Chester was taking another run-up to the door.

  Bang! He rammed his snout against the wooden doorframe.

  ‘Darren, stop him!’ I cried out, worried for Chester’s safety as much as the house’s foundations.

  Darren flung the front door wide open. Chester charged towards us . . . and covered us in pig kisses. He had just wanted to be with his family when he woke up, the poor thing.

  For a moment, we were so swept up in this affectionate reunion that we didn’t notice what had happened outside . . .

  We couldn’t see the patio tiles for all the debris. Chester had pulled out every log from under the decking stairs – strips of bark were strewn everywhere. He’d chewed his carpet to shreds and chomped through the windows and the letterbox of his Wendy house. Bite-sized pieces of green wood and scratched pine were strewn as far as the eye could see. And as for the garden – the little devil had left potholes across the lawn where he had turned up the grass with his snout.

  ‘That pig!’ Darren shouted, surveying the damage. ‘I’ll have him!’

  Sam clamped his hands over his ears, Will put his hands over his eyes, I let out a nervous giggle and I think that Darren was probably making a mental tally of the cost of all the damage.

  ‘At least the house is still standing,’ I joked, trying to make light of the situation.

  The boys found it all hilarious, of course. Sam and Will were howling with laughter.

  Chester knew exactly what he had done and hung back, just that little bit out of Darren’s reach. This had clearly been his way of telling us he didn’t take kindly to being moved outside.

  And poor Darren had to stomp off to get his tools again. It was just as well he liked DIY . . .

  Moving Chester back into the house was simply not an option. Darren was going to have to patch up the damage and we were going to have to pray that Chester would soon tire of these antics.

  Luckily we had bought an extra roll of carpet, and Darren was able to hammer the Perspex windows back into place, but Chester was going to have to make do without his letterbox.

  The following night, Chester didn’t even wait until we’d gone to bed to let us know that he wanted to be let in. The banging on the atrium door started at dinnertime, and went on, and on, into the night.

  I felt stressed about it on so many levels – worrying about the damage he was causing, about whether the noise was upsetting our neighbours, but, mostly, I felt so very guilty for sending Chester out into the cold.

  Every knock he made on the door was a reminder of how desperately he wanted to be with his family. I’d never foreseen this happening – we bought Chester to be a house pet, a ‘pig dog’, but what other choice did we now have?

  No one understood what it was like to be ‘different’ more than Sam. He knew it wasn’t Chester’s fault he’d grown too big. Sam couldn’t bear to see his friend suffer so he went out of his way to look after him and to make sure Chester knew he was still loved.

  Every time Chester banged at the door, Sam went downstairs to check on him. He brought him more food, topped up his water, and despite my protests about the cold, he insisted on keeping Chester company in the Wendy house.

  You could tell Chester was overjoyed to have Sam by his side. As Sam lay next to his best friend, softly stroking his belly, the pig sighed little grunts of appreciation, just like a cat purring with contentment. Only when Sam was convinced Chester was happily tucked up for the night would he come indoors.

  And so began Groundhog Day. Every night, Sam tucked Chester into bed and every morning we woke up to something resembling a war zone in our garden. By mid December Chester had shredded everything in the Wendy house that he could possibly get his teeth into. It was a miracle the thing was still standing.

  But worse than that was the state of our lawn. Chester just loved to turf up the grass with his snout. We tried countless ways to keep him contained to the Wendy house, so that he didn’t ruin the lawn, but all to no avail. Getting desperate, we even rigged up a makeshift electric fence to keep him off what remained of the grass. But Chester would simply take a running charge at the DIY fence, smash through it without a moment’s hesitation, and continue turfing over the garden, completely unaffected by the fence’s supposed shocks. Mum and I would leave pignut trails to entice him off the grass, or try to shoo him off using brooms, but nothing worked. He’d just sit on his haunches, like a dog, smiling at us. Mum and I would eventually give up and retire to the house, leaving Chester to continue happily with his digging.

  So every day I, or Darren if he was there, would patch up the damage as best we could. In the end, there was not one blade of grass left on our ‘lawn’. And Chester’s escapades weren’t just limited to our garden – now he’d realised he could get out and about, he started taking himself off on little trips. We weren’t even aware he’d gone, but while we thought he was snoozing in the Wendy house, he was actually having a good old nose around the village square, rooting through the bins and saying hello to all the villagers. He always came home of his own volition, and usually the first we knew of it was when a friendly villager made a joke about it to us! Despite doing everything in our power to keep Chester within our property, it seemed nothing stood in the way of our very determined pig!

  Although Chester was acting like an absolute hooligan, his nightly desecration of the Wendy house was the vandalism I felt most badly about – simply because I couldn’t stand the thought of him not being comfortable at night. By this time, however, I was fast running out of options for flooring in his house, for we had now been through countless strips of carpet.

  A chance encounter with a woman in the village wh
o always had her ear to the ground changed everything. You could often find her down the pub having a good chinwag with the locals.

  One day, we happened to be standing next to each other in the queue for the post office. She asked me how our pig was. She told me that Chester wasn’t just known in our village any more; apparently word had spread across the entire valley.

  ‘You’re joking?’ I nearly choked on the news.

  ‘Oh no, he’s well famous, he’ll be on TV before you know it,’ she teased.

  ‘Chester?! Nah, don’t be silly.’ I waved away her idea as being far-fetched, although a little part of me glowed with the idea of Chester being famous.

  I suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to confide in her about our recent pig dramas. She was one of those great listeners who had a kind, friendly face that made you want to spill out your life story to her.

  ‘Chester keeps tearing the carpet in his Wendy house to shreds and I’m running out of options,’ I confided as I shared with her my problem about what I should use to keep him warm at night, given he shredded absolutely everything I’d tried.

  For a moment, the woman was speechless. She looked puzzled, as if I had been speaking another language.

  ‘Sorry,’ she laughed, ‘I was just trying to get my head around what you were saying. Are you telling me you’ve been buying carpet for a pig?’

  Suddenly, I felt a little silly.

  ‘Yeees . . .’

  She half laughed, half coughed into her fist.

  ‘What about laying some straw down in there?’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘He’s a pig, not a dog!’

  Her words sank in. Of course! It was just that I’d never looked at Chester in that way before. Pennywell Farm had likened him to a pet pooch so everything we had ever bought him had been designed to fit a dog. We’d taught Chester to behave like a dog – to sit, stay, roll over. In my eyes, Chester was a dog.

  It took this woman, on that cold December morning in the post-office queue, to open my eyes. Chester was a pig – and it was time for us to finally start treating him like one.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Pig Move

  AS IT HAPPENED, we were able to put our plan into action almost right away – and not just by adding straw to Chester’s Wendy house (which, as the woman in the village had predicted, he adored). No – we had bigger plans to put in place. My house in Spain had finally been sold, which was wonderful news as it had been on the market for nearly two years. Finally Darren and I were able to purchase a long-term family home and we had found the perfect property to buy: an old farmhouse nestled amongst the rolling hills with enough room for our human family and Chester!

  But with the move confirmed the pressure was now on to get everything sorted in our rented house in time for the sale to go through. We had to patch up the converted barn so we could get our deposit back . . . and I had a terrible feeling it was going to cost an awful lot.

  Darren sat at the dining-room table, trying to figure out the sums. One hand clutched his head while the other tightly gripped his biro. It didn’t take a genius to tell he was stressed.

  I tiptoed past Darren, trying to peek over his shoulder at the total he’d come to. I took a big gulp as I saw the final sum. Three thousand pounds!

  There was the damage to the boiler; the ceiling that Chester had left a wee mark on; the wallpaper he’d peeled off the bathroom wall and tossed over his shoulder; the gate he had bent out of shape (countless times); the damage to the lawn . . . What had once been a beautiful, lush green garden filled with daisies and daffodils now looked more like a quagmire. The garden would need to be completely returfed, which would be a big expense, but the main cost would be replacing both the front door – Chester had split the wood from months of repeated banging – and the French doors to Mum’s bedroom, which now had mud a foot high across them from where Chester had spent a great deal of time pressing his snout up against the glass, trying to sneak a peek of Mum in her bedroom.

  There was also the small problem of where Chester was going to live while we fixed everything – we’d probably have to fork out another few hundred pounds to rehome him temporarily.

  ‘Whoever said getting a pig would be cheaper than a dog was lying!’ stated Darren bluntly. You have to choose your moments in life, and now really wasn’t the time to reason with Darren about how much good Chester had done . . .

  ‘Cup of tea?’ I said instead: a peace offering.

  Darren looked at me through weary eyes and sighed deeply. It seemed his love/hate relationship with our pig was as complicated as ever, but no matter how he felt about Chester, he was still prepared to work incredibly hard to make things right. I really felt for Darren – he had to be back on the rig in a few days but the need to restore the property was pressing, which meant he would have to spend his last hours with us working instead of relaxing and spending quality time with me and the boys.

  ‘I’ll think I’ll start with the patio doors,’ he said glumly. ‘Just keep that pig away from me!’ he growled as he disappeared to fetch his toolbox.

  That was a job for Will and Sam – they would have to keep Chester entertained for the interim. Mum wouldn’t be able to distract him with pignuts as by this time she had quite wisely moved to a house down the road in Ivybridge. She’d finally had enough of Chester banging on the door day and night.

  I have to hand it to Darren: he worked nonstop to get the barn straightened up. Just as he’d done when he’d packed up the house in Spain with me, he was like a whirlwind, whizzing from one job to the next.

  The French doors took some work. Darren was on his hands and knees, filling the cracks, sanding, painting and restoring the wood to its original mahogany brown. Luckily I’d saved all the strips of wallpaper from the bathroom, so it just took a careful eye to line up the stripes and glue it all back into place.

  I kept handing Darren cups of tea with biscuits while the boys played football with Chester in the mud. That night we used a padlock to keep Chester inside his house – we couldn’t have him banging on the doors and undoing all the hours of work Darren had put in.

  I’m certain Chester knew he had stepped over the line, as for those two days he was the perfect example of a well-behaved pig. Either that or he had wisely worked out he needed to give Darren a wide berth! Whatever Chester’s motivation, it had a positive impact, as Darren was slightly less cross with our pig by the time I dropped him off at the airport. He even showed a hint of concern about where I was going to keep Chester while we returfed the lawn. At that time, I didn’t have the answer.

  With Darren back on the rigs, it was over to me to get the rest of the house sorted. I didn’t have much time as our scheduled move was only a few weeks away now. I turned to our local paper for help, spotting an ad for a freelance gardener at the back. He’ll do, I thought.

  ‘So what have we got here?’ He leaned on the gate, practised eyes raking across the remnants of our former lawn as he shook his head at its poor condition.

  Richard was the man’s name; he was in his mid-thirties. He wore jeans, boots, a fleece with his catchy logo stitched across the back and a blue woolly hat that had been battered by the weather.

  I explained the Chester story and he gave me the same look the woman had in the post-office queue – one of disbelief.

  He quoted me a price. I wasn’t used to negotiating, that was Darren’s forte, but it sounded reasonable to me, so I just agreed the price as I needed it done a.s.a.p. Then Richard came up with a brilliant idea that saved the day.

  ‘I’ve got a field about fifteen minutes from here if you want to keep your pig there while I get this done,’ he offered.

  ‘How much?’

  Richard and I came to a happy agreement. Chester would only need to be there for a couple of weeks, while we fixed up the house and moved. A field sounded suitably pig-friendly and I knew how important it was to reassure Sam that Chester would be safe in his temporary home.

  I also needed to work out
how to move Chester. It wasn’t going to be easy – in just a year he’d grown from a micro to a full-size pig, weighing in at 15 stone. But Richard was able to solve that problem too.

  ‘We’ll put him in the back of my van.’ Richard pointed to his white Transit parked in our yard.

  I had a bad feeling about that: driving down the twisting country lanes with a loose pig in the back of a van could be rather dangerous, especially as Chester would struggle to keep his balance. But I didn’t have any alternatives so I agreed we should try it the following day.

  That evening, I did my best to explain to Sam why Chester needed to move temporarily. Darren and I had laid the foundations for the big house move by showing Sam pictures of our new house, and telling him what his bedroom would look like and how we had chosen his room for him because it would overlook Chester’s new home. We had already designed the latter: an escape-proof pen for a pig, not a dog. Naturally, Chester had played a key part in us deciding which house to go for.

  Will joined us on Sam’s bed as I drew pictures of Richard’s field, telling Sam that Chester would be staying there until it was time for us all to be reunited in the new house. I’d done my research – the field in question was a circular one high up on the hillside overlooking Ugborough Beacon. There were only half a dozen such fields dotted around Dartmoor. Richard’s was one of the few remaining that hadn’t yet been excavated by archaeologists.

  ‘And we are going to put Chester’s Wendy house here.’ I drew a big X to mark the spot. I wouldn’t have dreamt of moving Chester without his house – he needed somewhere snug to hide at night when we wouldn’t be there.

  Sam’s eyes suddenly turned big and watery.

  ‘What about the foxes?’ He whimpered at the thought of a wild animal attacking his best friend.

  Sam’s acute hearing meant he could pick up on all the nocturnal sounds that you or I would miss. There had been many mornings when Sam had come into my bedroom and described all the different animals ‘talking’ at the bottom of our garden. The noises the foxes had made must have worried Sam.