It's late 2005 and in three weeks' time we're going to kill our first animals. We've got an order for ten geese from Charlie's old friend Rowley Leigh, who is the chef at Kensington Place restaurant. Rowley and Charlie were at Cambridge together and in the last few years they've become good friends. We're lucky to be able to sell our geese to him. Kensington Place is fantastically successful and last year Rowley opened a fish shop, housed in a glass-fronted annexe on the side of the restaurant. Half of the geese will be sold whole through the fish shop and the others will appear on the menu, accompanied by braised red cabbage. Rowley is a brilliant cook and KP's ever-changing and always interesting menu has ensured packed tables for over twenty years, no mean feat in London's febrile restaurant world. We'll get better money from Rowley than from Mr Bonner, but while that's important, it is not just a financial matter. Rowley has huge clout in the restaurant world and if he likes our geese - and in time, our pigs and vegetables - then it will be easier to find other outlets.
'How do you feel about shooting the geese?' I ask David as he sits in our kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee and rolling a cigarette of Woodbine tobacco in licorice-flavoured Rizla.
It is a Saturday morning in early December and last night there was a sharp frost. The weather has been topsy-turvy. It's been raining and it's been freezing but the trees with small leaves, like the oaks and the apples, remain resplendently green. Temperatures in October were about 2.5°C above the thirty-year average, and in November the hours of sunshine were 50 per cent above the norm. Most years the fall in temperature through the autumn is the catalyst for trees to start slowing down, drawing the chlorophyll out of the leaves and exposing the carotene pigment, which produces their vivid reds, yellows and oranges. The mild autumn, followed by the sharp frosts of early December, further confused the trees. Those with big leaves -like walnuts and horse chestnuts - have shed their big, fleshy leaves, but smaller, tougher leaves - like the birch, oak and apple - are still clinging on. The mild weather meant there was poor colour this autumn: trees need cold nights to bring about the change.
But already, according to David's reckoning, there have been as many frosts in ten days as there were in the whole of last winter. The brugmansia, which grew all summer in a large, heavy pot on the terrace, is dead. In the vegetable garden, the leaves of the parsley plants and the spinach have wilted, as though struck by lightning. This time last year we still had roses in the garden and we mowed the lawn in midDecember, but now the garden lies dormant.
'This is what it's all about, isn't it?' he says. 'If you can't kill animals and do it quickly and cleanly, then you can't do it.' I know he's pleased with the geese. They've been a success, easy to look after, fattening quickly and well. We're keeping two ganders and six females to breed from next year and David wants to add some turkeys to our mix of fowl.
'I want to buy two girls and a stag,' he says. 'They'll cost £80.'
'What do you call a lady turkey?' I ask.
'I dunno. Mrs?' he replies. David's been over-working and he's lost weight. The doctor has told him he's putting in too many hours and not getting enough time off. Charlie has suggested that we approach the prison in Shepton Mallet and see if they would be prepared to let someone near the end of their sentence come and work on the farm. His long years in the law have led him to believe that prison rarely helps to rehabilitate its inmates; working on the farm would mean gaining a trade as well as hopefully discovering some of the therapeutic benefits of rearing animals and growing vegetables. I like the idea and we clearly need some extra help.
The chickens have laid a little better this last week, though we're still only getting about two dozen eggs a day when it should be almost four dozen. Apparently it is better to have your chickens reach point of lay in the spring as they'll get into their laying routine while the days are long. If they mature in the winter, it is hard for them to establish a good routine, even with lights coming onin their hut atfive in the morning. Wetfeetmay be another problem. Chickens hate being damp, and the bigfooted geese have churned up the ground, killing off most of the grass. After Christmas we're going to have to move them to another run, along with the ducks. The spring that feeds their pond will have to be run through a pipe into their new pen.
Ten days before Christmas David kills eight of the geese. I'd asked him to leave two to kill until I arrived, so that I could see for myself what it was like to kill an animal that you'd reared. He was reluctant. Despite his confident words that morning in the kitchen, killing the geese has made him feel 'tight' and he's upset that the geese now regard him as an enemy, not a friend. When I go over to the farm on the last Saturday morning before the holidays, the remaining eleven birds are clustered at the far end of the chicken run, completely silent, an unheard-of state for a gaggle of geese. Even when we walk in to feed the chickens, they still hang back. 'They know,' David says, as he flings handfuls of corn towards them. Their egg-laying has improved a little and is now back to about thirty a day. As there is no chance of the rare breeds getting pregnant in the deep winter, they are all out of their pens: magnificent Brahmas, speckled Sussexes, bantams with wildly feathery legs, all clustering round the pond, choosing to drink there rather than from the relative safety of their water trough.
Killing a goose isn't that easy, certainly not as easy as killing a chicken. Holding each head in his left hand, David fired his 2.2 air rifle into the back of each downy white skull, then quickly made an incision through the neck to allow the blood to pump out. Plucking takes almost two hours per bird: first the outer, big feathers, then the downy layer beneath, and finally an all-over singe with a blowtorch to remove the last feathery bits. The huge naked birds are then hung up by their feet, their heads enclosed in plastic bags which collect the last of the blood. That morning David and I are in the shed, looking at the ungainly, naked birds hanging from the ceiling. We take them down one by one. David chops off their heads then severs the neck close to the body, keeping the bony tube as part of the giblets. He makes a further cut to remove the rear end, through which he pulls out the gut, gizzard, heart, kidneys and liver. I take each bird outside and clean it inside and out with a high-pressure hose, washing away any remaining bits of blood, singed feathers and loose fat. They are heavy, between twelve and twenty pounds, and their breasts are plump with flesh and thick, yellow fat. I tie the feet together and, with the same bit of string, pull the wings close into the body. Then I stuff the finished birds into plastic bags which we've been given by Mr Bonner. They look good: eight fat geese lined up on the shelf in the shed, ready for Christmas tables.
Financially, they are useless. Each bird has cost £4.50 as a day-old gosling. Even if we charge the plucking costs at the minimum wage, each goose costs over £1 0 to prepare. Add into that each bird's share of fencing, food, man-hours for feeding, watering, checks by the vet and I think you must add about a tenner. Then there is the price of driving the birds to Kensington Place restaurant in London. That's roughly £20 in petrol, or £2 per bird, plus the cost of labour, which comes to another £2 per bird. Total cost per bird: £28.50. Sale price to Rowley: £35.
David has cut down a big old spruce that had been threatening to fall on to the fence along the north side of the girls' wood. After the geese are safely in their bags, we light another bonfire to clear away more wood, ivy and undergrowth so that there's clear space to plant some cooking apple trees. The pigs cluster excitedly round the fire as it leaps into life, but then stand still, their eyes caught by the flickering lights. David sits on Bramble and I perch on Bluebell, who has returned from her stay among the boys, hopefully pregnant. Both pigs move close to the fire, their noses just inches from the flames. They stand still and solid and I feel touched that a semi-wild animal lets me sit peacefully on her back. David has news about the pig rustlers. According to local gossip, on the basis of no evidence, a gypsy family has been on a mad stealing spree. The most astonishing theft concerned a Range Rover which was discovered by Rodney, Ewen's gamek
eeper, hidden in a nearby field of maize. But the gypsies themselves have been in serious trouble. The weekend before, one of them had been hit on the head in a pub fight in Broadway. He'd recently had a heart attack and was on prescribed blood-thinning drugs and the blow had killed him. Now a local man was being held on a manslaughter charge.
If there were truffles growing under the ground in Somerset, then it would be understandable why someone might want to steal a pig. One of nature's more extraordinary symbiotic meetings connects a pig's snout to certain fungi. Truffles live underground, below broad-leafed trees which lack phosphorus. The trees need the fungi to supply them with this vital trace element, so the parasitic fungus lives on their roots well below the surface. The best known of these is the Tuber melanosporum, which unites with the hair-like rootlets of the European oaks and develops tiny organs called mycorrhizae. These allow the fungus to access carbohydrates, produced up above in the leafy canopy, and they return the favour by spreading out in webs throughout the soil, collecting moisture and minerals which they share with the tree.
Root-bound and down in the dark, the fungus had a problem. The oak tree could reproduce via its acorns, but how was the fungus going to spread its spore? The famous black truffles of Perigord hit on an ingenious solution: the nose of the wild pig. The fungus somehow synthesised a perfect chemical copy of y-alpha-antrostol, the active testosterone normally found in the salivary glands of boars in the mating season. So, in the dead of winter, the truffle emits a smell strong enough to attract the nostrils of passing female pigs, who dig down in glee, hopeful of finding a randy boar under the soil.
It's an extraordinary, though mostly one-sided, bargain. The fungus gets to spread but the sow is left disappointed. For humans, though, it's something of a bonanza. They follow the pig and push her away before she can reduce the truffle to a cloud of dust, selling the prized fungi for up to £700 a pound. I pat Bluebell on her bristly rump. I'm sure that, given half a chance, she'd be a great and determined truffle pig, rootling her way through the undergrowth in search of the buried treasure. Even so, she will more than earn her keep: over her breeding lifetime she will give us at least forty piglets.
We decide that next year we're going to rear at least fifty geese and fifty turkeys and we're going to either rent a machine that will pluck them or take them somewhere that will do it for us. Mr Bonner has sold ninety geese this year, forty up from Christmas 2004, so hopefully we can make a deal with him early on in the year. Of our twelve remaining geese two are ganders. Assuming the ten females lay ten eggs each and successfully hatch half of them, we'll have fifty of our own goslings. As ever, these things look good on paper but go awry somewhere in the actual process of growing and selling. We're still subsidising the farm to the tune of some £1,500 a month, and even though we're selling all we grow there's a vast gap between outgoings and income. In January we're taking on another four acres, specifically to grow vegetables. That will cost £1,000 a year, plus fencing, plus the extra labour that will be needed to keep rows of organic vegetables weed-free. It's no wonder that organic vegetables cost more. Before he began working full-time on the farm, David helped set up an organic vineyard for a Londoner who wanted to go into wine production. The vineyard consisted of some five miles of vines, all of which had to be weeded by hand. David reckoned the wine would have to cost £30 a bottle.
5
A Christmas Market
The Empress died on Christmas Eve, 2005. When David went to feed the pigs early in the morning, the usual stampede was light one animal. The little black pig was lying on her side in the shed, partially covered by straw. There were no marks on her body. The vet said that she had died of suffocation, probably after being slept on by the bigger pigs. It seems sad and pointless. Although I'm not at all sure that I would have done anything different myself, I am somehow aggrieved that David hasn't eaten her: she might have tasted delicious and my sense of waste would have been partially mitigated. But he says that while he did think of it, the fact that she hadn't been correctly slaughtered stopped him and he buried her three feet down, under a laurel tree. But I think he's too much of a softie to butcher her himself and I wonder how the two of us are going to cope when we set off to Snells the abattoir in the middle of March with the first two boys.
The Empress's demise hastens the planned relocation of the pigs. When they're born, the first piglet, generally the biggest, latches on to the best teat nearest the sow's head and, unless forcibly moved, stays there throughout. Pigs have a very acute sense of smell. Get a pig to select a playing card from a washable pack, wash the pack and then ask it to find its original choice, and it will do so unerringly. It is bizarre to imagine some hapless researcher attempting this experiment, but it explains how they always know which teat - among twenty - is theirs. The same rigid pecking order carries on into young adulthood, with the biggest pigs getting bigger and the small ones lagging behind. They need to be kept in similar sized groups, something that might well have saved the Empress's life. We divide the girl and the boy groups, leaving Babe, Bluebell, Bramble and Guinness to roam around their large wood, with the bigger boys in the other heavily wooded region. The unnamed boys-to-be-eaten are all now in a smaller run, next door to Hyacinth, Blossom and Lobelia.
The moves meant some new houses being built and, for the larger boys, a house with a difference in the form of a very old, clapped-out caravan that David had been given last summer. It seemed like a good idea at the time, somewhere Josh might want to spend the night with his chums, but as the months went by the old white, grubby heap had sat in the corner of the walled garden, steadily falling to pieces. We drag it into a clearing in the wood, remove the wheels, rip out the cupboards, the seats and the small sink and park it on a bed of pine needles. A mountain of sweet-smelling straw fills up one half. The pigs are delighted and immediately start zipping in and out of the open door, looking through the low picture window at their leafy environment.
When my father left the army in his late forties, we moved to Ludlow in Shropshire where he worked for a company that manufactured agricultural machinery. Dad didn't much like the job but he liked his country life, especially the fishing. Along with his good friend, Joe Attlee, a local GP, he rented a stretch of river in North Wales, where the sea trout leaped in their thousands, flashing their silvery scales in the moonlight as they swam upriver from the sea. A caravan was required, occasionally for sleep but mostly for cooking up a vast breakfast of kidneys, bacon, eggs, tomatoes, fried bread and sausages, which Dad and Joe would eat at five o'clock on a summer's morning, before starting their three-hour journey back to Ludlow, driving too fast along the windy Welsh roads, hoping to get home in time for work. The caravan lived with us for almost a quarter of a century; when Daisy was little, she loved going off with her granddad for picnics, the caravan bouncing along behind his car. We'd park in woods, or on hilltops and cram ourselves into the tiny home on wheels to watch Dad cook up one of his legendary fry-ups. After my mother died of bowel cancer at the age of sixty-three, Dad took a cooking course and became a dab hand at chicken breasts in wine and lemon sauce and rich beef stews. But fry-ups were his piece de resistance and they never tasted as good as when eaten round the fold-away yellow formica table, the windows foggy with our breath and the smoke from the frying pan. The day came when Dad was too old to go night fishing for sea trout and, anyway, by then the river was fished out, its clear waters wholly devoid of the magical creatures and we advertised the caravan for sale in the local Ludlow paper. It was priced at fifty quid, but really Dad just wanted someone to come and take it away as it was clogging up space in the driveway. I was there the day a man drew up in a battered blue Cortina to buy it. 'What are you going to use it for?' Dad asked as we helped position his towing cup over the caravan's steel ball. 'Well,' he replied, 'I've got nine children and I reckon that four of them can sleep in here.'
Bluebell isn't looking that fat, but her teats are bigger. The first sign we'll have that she is pregnant is
that her stomach will drop: she'll get bigger downwards before she starts getting bigger outwards. But at least she puts up with her nuptial sojourn with the boars. Big sister Bramble doesn't take to it at all. David shoves her through the gate, where the mud is deep and gluey, clinging and sucking at your boots. Bramble squeals madly, thoroughly miffed at this turn of events on an otherwise peaceful morning. She takes one look at the four eager little guys who started clustering round her and makes an immediate bid for freedom, forcing her considerable bulk through the wire fence between the wooden gate and one side of the chicken coop. The wire doesn't stand a chance and Bramble is out on the track, huffing and puffing after her exertions. Consequently Plan B has been adopted. The area of the girls' wood where their original big house stands was partially enclosed. Now we gate it off and build a new wooden house deeper into the trees, down near a muddy wallow. As David quips, if the mountain won't come to Mohammed then Mohammed will come to the mountain: Boris is stepping up to the mark and has been sent to live with her. Secretly, I think we're all impressed by Bramble's independent streak. And we did need another, separate area with its own shelter for when Bluebell's piglets finally emerge.
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 7