Standing in the potting shed, with my hands buried deep in the mound of rich potting soil, it's weird to imagine all this going on inside this pile of earth. One thing is clear though: somehow or other this rich array of species manages to coexist successfully. It has long puzzled scientists how this is possible and they attribute this peaceful sustainability in part to the tremendous diversity of habitats available, from tiny soil pores to clumps of soil particles to larger patches created by the engineering work of ants or earthworms. Food sources like plant litter, root secretions, dung and dead bodies are patchily distributed throughout the soil. Above ground, competition for resources has limited the number of species that can pack themselves on to the planet: down below, competition is less fierce, possibly because the little creatures cannot move well and because many spend long periods in dormant states. But thinking about the world beneath as like our own with tiny animals bustling along, jostling for space like crowds of shoppers on a Hong Kong street, is inaccurate. From the point of view of the microscopic organs, there is plenty of space and plenty to eat. The typical soil microbe, according to George Kowalchuk at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, plays a long game: 'They can wait a really long time, perhaps years. Then when a root comes along or a drop of water or whatever, the cell blooms into a colony. Once the plant or the source of riches is gone, the colony dies out and the few remaining microbes go back to waiting.'
At the beginning of the 1990's, I used to playa computer game called SimCity which became incredibly popular amongst journalists, so popular that at the Daily Telegraph it was banned as being an addictive time-waster. The principle of SimCity is brilliant: the player is presented with the outlines of a city and a sum of money. As the newly appointed boss of the city you decide how to spend your cash. You can build roads, or hospitals, or art galleries, or parks, or low-cost housing, or yuppie apartments. You can buy buses, or statues, or install a metro. Or you can make provision for people's pensions, or pay council workers higher salaries. The game is endless in its permutations and my daughter Daisy, who was then ten years old, became addicted too. What is abundantly clear from SimCity is how even apparently random acts have knockon effects: that everything is indeed linked up to everything else. If you build too many parks, there's not enough left for buses to get people to the parks. Too much yuppie housing means that hospital workers have nowhere to live.
It was in the middle of our SimCity craze that Daisy and I went on our first safari, to the Okavanga Swamps in Botswana. At dawn on our first morning, we awoke to the sound of an elephant crashing around outside our tent. We were both too excited to breathe.
One of our guides was an insect specialist who took us on bush walks. After he let us marvel at the magnificence of a termite mound, he instructed us to just stand still, put our heads down and study the ground. After days of watching big, grand animals, it took a few minutes to adjust and get used to looking at the tiny insects. There were hundreds of them, moving this way and that, rustling through the grass, intent on their business. He told us that all of African life depends on these tiny creatures, and that the removal of one species would drastically affect all the others, and that the removal of these termites would result in a dead, useless land where nothing could hope for life. Daisy looked at me and said 'Mum, it's nature's SimCity.'
We were seeing the real interdependence of the natural world but, apart from humans, it is only the insects who have established anything remotely resembling cities. What sets humankind apart from other creatures is our ability to grow food, and our ability to live in large groups which in turn can support great institutions. Cities are the heart of our global world and they need to be subsidised from the outside. That makes them vulnerable. A small town won't possess a museum or a specialist neuro-surgeon, but its inhabitants live closer to sources of food. As cities get bigger so the brilliance of our civilisation becomes increasingly evident: opera houses, metro systems, grand monuments and stately buildings. But as they get bigger they become increasingly dependent on supply chains, electricity grids, water and food that is produced far away. We inhabit our concrete streets and take for granted how it all works but, like the planet we live on, cities walk a tightrope to survive.
When we close down a corner shop, thus making people drive to an out-of-town superstore for their groceries, or dig up a hedge to enable farmers to grow even larger areas of wheat, when we ship apples all the way from South Africa to sell in a Somerset supermarket, and when we rip up great swathes of the Amazon rainforest to grow feed for cattle that live in the USA - to be turned into hamburgers to keep the dollars flowing through fast-food restaurant tills - we upset the complex balance of the natural world. As I shake a tiny coriander seed out of its packet and drop it on to the soil in the pot, I realise that by growing food organically I am doing something, albeit something very small, to try to redress this balance. I also realise that the process makes me happy. All my life I've lived within a political system which believes that sustained economic growth is always a good thing, leading us towards happier, more fulfilled, more enriched lives. Yet evidence now points to the contrary. Once a country has filled its larder, or a person has met their basic needs, do extra riches bring extra happiness?
Surveys of happiness are both popular and revealing and they show overwhelmingly that industrial nations have not become happier. Random samples of British citizens demonstrate that we are no more satisfied with our lives than our parents were, yet we have two cars, three annual holidays, endless gadgets and gizmos, access to worlds of information so much stuff that my parents, at least, never even dreamed of. Measures of health, probably more accurate than measuring elusive qualities like happiness, paint the same picture but endorse it with harder facts. Rates of depression have increased while stress levels at work have soared. In the USA, even though real incomes have risen six-fold, the per capita suicide rate remains the same as it was in 1900.
Innovative academics point the finger at the deadly sin of envy. We are creatures of comparison and we want what others have. Research conducted in 2005 showed that happiness levels depend inversely on the earnings level of your neighbour. If they're richer than you, you're dissatisfied. If their child has got into a better school, you're envious. If they drive a better car, take more exotic holidays and buy more expensive shoes, then your own fleeting pleasure is destroyed. We live in an age which is constantly on the hunt for the next new thing. Something that might seem brilliant today -like a pay rise, or moving to a bigger house - quickly becomes routine and ceases to delight. The old empty space opens up inside us, nagging at us with the vexed question of what new material goody might fill the void.
Here on the farm, I am able to step aside from the competitive world I inhabit in the city. Watching the pigs going about their business, seeing the plants grow, and knowing that though what we do might be small, it is also an affirmation of something more solid and tangible. Growing plants and vegetables is something that is nearly free for everyone, even though this particular project is causing us a few sleepless nights as the cash flow steams on in only one direction. Charlie's notion when we set out on this adventure, that it would cost us the same as a Mercedes, now seems more apt than ever. If we had spent £70,000 on a flash car with all the trimmings, within a few months there'd be another one in the window of one those grand car dealers in London's Park Lane, beckoning us with the promise of an even better driving experience and, unsaid but true, a quick way to get one up on the neighbours. I was a hippy in my teens and early twenties and I believed passionately in hippy things like communes and community and the power of nature and the spirit. Now, in my fifties, after a long diversion into the material world, maybe I am reverting, although the prospect of one day entering one of our pigs in a show, and winning, seems a very attractive notion.
We've bought three new saddleback pigs, including a splendid boar who we've called Robinson. After I finish in the potting shed I go to look at them, lying on top of each other
against the garden wall, enjoying a rare moment of sunshine in this cold, long lasting winter. Saddlebacks have amazing markings, black at both ends with a white band round their shoulders and front legs, so clearly defined it is as though they've been kitted out to play on the same football team. They have longer snouts than the Gloucesters and, because they arrived with us as grown-up pigs, they're definitely more skittish and less keen on human affection. Bramble is sharing a pen with them and when I arrive she ambles over to get a rub behind her ears. Within seconds, Robinson is heaving himself up on to her hind quarters, something Bramble clearly doesn't have time for. She shrugs him off, so he has a go at one of his own kind, who is also wholly unresponsive to his ardour.
Boris's health is not improving. He is clearly a 'sickly pig'. First pneumonia, then a skin infection, which, despite antibiotics and daily baths with an iodine solution, is wretched. Most of his hair has fallen out and his skin is red and scabby and itchy. I watch him desperately rubbing his shoulder against a fallen tree-trunk, grunting in his efforts to dig deep into the itchy patch. Two days ago, David moved him into the new chicken runs, where he has sole occupancy of the large wooden hut, built to house the geese and turkeys or, in the event of a lock-up due to bird flu, most of the flock. For now, though, it is Boris's home. Inside the hut, he has a pile of straw and a heating lamp which is normally used for baby chicks. Outside, he has the run of the old vegetable garden, which, when he's not scratching his itchy skin, he clearly enjoys. I'd decided to try tea-tree oil as a cure for his skin complaint, and when he's finished scratching himself on the log I enter the run to catch him, a bucket of tea-tree oil and water in one hand. He runs off towards the purple sprouting, grabbing quick mouthfuls but moving on every time I get close.
I pull off some leaves and hold them out to Boris, who gingerly comes closer. Then his nostrils quiver at the unfamiliar smell coming from the bucket and he's off again, haring back across the rows of old vegetables towards the shelter of his hut. Inside the hut, the sad-looking little pig is shivering in one corner. I offer him the leaves and while he crunches them up he stands still long enough for me to brush his back, sides, stomach, ears and chin with the oil.
The chickens have laid seventy-two fertile eggs, and as I am brushing Boris with tea tree oil an egg cracks open in the incubator and a tiny bird emerges into life. Within half an hour his feathers are dry and he's flopping around, tweeting incessantly, leaning his head against the other eggs, checking for signs of movement inside. Bird flu has crept even closer in the last two weeks. It has now reached France and according to DEFRA it is inevitable that it will arrive in Britain before too long. The failure to vaccinate livestock in the foot and mouth outbreak resulted in the needless slaughter of thousands of herds. I remember reading stories about farmers, heartbroken because their beloved cattle were destroyed. Despite that disaster, we are once again facing a possible pandemic without reserves of vaccination. But this time, for me, the issue is personal and as I watch the tiny new-born chick take its first tentative steps, I realise how much I will mind if we are told that they all have to be killed.
The weather has been freakishly cold this January and February. It reminds me of how cold it always seemed to be when I was a child and we would go skating on shallow ponds every January. My father had a wonky pair of skates, two blades screwed on to the bottom of some old brown army boots. The ankles flopped this way and that, but he was nifty on the ice and worked hard to teach me how to waltz on frozen water. He was well over six foot and we must have made a funny sight. I'd hang on to his hand and practise turns and backwards movements, crashing into his stomach as my balance teetered. But in recent years the winters have been mild, the early spring flowers arriving at the same time as I took down the Christmas cards.
In this cold, Hyacinth has been suffering: she's so little and one night David found her shivering uncontrollably outside her hut. She was, he said, almost frozen to the spot. Two days in the shed, in a warm straw-filled box under the heat lamp, coupled with extra nuts and fresh vegetables, had her back on her feet. Now she's putting on weight at a terrific rate. But I still agonise that she isn't going to make it and wonder what Charlie would say if I were to suggest that Hyacinth spend the night on our bed.
7
The First Slaughter
Four days before the first three boy pigs are due to go 'up the hill', as a trip to Snells is called, I go to visit Mr Bonner to tell him to expect the imminent arrival of our first pork. 'Are they boars?' he asks, as he bags up a string of sausages. 'Oh yes,' I reply, thinking of the discreet though pronounced double bulges under their tails.
He pauses and pushes his white cap back on his head, looking thoughtful. 'Well, I'll take them this time, but the trade doesn't like boar meat.' He puts down the sausages and reaches over the counter to pick up a pork chop. He bends it backwards and forwards, the pale meat chunky under his fingers, the fat well attached to the outside edge. 'Boar meat doesn't set so well-don't know why, something to do with the hormones. The fat falls off and the meat is less solid. It tastes OK,' he adds, looking at my worried face. 'And I will take them.'
'That's true,' David says when I ask him what we are going to do. 'But only when they're more than a year old. Taste goes as well, not just the texture.' Ouch, another example of being a dumb townie, thoroughly ignorant of the art of butchering meat. But I have scored a small but significant triumph. After a week of having tea-tree oil and water brushed on his skin, Boris is on the road to recovery. He's back with his brothers, his skin still scabby and rough but no longer inflamed, and his bristly white hairs are clearly growing again on some of his bald patches. I watch him in delight, chuffed as anything to have made a contribution to animal welfare and relieved that Boris isn't going to be consigned to the group of pigs going 'up the hill'. David's impressed. 'Good stuff - doesn't dry his skin out,' he says.
It is a rare day of warm sun, a spring day sneaking into this long winter when the sun shines brightly and the sky is blue and the early flowers start opening up their petals: crocuses and a few daffodils mixing with the snowdrops which have loved the endless frosty days. In The Times this morning there's a report from Kew gardens, where the daffodils are still tightly shut. In recent years springs have been so early that it has been predicted that winter will disappear altogether. We've had the ten hottest years on record in the last eleven years: lawns have been mown in midwinter and bulbs have bloomed in February. This winter, although there's been little snow, has actually been more normal and it feels wonderful to be outside in the soft warmth. In the nursery there's a definite feeling of spring. In the last four days, thirty chickens have hatched in the incubator; now they're in a wooden box, clustered under the heat lamp, chirping and tweeting in high-pitched voices. Some are yellow, looking like chicks on an Easter card, but others are various shades of browns, blacks, stripes, with black or white markings on wings and above eyes. There are eleven different breeds hatching and they're still too small to tell one from the other. Just over a third of the incubating eggs have hatched successfully, and some of those needed human help at the crucial moment. When the membrane has dried too much, it becomes too tough for the tiny bird to break through. The geese have not fared so well: at one point one solitary goose was sitting on twenty eggs, fiercely guarded by the ganders, but she suddenly upped and left her nest, leaving behind a pile of eggs which duly addled. George and Mildred have produced eleven eggs, but so far none has proved a winner. Still, the hen coop is in a tizzy of excitement: George and the ganders patrol the ground near the coop, hissing and gobbling with macho vigour; the rare-breed cock birds crow throughout the day, puffing up their chests and strutting in majestic circles in front of the females who look fat and full of purpose. There's loads of testosterone in the air.
Fat-Boy the Labrador has woken me up at dawn: he too is beside himself with energy and vim and the reason soon becomes clear. Charlie turned fifty-five this week and he'd been given a box of truffles, well sealed
in a wooden box which was nailed shut. The box had been left overnight in the bottom of a carrier bag full of books. Fattie has taken out the books, ripped off the wooden lid and devoured the lot. I go downstairs with him and we watch the huge red sun rising through the bare trees of the wood to the east of our house and listen to the birds going crazy outside the window.
There's an order to the dawn chorus: first the blackbirds break into song, starting about forty minutes before sunrise, closely followed by the song thrushes; then the wood pigeons, robins, mistle thrushes, turtle doves, pheasants and willow warblers join in one by one, until finally the tiny wrens start singing too. I've learned this week that there is a reason why birds choose dawn as the time of day to make so much noise: the sudden inversion of temperature from the cold of night to the first warmth of day creates a reflective layer on which sound waves can travel further. It's why noise carries further across the cold surface of a lake and campers can hear each other talking on the other side. The birds discovered this several million years ago but we've only just figured it out.
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 12