Bluebell's departure from the north wood changes the balance of power among the females. In her absence, sister Bramble takes over as top pig, pushing Babe firmly into second place. There's no doubt that Bramble is the biggest pig - she stands about thirty inches tall and is getting fatter every day. She probably has another three inches to grow in height and many inches to grow round her girth, but she now seems to have the psychological clout. All the pigs seem calmer, especially Babe. Now she comes to the fence at a walk, instead of her usual pushy jostle, standing politely beside Bramble to have her head scratched. In recent weeks, Babe has always thundered up to the gate, hurling herself upwards, feet balanced on the top row of wire, lungeing forward to grab anything she can - a proffered vegetable or my sleeve. Today the mood is much more restrained, with all the pigs standing in line, waiting for a stroke. Bramble makes sure she is at the head of the queue, gently sniffing my hand, reminiscent of a dog ascertaining whether you are friend or foe.
One of the gardeners from Dillington House, Adrian, has been helping out on Mondays with the vegetables. This week, the last in November, he'd walked into the pig pen while David was putting down fresh straw in the hut. The pigs love this moment: they kick at the clean dry straw, tossing it into the air with their noses and burying themselves in the soft piles. Bramble heard Adrian coming and rushed out of the shelter, her head on one side (which for a pig is the position they need to adopt if they are preparing to bite) and charged up to Adrian, emitting loud squeals. He didn't wait to discover her intent and beat a quick retreat to the gate. David told me that he reckoned Bramble was defending the house, and possibly him, against a stranger that she didn't know.
David and Adrian have cleared up much of the wood in the last few days and we light a bonfire with the debris. The pigs cluster round, sitting incredibly close to the flames, their bottoms almost in the burning embers. Bramble is so close that I think that her long sandy eyelashes will start to burn. They love the heat and the sight of the flames seems to mesmerise them. When the fire dies down the pigs lie on the hot ashes, their thick hairy coats starting to singe in the heat. When I tell Charlie about this later on in the day, he makes a joke about the crackling we're soon going to be eating. He's not as sentimental as I am about the pigs, but then as a lawyer who has spent so many years of his life working in the field of child abuse, sentiment is not an emotion he can easily afford.
A few days later, I'm in Hay-on-Wye for the winter book festival and I find myself sitting next to gardening guru Monty Don at dinner, telling him about the pigs and the bonfire. Monty has recently set up a small farm where people from Hereford with serious drug problems come for two days a week to learn how to grow vegetables and care for animals. Monty is a great believer in the therapeutic powers of nature, as a cure for depression and as a way to help restore confidence and a will to live in anyone prepared to open themselves a little to the process. They'd also had a bonfire and his pigs, four Tamworth siblings, had behaved in exactly the same way.
While I am in Hay, there is an attempt to steal the pigs. Two things happen over the night of Friday, 2 December 2005. First, a gate that shuts off the road through Dillington Park is rammed sometime between one and seven o'clock in the morning. Second, when David arrives to feed the pigs just after eight on Saturday, he finds the male pigs locked into their small shelter. When he'd left them the night before, they were still outside the corrugated iron structure, rootling around in the incredibly muddy ground. Who had locked them in? We can only assume that someone had rammed the gate, driven down through the park towards the walled garden and then, for whatever reason, changed their minds about actually nicking the seven little pigs. David reckons it is the local gypsies, but Charlie and I are reluctant to buy automatically into the prevalent Somerset belief. Everything, we are always told, is the fault of the gypsies. Over in Charlton Mackrell, the village where Charlie spent his early childhood, a dog was recently kidnapped from the rich new owners of the biggest house in the area and a ransom note for £1,000 posted through their letter-box. Negotiations through intermediaries in the pub reduced the sum by half and the dog came home. Closer to us, a statue of two Labradors cast in bronze and commissioned as a fiftieth birthday present was stolen from some friends' locked barn the night it was delivered from London. There had clearly been some inside tip-off. The police had suspicions but no definite leads. Then a message was received outlining details of a reward for the return of the gambolling dogs. The ransom was paid and the dogs are now firmly fixed in a concrete base on our friends' lawn.
But would anyone want to kidnap the pigs? They're not fully grown, but they stand two feet high, they're heavy and they wriggle like mad if you pick them up. Would someone really want to keep seven noisy little pigs hostage, hoping to cash in a ransom demand? It must have been straight theft with a view to fattening them up for sale or eating. Right now, they'd probably fetch about £90 a pig. There's not much we can do to make the pig pens safe from thieves. The fence posts have been sunk in concrete and extra padlocks put on the gates, but if a thief is really determined, then I guess the pigs are history. Geese might be a good alarm system, but in the middle of the night who is going to hear?
I like Monty Don's idea about healing through nature. Without a doubt it's what helped me through the bleak months after my car accident in May 2003. My right leg took the force of the collision, shattering the lower inches of my tibia into shards. My surgeon later said that it was as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to the bottom of my heel. My leg was pinned together in a metal fixator, known as an X-fix. Two months after the accident, I was back in hospital having a bone graft. They took the bone out of my left hip, mixed it with red jelly-like cells extracted from my blood and squished it around the broken bones. The scar went septic and three weeks later I was back in hospital, hooked up to antibiotic drips. The summer of 2003 was mercilessly hot and I fretted from a chair in the garden. In the autumn, my surgeon at Salisbury Hospital said that the bone graft wasn't working and I was sent home with an electric gadget that I wrapped round my leg at night, so that pulses might be delivered to the fracture site to encourage growth. To make it work, I had to leave it on for eight-hour stretches. I slept like that every night until just before Christmas, when I returned to Salisbury for another x-ray. The doctor was gloomy. It wasn't healing. He wrote me a letter of referral to a surgeon at St Peter's Hospital, Chertsey, and wished me good luck. I was seriously frightened that I was going to lose my right leg.
My new doctor wasn't optimistic. In time, I got to realise that he never was. He always erred on the side of caution. Bob Simonis is something of a genius. His surgery is the last resort for a generation of young men who've piled their motorbikes into walls, suffering fractures which, only a decade or two ago, would have resulted in amputation. Like me, their primary doctors had despaired and referred them to Simonis to see if he could succeed where they had failed. In the late 1980s, Bob started working with Ilizerof frames, a complex, Meccano-like system of wires, rings, nuts and bolts invented by a Russian doctor of the same name. Dr Ilizerof founded a huge institution in Russia, which, until the fall of Communism, no Western doctors were allowed to visit. Bob went out there in the early 1990's, his visit recorded by a BBC crew. Until that moment, he'd been fitting the frames using his own skills and the information contained in a textbook.
As I sat in the waiting room at our first meeting, I couldn't take my eyes off my fellow patients. The frames were simply terrible. Mediaeval torture instruments, heavy, clumsy, with wires going straight through the skin and bone and twisted tightly in place into heavy circular rings. The skin round the entry holes was red, sometimes bleeding, always angry. When he told me that I was also going to need wires through my foot, four of them, I wanted to scream. Instead I asked him my chances - '40/60,' he replied, and right up to the moment that he took the frame off he never altered that verdict.
It had been a long autumn, hobbling around on crutches, getting exhau
sted when I walked any further than a couple of hundred yards. None of my clothes fitted, partly because I was putting on weight, but also because no trousers would fit over the X-fix and I looked and felt like a bag lady. I was also in a deep depression which had been living inside me like a malignant storm for almost two years. After I left the Express at the start of 200I, my sense of self seemed to curl up and wither. The paper had been sold to Richard Desmond, multimillionaire pornographer who made his fortune out of titles like Asian Babes and Big Ones. His every other word was 'fuck'. From the moment details of the sale were confirmed, I knew my days as the paper's editor were numbered. Even so, I wasn't remotely prepared for the shock. I'd been going to work every day for the last fifteen years; for the last ten of them I'd been an editor. Work, I realised, had meant a great deal more to me than simply a way of paying the bills. It defined the way I spent my time, the structure of my days, the mood of my evenings and weekends. To a large extent it provided the subjects of conversation. On a deeper level, it defined who I was, to the world at large and, all too often, to myself. I hated to admit just how much I had become attached to labels to define me, but it was the truth.
There were mornings when I'd wake up in tears, unsure how to get through the day, unsure of who I was. I was furious with myself for being less than fine. The last few months at the Express had been a nightmare and much of it had been played out in a very public arena. I had a terrific husband, a great daughter, four wonderful stepchildren and a lovely house to enjoy. Plus I'd been given a chunky golden handshake and was able to depart the Express with my head held high. To confess that I was less than fine felt self-indulgent and ridiculous. The inner resources that had stood me in good stead through difficult years had evaporated and, after twenty years of mostly continual sobriety, I began to drink again. I knew as I picked up the bottle that it was a form of insanity. I'm an alcoholic and drink is as dangerous to me as sugar is to a diabetic but, in my gathering depression, the brief oblivion that it offered seemed preferable to the chilly reality of my life. Inevitably, it only caused more chaos, not just for me, but for Charlie and Daisy and my family as well. I was drunk when I had my car accident, which was reported in the papers under a picture of me looking wild-eyed and crazy after a court case in Salisbury. It was as though everywhere I turned there were nails punching holes through my shattered self-esteem.
The only moments of peace I could find were in the garden, particularly in the wood. In September 2003, when I could still convince myself that I was going to walk freely again by the end of the year, I'd decided to create a garden in the overgrown wood which joins our land. The wood had been planted twenty-five years earlier, mainly with oaks, but it had been neglected over the years and now the trees were growing too close together, slender trunks rising up to a canopy of leaves. We began by cutting down some fifteen of them, opening up spaces and allowing sunlight on to the leafy floor. In the centre we carved out a pond which was lined with old carpets, some donated by friends in the village. Paths were laid and some huge lengths of oak dragged into the wood to create chairs and a sofa, which we positioned by the fence, overlooking the park in a southwesterly direction. On those autumn weekends I'd balance on my crutches on the leaf mould, watching Charlie planting bluebell, aconite and snowdrop bulbs and think that when the bulbs started to grow, pushing their sweet young green leaves up to feel the sunlight, then my leg would be better. It was extraordinarily calming to align myself with the rhythms of nature, which cannot be hurried. All you can do as a gardener is prepare and feed the soil, provide the water, see that the light can get in and then wait. For the brief moments that I felt at one with the natural world, the panic that seemed to beat incessantly inside me would subside.
Nine months after my accident, I went into hospital for the five-hour operation. When I came round I was in agony, not just from the wires that had been drilled through my bones. There was no guarantee that this would work. No miracles had occurred on the operating table to alter Bob Simonis's original verdict. All that was certain was that there was no certainty and I had no inner resources to deal with it.
When I was in my twenties, I studied Buddhism under a Tibetan teacher called Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. With my then boyfriend John Steinbeck, the author's youngest son, I'd lived in Boulder, Colorado, where Trungpa had set up a university and spiritual teaching centre. I'd wrestled then with the notion of impermanence, which the Buddhists understand as the only guaranteed condition of our lives. All sadness, they maintain, comes from failed expectation, from regretting what has happened and waiting for circumstances to change and make you feel better. By living with one foot in the past and another in a fantasy of how things might be, we fail to live in the present. And that way a sort of madness lies. I knew intellectually that everything in life is impermanent and that all we truly have is the moment in which we live, right here and right now. And that it is within our gift to live in that place and thus to feel and see all that is fine and right in our universe. But there is a huge divide between understanding something intellectually and finding a way to live it. I found it almost impossible to accept what had happened; I wanted to rewrite my story, to make it more palatable. Charlie is much more realistic than me, good at coping with consequences and facing reality. Thirty years of being a lawyer, of listening to people say, 'If only this hadn't happened,' have bred in him a rare ability to face the music fair and square. Now his once determined and focused wife was wallowing in egotistical self-pity, turning his own life into a nightmare not of his making.
The dull winter of 2004 turned into spring and the days were drifting past, like flotsam in the tide. I had no connection with them. My life just seemed to be a matter of getting through from dawn till night, lumbering around on my frame, eating too much, sleeping too much . . . waiting, waiting, waiting, sentenced to a kind of limbo which would only, I believed, be altered by external events. I was still occasionally drinking and I couldn't see how to stop. The long years that I'd spent sober felt like a foreign country for which I'd lost the visa. So at the end of May I went to get some help.
Mr Simonis, who I saw regularly every month, had told me that the only thing I could do for my leg was walk on it. I needed to walk a mile a day, preferably without crutches, though using one would be acceptable. The fact that the wires made my feet bleed when I walked couldn't be helped; bones need weight on them to encourage healing, the more weight the better. As he explained, animal bones mend fast because they continue to stand up and move despite the fractures. The lumps and bumps that you see on a sheep's leg are the result of their bodies forming calcium deposits around the breaks. Not pretty, but wholly functional.
I went to get help at a therapy centre in Woking, run by Americans who I instantly trusted. There was a red-brick path running through the garden and every day I'd aim to walk up and down it twenty times. The bricks were laid in a herringbone fashion and halfway along the path there was a huge copper beech, its branches providing shade from the sun and shelter from the rain. The path was to become my own little road to Damascus. Walking along it one day, I saw how much I needed to change. Not the world, not other people; I could do nothing about them. All I could change was myself and my reactions. The walking hurt, but I was doing it and so, I reasoned, I wanted to get better. I was physically and spiritually sick. I'd stopped seeing the trees, stopped seeing the way the sunlight made patterns on the bricks beneath my feet, stopped hearing the sounds of the birds or watching them fly. I remember sitting down on the bench under the beech tree, its generous silvery branches reaching away above me. I have always found that trees are excellent listeners. They've been here so long that there isn't much they haven't seen. In the past trees have been worshipped and wars have been won and lost on the ready availability of timber. In the dining-room of my late parents' home there was a huge, curved oak beam holding up one wall. It had been cut from local Shropshire oak, used in a ship which sailed against the Armada and then, as had been agreed, returned
to its place of origin for use in house-building. When I was little I used to daydream about that beam and the places it had been. Sitting under that copper beech I found myself thinking: the tree breathes out what I breathe in and I breathe out what the tree breathes in. That interdependence is part of my equation for living on the planet. I began to get better.
In our wood there's an old oak tree. It's dying and when in full leaf in the summer its dead branches stand out from the crown of greenness, like gnarled bony arms reaching up towards the sky. The oak is probably about three hundred years old and it stands next to the pond, casting its long shadows across the water. I like leaning against its trunk. The knobbly bark reminds me of an elephant's skin. It's a tough tree, resilient, able to keep on living proudly even while it's dying. Right now, up in a crack just where the main boughs grow away from the trunk, two hornets hover at the entrance to their large nest. By standing back, you can see the papery structure, balanced in a gap in the rough bark. Hornets always keep two guards in place in front of a nest, checking for intruders, allowing only their friends to enter. Last summer wasps made a nest further up the tree. Its branches are home to birds, the cracks and crevices in the bark shelter a myriad of insects.
We're all tenants of this land and when we garden we plough something back. It's a way of saying thanks. If gardening were just growing a row of pretty flowers then it would be meaningless. But it's not. Planting and sowing and digging are the ways in which muddled people connect their lives to something bigger, to all our joys and sorrows, because when you push a bulb deep into soft wet earth it is always a symbol of hope. Hope that nature will not fail; hope that you will still be alive to see the bulb burst out of the ground and unfurl its delicate leaves, opening the way for the miraculous flower. It is always about the future, but about a future which you can only hope for. Maybe you won't see the flower in all its glory, but someone will. Gardening connects us to a bigger picture, in which we are small, but crucial, players. It also offers a solace against much that is tough today. Many of us have little control over our working environments: we're hostages to the mortgage, the boss, the kids. Gardening is something private, with its own triumphs and disasters, and our gardens are our retreat from those problems. When we step out under the sky and into our own space we can leave behind some of the pressing clutter which makes modern life so stressful.
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 6