George spends most of his time attempting to mate with Mildred. As a preliminary she flattens herself on to the earth, wings spread. George lumbers around her, periodically clamping his big heavy claw on her neck to keep her pinned down. He lurches his full forty pounds at her rear end, wobbles a bit and falls off. Then he starts all over again, seemingly getting crosser and crosser as though his failure is somehow Mildred's fault. I bought a new book on keeping fowl and it says that 'natural' mating can be very hard for turkeys: basically the male grows too fat and ungainly to manage it and you usually have to resort to artificial insemination. David is firmly rooting for George's masculine rights and assures me that Mildred will be producing eggs by the beginning of February. I remain to be convinced. His antics seem tantamount to harassment.
I wrote an article about the smallholding for Country Life and one weekend in January the magazine sends photographer Brian Moody down to take some shots. He takes pictures of George, of chickens being fed, of winter cabbages and strawberries on bales of straw out of reach of the slugs, as well as of Bramble, Bluebell, Guinness and Babe eating nuts in the wood. Finally, he takes a picture of me sitting in a wooden hut, holding a very muddy Hyacinth in my arms. She's still a very little pig, far smaller than others of her age and even though she's fattening up a bit now that she's away from the older pigs, she's well below size. In early January, she developed a cold and had to be kept under the heating lamp, which is generally used for rearing tiny chicks, until her body temperature returned to normal. Brian works quickly, and Hyacinth stays reasonably still, seeming to quite enjoy the fuss. But half an hour later, when I walk past her pen, I notice that she's disappeared. She's retired to the warm bed of straw in her hut, her venture into show biz clearly overwhelming. The Greta Garbo of the pig world is, as Charlie jokes, just a pig that wants to be a-loin.
The first pig I ever saw was a saddleback sow who was living in one of a row of three Cotswold stone pigsties, which faced outwards on to the cow yard at my aunt and uncle's Oxfordshire farm. My father had been in the army when I was born and my sister Collette and I spent the first years of our childhood in army HQs in Germany, Vienna, Tripoli and Bury St Edmunds. In contrast, my mother's sister, Giogia, had met and married an English farmer at the start of the war and settled down on a 350-acre farm outside the village of Great Tew. To this day, their farm remains the most constant physical presence in my life, a place my sister and I relished in our peripatetic childhood. We both loved our aunt's bighearted warmth and the fact that in spring there'd always be an ailing lamb or two, wrapped in old towels, their heads peeking out of the bottom drawer of the Aga. We loved going off with her and our two cousins, Ander and Richard, to collect fresh eggs or pull up carrots from the vegetable garden. Uncle Ben let us ride on the tractor with him and, if we were lucky enough to be spending Christmas there, the Christmas Eve trip to cut down a fir tree from the heart of Conegrey Wood was, to me, almost the most exciting event of the year. I loved the fact that all the fields had names: the Oxpen, the Hangings, Limekiln Quarry, Three Gates, Porbridge Bank, the Skills, the Wallet; that a sheep called Esther whom Giogia had hand-reared would return to the farmhouse bringing her two lambs with her to steal a drink from the lavatory off the corridor from the front door; that there was always a big saucepan on the stove, full of delicious soup made from potatoes, onions and carrots. My mother, Betty, and Giogia were Jersey born and bred. Their father, my grandfather, was the island's first fully qualified vet. Giogia studied agriculture at Reading University in the thirties and, when the Germans occupied Jersey in 1940, she left the island for a job near Oxford, looking after a herd of Jersey cows. My mother was already in London, working as a military driver, and Granny, by then a widow, left her island home and joined Giogia in Oxfordshire to sit out the occupation.
While taking care of the Jerseys, Giogia met and married my uncle Ben, and when a Mr Evans - the tenant of Beaconsfield Farm, Great Tew - was kicked out by the Ministry of Agriculture for not achieving high enough production levels, Ben and Giogia moved in. There had been a farm there for centuries. They took a lease on the main farmhouse, a lovely Cotswold stone building dating from about 1720, which faces south down a long valley where the soft green folds of the hills seem to embrace the small stream that runs down alongside the rough track. They also acquired three cottages for workers (with the instruction that they were not to be fed salmon more than three times a week) and a set of farm buildings, also built of Cotswold stone. The roofs of the farm buildings, one over fifty metres in length, are made from Stonesfield slate, which comes from a quarry near Woodstock. It was hewn out of the ground in metre-square chunks and then, over the winter, doused with water so that the frost would work its way into the crevices and break the stone into the half-inch-thin tiles that make up the roof. As my cousin Ander says, that would be impossible now, there's just not enough frost.
In the 1970s, a tractor suddenly capsized while crossing the top yard. It had fallen into a perfectly preserved Roman culvert. Excavations revealed an entire villa, complete with the skeleton of an adult male with an eight-inch knife stuck through his thigh, which is now in the Woodstock Museum.
My aunt Giogia, a natural born organiser, was soon in charge of the hastily assembled 'land army' for the region, responsible for visiting local farms and seeing that they were maximising production. They were allocated four POWs to help out: two Germans called Kurt and Hendrik, an Italian named Aldo and a Serbian called Pieter Vaser, whose mother somehow became the farm cook. Kurt was nicknamed Booby, and for many years after the war he would return to Beaconsfield to visit Giogia and Ben, seeing them as surrogate family.
In addition to the pigs, who lived in some style in their Cotswold stone sties while they were nursing their piglets, the farm then consisted of 150 sheep, 28 milking cattle, 600 Rhode Island Red chickens who produced fertile eggs which would be sold, as well as wheat, barley, swedes, kale and mangel-wurzels. All the food that the animals needed was grown on the farm. During the war, War Ag - as Ben and Giogia called Lord Woolton's Ministry of Agriculture - insisted that every possible fertile square foot be ploughed up and put to use. In the 1930's, Britain was importing 70 percent of all its food, but once war broke out importing food became impossible. Making Britain self-sufficient in food was a government priority, a goal which persisted after the war ended.
In 1947 the National Farmers' Union persuaded the government to offer a guarantee to British farmers for the price of beef. So much beef was being imported cheaply from Argentina, that the price guarantee was, in effect, the first 'subsidy' or, as it was initially called, 'a deficiency payment'. At the same time, the Milk Marketing Board also extended a guaranteed market for milk. It was a huge incentive for British farmers to produce more and it was vital for the government, who didn't want to return to the pre-war position of being so dependent on imports. In 1947, the government held out a further incentive to farmers by giving farming tenants lifetime security of tenure. That security, coupled with the guarantee and regular income from the Milk Marketing Board, gave farmers a new ability to borrow money to buy machinery and modernise. Other subsidies followed: for ploughing up the ground, for liming and for adding phosphate and potash. The Ministry of Agriculture sent advisers round to all the farms, who were on tap for free advice. Giogia and Ben's advisers were called Mr Eddie and Mr Stanforth, and they worked out of a pre-fab office in Oxford opposite what is now the Islamic centre.
For my cousin Ander, who was born in 1942 and started working on the farm when he was nineteen, farming really changed in the 19 60's when technology moved on to the land. Once you'd invested in a combine harvester you felt obliged to use it to the maximum, to get value for money, and so fields that were once used for grazing went under the plough. Uncle Ben's first combine was a Ford, called an Alice Chambers, and he travelled to Ireland to buy it. The machine arrived at the farm in bits, and reps from Ford assembled it in the farmyard. Its span was two metres - a midget compared to
today's giants, which can stretch up to ten metres - but it could process twenty-five tonnes of grain in a day. Ben and Giogia gave up the pigs first, then the cows and finally the sheep. By 1970 the farm was entirely arable: wheat, barley, grass seed and twenty acres of spuds. By then I was living my own life in London and I visited the farm less often. But I remember that every time I did the farmyard would have grown, the new Dutch barns, built of corrugated iron and painted green, towering over the old stone buildings. The small buildings with their relatively narrow doorways were useless in this new world of automation and bigger and bigger machines, which are effectively factories on wheels. Once they were home to horses and carts, which in 1939 still outnumbered tractors by I.5 million to 600,000. By 1960, only 20,000 were left and the word 'horsepower' is now used by people who wouldn't know the difference between a snaffle and a snafu. The old cow yards, flanked on all sides by beautiful stone walls and arches where the cows once bellowed as they waited their turn for the milking machines, stood empty. The other buildings slowly turned into storerooms. Perhaps if Giogia and Ben had owned the farm they might have embarked on an ambitious conversion into flats and offices which, across the farming communities of Britain, became the fate of farm buildings towards the end of the century, but it wasn't to be.
Today, they're home to swallows and barn owls and, as they're now rearing industrial quantities of pigs again, to sick piglets and young beef cattle. But the main business is in the huge grain stores, where underfloor aeration helps dry the grain. At the start of the twentieth century the weight of grain from the harvest was an average of 0.95 tonnes per acre. In the year the war ended it was I.05 tonnes. Now, farmers are expected to produce 3.24 tonnes per acre, in a mechanised system of production that has more in common with a factory floor than with a natural relationship between the farmer, the soil and the crop. Not many people are needed on the farm these days: from a high of ten in the immediate post-war years, it is now just my cousins Ander and Richard, Richard's son Mark and one full-time employee who look after the twentyfirst-century Beaconsfield. And it is bigger too: today they rent 500 acres, and in the 1970's they bought a neighbouring farm of 150 acres. When Alistair Cooke started writing and broadcasting from America in 1942 he noted that in Kansas, with its high-powered machines, it took between one and two manhours of labour to grow an acre of wheat; in China it took 243 hours. In some ways, this change is clearly a good thing. Much of the traditional work on farms was backbreaking and ghastly, but it has also altered beyond recognition the life in the village of Great Tew. Ander can remember when there was a blacksmith and a butcher, as well as the school, the village store and post office. Almost all those that lived in the village worked on the main estate. Now these tiny cottages, clustered picture-postcard fashion around the village green where the Falkland Arms pub attracts Sunday lunchtime crowds in their hundreds, change hands for well over £350,000. The only cottages to sell in the twenty-first century have been to Londoners like us who visit at weekends.
At the bottom of the farm, where the buildings peter out and the rough track leading down to the Hangings begins, is a wooden lean-to shed with a heavy wooden door with a padlock. I remember being about six or seven years old, standing in the yard with Giogia firmly grasping my hand and telling me never to go inside this shed. I remember that every so often there'd be a pool of evil-looking black liquid collected in the dips in the concrete outside the shed and that inside there were white plastic drums with a skull and crossbones stamped on the side. Soon after the war, the first industrial chemical, MCPA, replaced sulphuric acid as a basic weedkiller. It instantly increased crop production. It wasn't dangerous to humans and it worked on cereal crops because it stayed on the flat leaves of the weeds but ran off the upright stalks of the cereal. Poking around in the shed today, I found Stacato - which warns against contact with eyes - Starine and Opus, a collection of fungicides, pesticides and weedkillers, an alchemical arsenal without which no modern farm can hope to compete. Ander is realistic about chemicals: they increase production, but they come at a price. Natural soil fertility is depleted, the balance of nature disrupted, and many, such as the pesticide DDT, have caused enormous harm to wildlife. DDT is soluble in body fat, which means that once it has been ingested it is not easy to eliminate and remains in the body, becoming increasingly concentrated as it moves up the food chain. Thus it passes from plankton to fish and into water birds. Its accumulation in the bodies of birds of prey such as peregrine falcons and eagles causes them to lay eggs with thin shells which break during incubation, leading Rachel Carson to title her influential 1960s book on the coming environmental crisis Silent Spring.
In the 1960s, the government, anxious to encourage beef production, instructed British farmers to use one-third more than the recommended dose of organophosphate (OP) to kill warble flies, which lay their eggs subcutaneously along a cow's back. When the grubs form they crawl out through the skin, leaving holes in the hide which reduce its value as industrial leather. The organophosphate was used simultaneously across Europe and Southern Ireland, but only in Britain was the dose increased above the recommended safety level. Ander is now firmly of the unproven belief that the drug upset the chemical balance in the cows' brains, leading, years later, to the BSE outbreak. OPs were originally designed as a nerve agent for use in combat and, despite clear evidence of their dangerous side effects, the military used them in the Gulf War to spray the insides of tents against flies. They have been cited as causing mental health problems in Gulf War vets.
Ander and Richard are good custodians of the land. Since the war, they've ploughed up only one hedge to make bigger fields to accommodate today's gigantic machines. There are 4,500 pigs on the farm these days and they rotate the pigs and the grain crops, thus dramatically reducing the need for fertilisers. The pigs have good lives, living in large fields with corrugated-iron pig arcs as homes. They sell each animal, at six months old, for around £75, and in 2005 the pigs made them £70,000. Supermarket buyers drive hard bargains: if a pig has arthritis in one of its legs, they'll hack it off and chuck it away. Even though the meat itself is edible, arthritis causes discolouring. They're also fussy about fat, wanting it less than twelve millimetres deep and reducing payments for every extra millimetre on the animal.
Ander and Richard have two hundred beef cattle which sell for £2.09 a kilo. Each year they slaughter half of these, earning about £700 per animal. The remaining income comes from the cereal crops. It doesn't sound that bad, but the farm supports three families, one full-time employee and the costs of machinery, drills, building maintenance, chemicals, antibiotics and feed for the animals. My cousins could never be described as the sort of farmers - so despised by rural-phobic city folk - with grand lifestyles, supported by ED subsidies. My cousins still belong to a community which modern life has done so much to traduce. Farming in the past might have been a miserable affair for many, but living closely with the land did provide a network that was sustainable through good times and bad. A community is like a coral reef in its multiple layers of dependency and in its relationships. I see it now in Ilminster and I see the way that politicians, always keen to stress its importance, are also so willing to chuck it all aside in the relentless pursuit of profit.
One bright, wintry Saturday morning, Charlie and I set off to the farmers' market in the old stables at Montacute House, seven miles away in the small village of Montacute, nestled under the easterly side of Ham Hill, from where all the mellow local stone originates. Montacute is a perfect Elizabethan house which Lord Curzon once rented as a love nest with his mistress, the infamous Elinor Glyn, with whom he was said to have committed sin on a tiger's skin. Curzon installed Montacute's first bathroom, a tiny chamber built in one corner of his bedroom, less than one hundred years ago.
We're meeting our friend, the food and cookery writer Rose Prince, who is signing copies of her just published book, The New English Kitchen: Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat, from a rickety table under t
he roof of the open-sided barn. The market is jostling with people: business is clearly terrific for the stallholders with their cheeses, vegetables, meats, ciders, jams and chutneys. Food here is about history, culture and ritual, and shopping here is probably the only time that buying food can be described as retail therapy. The rich local cheddar has been made this way for hundreds of years, and the flour for the bread has been ground between stones, not squeezed between two rollers to extract the wheatgerm from the grain, which modern millers then sell to the healthfood industry to sell back to us as expensive wheatgerm oil.
There's a stall selling salt marsh lamb, the sheep fed on the wild grasses found only in estuaries. I go over to introduce myself to the man running the stall. Until 2003, Andrew Moore worked as an international stockbroker in the City, but after a series of take-overs and rationalisations, he found himself with a decent pay-off and the chance to change his life. 'My passion was food,' he tells me from behind the table where the joints of lamb are laid out in cold boxes. 'I'd always gone shooting and to start with Idealt game, smoked it, made pies out of it, made sausages. It was OK, and the margins are good, but if you're talking about a 20p margin on an 50p product, you've got to sell a lot of product to make any money.' He is so earnest, I start to laugh: clearly it takes a lot to get the City out of a man. I hadn't thought of our business in terms of margins, but it makes sense. 'I had a friend in London who was looking for lamb for a restaurant,' he says. 'We went into business with a farm near Bridgwater. I supply the sheep and they've got the estuary grazing. It's not only the taste that improves when they eat grass grown there; the salt water of the spring tides floods the marshes, naturally killing off harmful parasitic worms and bacteria. We sell at markets and through box schemes. We send half or whole lambs all over the country.' Ichoose a plump-looking shoulder and start counting out the money: it isn't cheap, Andrew's lamb averages £7-£8 a kilo, but I am sure it will be delicious. As he wraps it up, he tells me that what he likes most about the markets is the chance to talk to people and get feedback on his food. 'Although some people do come up with the most amazing things,' he says with a grin. 'One man spent ages staring at some smoked pheasant breasts. Finally he asked me if they were fish as they didn't look like the sort of meat he was familiar with. I told him they were breasts. He cheered up immediately, saying, "Oh, I see, they're from the females.'"
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 9