Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes

by Rosie Boycott

  By the middle of March the lateness of the spring is generating newspaper headlines such as 'where have all the flowers gone'. Down in Cornwall the annual daffodil festival at Cotehele Manor has been postponed until April. The average mean temperature for March has been just 2.4°C, about 4°C below recent years and that's meant that many early-flowering flowers such as crocuses, daffodils and hyacinths are still keeping their buds firmly closed. Only the snowdrops have flourished, flowering for far longer and growing far larger than anyone seems to remember. I know that we're not alone, but as the days creep by and the ground in the market garden refuses to warm up, nothing can be planted. Seed potatoes, onion sets, carrots, cabbages, beans, parsnips are all waiting to go into the ground, but without a sustained period of warmth when the temperature stays above 6°C for a number of days, there's no point in sowing anything.

  Charlie and I write cheques for wages, pigs, animal feed, telephone bills: by the first official day of spring on 21 March, our investment totalled £86,540, much more than our first 'limit', more than our second one too. Our bank in Yeovil, the NatWest, has been a lousy partner in our small business venture. At Christmas, they bounced three cheques, charging us £37 every time. I negotiated a small business loan of £1,000, explaining to the manager that we often had a shortfall between paying necessary bills and new investment. Charlie and I bank with NatWest in London and our main accounts act as surety for any loans. The manager, Lee Chapman, agreed, but two months later, he bounced another three cheques, charging us again for the privilege. My normally mild-mannered husband hit the roof. I went to ask David if he knew what was going on. He told me that when he and his wife Tracey split up, the bank wanted David to clear the debt on their loan. He had asked to renegotiate the repayments but the bank hadn't got round to doing so, and now the banking system at the nursery was being penalised. It was an explanation of sorts, but Charlie and I were still furious with the bank and argued to have the bounced cheque charges refunded.

  Our income stream remains tiny: 800 eggs a week, a small amount of vegetables and now four pigs, which will make us about £500. There's not much chance of having many vegetables to sell before June, and I know that it is only Wayne Bennett's patience and belief in the project that is making him keep faith with us as suppliers of all Dillington's vegetables. Charlie and I have stopped talking about what our limit is in terms of investment: neither of us would pull the plug on the project, but I'm worried. The cold weather has put our earning potential back a good few weeks. Bluebell is definitely not pregnant, and that's another financial setback. The newly hatched rare-breed chickens won't be big enough to sell till May, and if bird flu is found in Britain then not only will the bird markets be cancelled, private sales will be impossible as well.

  But the cold weather isn't deterring the birds from mating. All the females are laying and the incubator in the office is full to bursting with seventy-two eggs in various shades of brown and white. Unlike that of the pigs, who mate for a full half­hour, chicken sex is fast and furious: they just need to position themselves correctly so that the sperm can enter the female vagina. All animal copulation takes place in full view of the other animals and zoologists have learned that the sight of others having sex can work as a powerful aphrodisiac.

  The most bizarre experiment I ever heard about took place in Japan. Researchers put two female and two male quails in a pen together. The female birds showed a definite preference for one of the males, so the rejected male was removed, filmed having sex with a third female and then the resulting video showed to the two lady quails, who immediately developed an overwhelming interest in the porn star. The Japanese researchers had no idea why the film helped the birds to change their minds, but concluded that female quails are, like humans, affected by watching sex and seem to prefer males that have demonstrated their sexual dexterity.

  I had begun to wonder if the fear about a supermarket opening in Ilminster was just that. Time had passed and there'd been no signs of movement from the developers and no firm announcements as to which of the Big Four would be moving into the site on Shuddrick Lane. But now in early March there is a report from the Office of Fair Trading that shoots the whole issue into the headlines. In 2005, the OFT had ruled that there were no grounds for probing the power of the supermarkets; now that decision has been reversed. A report from the Association of Convenience Stores said that they were stealing the identity of our towns and cities. In the year leading up to May 2005,2,157 unaffiliated independent retailers had shut down, compared with only 1,079 the year before. MPs expressed fears over this unchecked expansion, which they warned could lead to the closure of 40 percent of small shops by 2015. The 2003 decision to allow Tesco to buy up high-street convenience chains has further strengthened their market share of Britain's grocery business and the report recommends that the issue should be reopened by the Competition Commission. For the first time in my memory, supermarkets led the evening news on the BBC. One morning shortly after the report's publication I am in Lane's Garden Shop, talking to Bryan Ferris. We express our optimism that this might mean that Ilminster will be spared. But on 16 March the Chard and Ilminster Gazette tells a different story. A colour picture of the Shuddrick Lane site reveals a barren stretch of land, scored by the deep marks of tractor wheels. The trees have all been felled and bulldozers have flattened out the bumps. As reporter Laura Thorpe notes, 'The face of Ilminster is set to change for good as work begins on a controversial supermarket development.'

  'No one had any idea this was going to happen. The workmen just arrived.' Bryan has come round to the Dairy House for tea, with his friend Mike Fry-Foley who, with his wife Patricia, runs a small hotel in Beaverbrook's old village of Cricket Malherbie. Bryan and Mike have just sent a letter to our local MP David Laws, asking him to attend a meeting to protest about the one-way system. 'I know we've lost the battle over the store, but we can at least keep fighting about the one­way system,' they wrote.

  The new one-way system was authorised by the council following the decision to build the supermarket. It will divert traffic around the town and away from Silver Street, where all the independent shops are located: Bryan's garden shop, Mr Bonner's butcher's shop, the greengrocer's, the chemist, the cheese shop, the bookstore, all the shops that give Ilminster its character and vitality. A further blow to the town traders is the council decision to allow the supermarket to build on the site of the existing car park which means moving the car park out eastwards into an area which, at the moment, is a field. 'To get to Mr Bonner's,' says Mike, 'you're going to have to walk over half a mile.' The new road system, which the road department are insisting on for reasons of safety, will turn a journey that at the moment is about two hundred yards, into one of over a mile. For Bryan and Elizabeth, Aaron Driver, Mr B, John and Mary Rendell and others along Silver Street, it's like having a heart by-pass.

  'Of course, there's another alternative road scheme,' says Bryan. 'We've proposed it and this is what we need David Laws to help us with.'

  'Three thousand people in Ilminster have signed a petition objecting to the traffic scheme,' added Mike, who knows that Ilminster's market town diversity is so attractive to his guests. 'This is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.'

  Bryan has another worry. While building works are going on, spaces in the existing car park will be reduced from 160 to sixty. He's been checking the car park every few hours, counting the actual number of cars parked there at any time. It's rarely under ninety. In their memo to David Laws, Mike and Bryan write that 'there can be no doubt that the road plans and proposed car park layout are designed exclusively for the benefit of the superstore and to the detriment of the rest of the town. A look at the plans and time spent "walking the job" will demonstrate this. We see no malice here, only lack of detailed thought: no consultation; incompetence and an "it's not important" attitude.'

  'We know the superstore is coming: we just want a level playing field to fight it from,' Brian says, adding that he's rece
ntly heard from a retailer in Tiverton who has told him that, since major traffic deployment schemes following the opening of a Tesco superstore, his turnover has declined to the point that the outlet is no longer profitable and remains open only because it can - for the moment - be bailed out by his other outlets. If you have only one outlet, like Bryan and Elizabeth, this option is not available.

  Bryan and Elizabeth used to have another shop in Wellington, which Bryan looked after while Elizabeth took care of the Silver Street store. But a couple of years ago they had to close it down and consolidate their resources in the one shop. The development of the superstore might bring more people into the town, but they will be dedicated supermarket shoppers who, after spending one and a half hours filling up their trolleys with frozen meals and chilled food and then pushing their groceries back to their cars to unload, won't then set off back past the store and into town. Bryan's right: the way the scheme is planned, it will mean only loss of business for the existing shops.

  Fat-Boy's constant quest for food often goes badly wrong. We left a bag of rice out on the table in the kitchen overnight. It was half full and I'd rolled down the cellophane and secured the bag with an elastic band. Fattie nicked it off the kitchen counter, his teeth puncturing the thin transparent bag. When I come down in the morning there's a trail of rice leading out of the kitchen, along the corridor and into the sitting-room, where he's abandoned what's left of the bag beside the fireplace. He's really been after the leftover pheasant bones, which had been boiling on the stove the previous evening, but the saucepan, with the lid firmly on, had been placed well out of his reach so he's settled for stealing the rice. It's the end of the shooting season and Mr B is selling a brace of pheasants for as little as £2.50. There are so many round here that I realise I take their exotic gorgeousness for granted. Their lives, though, are tragic. Deliberately introduced here from a faraway habitat, they're mostly raised in captivity then released into the wild, knowing nothing about how to survive, only to be shot or squashed under car wheels after wandering unwittingly on to the road. Pheasants were first brought to Britain by the Romans, but these early birds were kept in pens and never went native. A thousand years later, the Normans brought in a new strain, with the white neck ring. These adaptable birds naturalised well in the woods and grasslands of Britain. At my cousins' farm, many of hedges were planted as 'doubles' in Victorian times: two hedges separated by a gap of some fifteen feet, where trees and brambles were allowed to grow wild. Doubles were designed with pheasants in mind, providing safe corridors for them to live and nest in. Victorian gamekeepers would be under instruction to shoot anything that might eat pheasant eggs, young chicks or the birds themselves: badgers, foxes, weasels, stoats. But in the 1920's, when the Depression began, money ran out and the pheasant population, quite unable to fend for themselves, was decimated. Wartime followed and, after the war, estates were too expensive to keep up, which further reduced pheasant numbers. It wasn't until the financial boom of the 1980s that estates began intensive breeding programmes again, rearing the birds in coops and releasing them on demand into the line of the guns. In the name of sport, twenty million pheasants are bred every year across the English countryside. As Ander says, it's a heartless business. They don't like to fly and they often get winged by city gents who don't shoot straight; then they're left as prey for the foxes and badgers.

  My father used to shoot, primarily, he always said, because he liked the walking and the company. But after he turned seventy-five he stopped, saying that he no longer wanted to kill anything. As he aged he grew more vociferous about his love of the countryside, and his view of what human beings were doing to it became increasingly savage. His main anxiety was population growth, and as Alzheimer's slowly ate into his brain this turned into an obsession. When I became the editor of the Daily Express, Dad's first suggestion was that I should publish a whole page every day showing on a graph how much the world's population had grown in the previous twenty-four hours. When I pointed out that this would be an extravagant use of limited space, he'd jab his finger at a page of advertisements for cheap TVs or low-cost flights and instruct me to 'dump this silly rubbish'. As his inhibitions faded along with his memory, he would work himself up into explosive fury about the fate that would soon befall the planet, all because people spent too much time fucking! It was bizarre and uncomfortable to hear such an obscenity from my father, a previously fastidious and impeccably mannered man who would have recoiled with horror from anyone swearing like that.

  My sister and I would endure his outbursts as best we could and it was only after he died, in the autumn of 2003 at the age of eighty-seven, that I was able to see the truth of what he feared. Until some populations started reducing in size, the world was on a terrifying trajectory. In AD I, when Christ was born, there were between 100 million and 300 million on the earth. By 1500 there were 500 million. By 1825, one billion. By 1927, two billion. By 1960, three billion, by 1975, four billion. By Millennium Eve - which my father spent with Charlie and me, Daisy, my sister and her family and cousin Ander, watching fireworks from the offices of the Daily Express overlooking the Thames at Blackfriars - the world's population had reached six billion. Unchecked, that rate of population expansion would have meant sixteen billion people on the earth by the middle of this century, a completely unsustainable number. But, in fact, due to falling birth rates across the world, population experts now estimate that the world's numbers will level off between nine and eleven billion by 2050.

  Charlie's family is a good example of falling birth rates. His maternal grandmother gave birth to twenty-two children, born between 1893 and 1916. There were two sets of triplets who all died, three sets of twins, one of whom survived, and seven others who grew to adulthood, his mother, Naida, being the youngest. His grandmother was called Rose Guest and when she'd come to the end of her years of breeding she set about planning her exit from her marriage. As the Depression deepened in the twenties, her husband Henry, a West Country cattle drover, transferred a sizeable amount of his company assets into his wife's name, in order to safeguard himself in the possible event of bankruptcy. Rose took the money and moved into the Clarence Hotel in Weston-super-Mare, from where she oversaw the building of a four-bedroom Regency villa, equipped with two bathrooms and all mod cons. Charlie has only eight cousins, a case of dwindling returns on Rose and Henry's original investment in procreation.

  My father would not have been persuaded by their example. Nine billion people are still far too many for our planet to sustain comfortably. Most of the money I have invested in the farm came from the legacy I inherited from my father and I like to think that he would have been pleased with what we are doing, delighted by the pigs and the plants and our small attempt to put something back into the natural order of the world.

  8

  The Swallows Return

  The last Saturday in March, a week before the official first day of spring on 1 April, turns into one of the worst days we've yet had on the farm. It isn't just because of what actually happens, although things do happen; it is also because the things that do happen bring me face to face with a whole slew of problems which I've been shoving under the carpet and refusing to acknowledge.

  Mildred doesn't survive her fall into the duck pond: she shivers through one night and the following day she dies in the hen house. George is now a lonesome turkey and all that remains of poor little Mildred is a collection of five eggs which are awaiting their turn in the incubator. The new pigs have all settled in: Earl and the Empress are living in the caravan wood with Boris and his three brothers. This week the vet said there is every likelihood that Boris's fertility has been affected by his illness and by the antibiotics he's had to take, so we're going to have to bite the bullet and send Boris up the hill when he's fat enough. One of his brothers will be kept as the Gloucester boar. I want to call him Napoleon, as he's attained his status through another's demise, but the boars need short names which they can remember and Nappy seems very un
distinguished for a breeding pig.

  Poor Boris, getting the chop after all the misery of those injections, the tea-tree oil and iodine baths, the endless scabby skin and itchiness. Still, maybe he'll taste good, I think, as I go into Mr Bonner's expecting to see our name up on his blackboard, advertising our pork. Nothing. And no sign of Mr B. I find his dad, Mr B senior, in the back of the shop, standing beside the long chopping boards, expertly wielding a knife through a huge joint of beef.

  'How's our pork?' I ask.

  He frowns. 'Well, not very good, actually.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Your pigs are too thin, there's not enough fat, and Clinton cut off a chop to cook and it was tough. And they're boars and they're not as good. We only sell gilts . . .'

  He takes down a piece of meat that is hanging off a metal hook above his head. 'Clinton kept this for you to see.' He bends the piece of meat in his fingers: it's part lean flesh, part skin with a small layer of fat. It rolls together and, to my ignorant eyes, looks like a nice, though not large, chunk of pork. 'See how small it is,' Mr B senior continues. 'And look at this one.' He goes out to the main shop and returns carrying a huge rolled loin of pork in one hand and a smaller loin in the other. The first one has a thick layer of chunky white fat running right round it; the smaller one is almost wholly lean, the skin attaching directly to the meat. This is ours. 'We can't sell this kind of meat in a shop like ours.' He says this in a whisper, so that the people in the queue in the main shop won't hear. I could be in the clap clinic waiting for a test result. 'You could sell it in a supermarket, or somewhere that wasn't so particular, but it would bring us into disrepute. We've made the rest of the pigs into sausages.'