Colin Rolfe, a friend of Tony Dowling, Hygrade's unofficial union rep as well as the Labour candidate at the last general election, is seething when I meet him in the Portuguese cafe in Chard a few days after the closure. He'd just been down to the unemployment office with his wife Zoe, who works at Oscar Mayer, and their two-year-old son Jack, who is recovering from a bout of pneumonia. 'There were no jobs that would be any good for someone like me,' he says, 'I'll get the job seekers' allowance of just £56.' Colin knows that the closure of their firm, where he's worked for the last two years, is directly connected to the ever-expanding power of the supermarkets. Many workers feel the supermarkets' continual drive for increased profits has been a major factor in the decision to close. Hygrade isn't closing because it has gone bust, it is closing because they can make more profits by relocating two hundred miles across the country. Tony Dowling told me later that 'many producers for Tesco are driven into the ground in order to keep prices down and profits up. There is nothing realistic about buy one get one free. It may be free to the customer and low-priced to Tesco, but somewhere, you know a producer is being squeezed - and then squeezed again.'
Keith Milton, the GMB branch president for Somerset, sums it up in another letter to the Chard and Illy: 'How many more factories must close, jobs be lost and lives changed for ever before big business realises they have a moral responsibility to their workforce which is not just motivated by more and more profit?'
There is another sinister thread running through this story. In 2003, when Oscar Mayer first started employing Portuguese labourers to work in their factories, filling the jobs with the dismal wages they were offering in their expanding empire, the town was targeted by the BNP. They renewed their campaign in February 2005.
Who, if anyone, gave Oscar Mayer Ltd the right to change the face of Chard? . . . Oscar Mayer Ltd acting, presumably, in the pursuit of profit, has over the last few years brought in hundreds of foreign workers and their dependants to work at their Furnham Road plant. . . . it is widely understood that Oscar Mayer has done so without seeking the views or opinions of local residents and with apparent scant regard for the impact their employment policies are having on Chard's social fabric, services infrastructure or local employment opportunities. Oscar Mayer's excuse for importing foreign labour, we are told, is that they cannot find enough suitable labour locally. Could we suggest to them they try increasing their pay rates to a level acceptable to Chard folk and in so doing contribute a little more to the British economy rather than to the Portuguese one?
When the leaflets first went out, the BNP were exploiting a spate of attacks that had been made on the Portuguese community. Two local cafes, Cafe Moca and Costa Brava, where the TV sets are tuned to pick up Portuguese TV and egg custard tarts and chorizo are sold alongside cheese and pickle sandwiches, had had their windows smashed. But the incidents were isolated and short-lived and the BNP's leaflets, heartily condemned by the mayor and other town dignatories, were largely rebuffed. Up until the closure of Hygrade there was almost full employment in Chard, and while there were complaints about immigrants pushing up rental prices, new affordable houses were being built. In the days following the closure of Hygrade it became clear from the sacks of letters received by Alex Cameron, editor of the Chard and Illy, that many young couples who had just taken out mortgages and started their kids in the local schools, confident that Chard would be their home for life or at least for a good long time, were very worried. Their contentment has been blown away. Oscar Mayer, the town's largest single employer, currently has just over nine hundred workers on its books. Three hundred of those are foreign: the same number that are losing their jobs at Hygrade.
In the week after the closure, the first voice of protest is heard in the letters pages of the paper on 15 March. Mrs Coombs writes to say, 'Maybe it is time that local businesses reviewed their policy on agency workers. Many of them are foreign. I know they are all ED citizens, that they pay tax and national insurance like the rest of us, so they are entitled to work in this country. However, they are, after all, agency workers and migrant workers. In times like this jobs should go to local people with mortgages who have spent all their lives in the Chard area, brought up families, etc.'
In an instant, Chard becomes a first-rate recruiting ground for the far right: their messages offer the kind of protectionism that all the workers, faced with the loss of their jobs, want to hear.
On the last day of March, I'm back in Chard to join Colin and Tony on a march to protest about the redundancy conditions. Tony is adamant that Hygrade's new owners, Tulip, a subsidiary of the huge Danish Crown meat conglomerate, bought the company to get their hands on its valuable Tesco contract. Hygrade had been making £250,000 profit a month at the Chard factory alone at the time of its closure, but the government minimum redundancy payment being offered to the workforce is more in line with a company that has gone down drowning in debt rather than one which has posted a consistently healthy bottom line. Each worker is being offered £290 for every year that they've worked for the company. A pittance and, for someone like Colin, who started work only two years ago, a financial disaster.
The workers gather outside the Hygrade factory at 6.30 p.m., to time their departure to air on the BBC's Points West news programme. Red banners emblazoned with the slogan 'Workers of the World Unite' are carried aloft. Two young boys wave a placard saying 'You are as cold as one of your fridges'. Another billboard asks 'Tulip - how does it feel to ruin so many lives?' The local Methodist minister Marilyn Tricker commences the proceedings by offering up a prayer for the workforce.
'We are concerned for the impact this will have on the town of Chard. I believe in a God of justice and compassion and I would ask that God to act now.' The rain holds off and we march up Furnham Road, turning right at the traffic lights into Fore Street, where the mayor and mayoress are waiting to greet the marchers outside the Guildhall. Inside, MEP Glyn Ford kicks off the rally by explaining the impact that will ripple through Chard when the factory moves out. 'It is not just three hundred jobs that will be lost, it's six hundred. People who run sandwich businesses, cleaning businesses, small shops, they'll go too. I've been here before. Under European law there should be a ninety-day consultation period before terms are agreed on. Tulip made their decision without consultation and we will fight to overturn it.'
From round the hall there are shouts of support, but confidence is short-lived. Everyone looks angry, but mostly I think everyone looks worried. Wives, some of whom worked in Hygrade too, and kids who have picked up on the anxiety, mutter and shake their heads. The mayor, John Malcolm, pledges his support. The economy of Chard is in crisis: the closure of Hygrade will take £6 million out of the local cash flow overnight and this is an issue the whole community will have to face. No one will be left unaffected. Tony stands up to speak about what the union hopes to do to improve Hygrade's offer. Then I stand up and speak about the power of the supermarkets and how it is always the workers who suffer in the constant pursuit of greater profits.
There is a shout from the back of the room. 'Where is our MP? He's never here when we need him. If Paddy Ashdown still represented us, he'd have been marching with us.' This angry cry gets taken up around the hall and isn't pacified by Tony Dowling and Colin trying to explain that David Laws has an engagement he can't break and that he will be meeting with them on Monday. Cathy Morrison, the deputy mayor, picks up the microphone. In her hand she carries a bundle of brochures.
'I used to work in Oscar Mayer,' she tells the crowd, 'now I work at the employment centre in Chard. I want to reassure everyone that you will be able to claim the job seekers' allowance, even if your partners get other jobs. But I know that there aren't enough jobs for you all in Chard and I know that many of you don't drive and that you'll have to go to Yeovil, Taunton, even to Exeter to get work. So I've brought bus timetables with me. Not enough to go round, but after the end of April you can get more copies from the tourist information office next door
.'
There was silence when Cathy finished speaking. After the feisty rhetoric from the unions about corporate greed and standing together, she has voiced the grim reality. There are almost no jobs in Chard and the lives that the workers had built up, revolving around the schools, the community, the known and the familiar, are being hurled into oblivion. A job in Exeter will involve spending three hours a day on a bus. How will the kids get to school without Mum or Dad to take them? Who will be there when they get back? And, even with a season ticket, the transport cost is going to make a big hole in the weekly pay packet, a hole roughly the size of the annual holiday budget. I look round the hall. Couples were holding hands and clasping their children to them. Now there is real fear on their faces. What on earth has this country come to? Hygrade might not have been the nicest place to work, and no one really thinks that packaged, processed pork products add much to the sum of human health or happiness, but it was their place of work, where jobs had been a source of pride, belonging and security. Now, in the desire to 'rationalise' and maximise profits, they are being thrown on the garbage heap like yesterday's fish and chips. It seems to me that if this is what we call progress, then we have a very warped idea of how to run a successful world.
When Cathy has finished, the meeting is over and a longhaired folk-singer called Red Dirt takes to the stage. 'I'll be with you when the roses bloom again,' he sings in a gravelly voice that sounds as if it owes a lot to late nights and cigarettes. In small groups, everyone leaves the hall, gathering on the pavement to share a smoke before setting off for home. I find myself standing next to a white-haired, elderly man with a moustache who reminds me of my father. He has a nice grin and looks like he has once been in the army. He tells me his name is Andrew Fuller and that, for the last seven years, he's been in charge of hygiene at Hygrade. With his wife, he used to run the Langport Arms, but his wife became ill and they had to retire. After she died, Andrew had looked around for what to do and his path had taken him to Hygrade in Chard. 'Tesco were like terrorists for hygiene,' he tells me, 'they appear, unannounced, and check everything. Never sent the same person twice so that you had no chance of striking up any sort of relationship which might mean things got overlooked. Their sole object would be to find fault.' He pauses and adds with pride. 'We were the only firm in the country who ever got 100 percent on the test.'
Over Christmas 2005, the firm had worked round the clock with almost all the staff putting in overtime to fulfil Tesco's last-minute Christmas order books. Hams and all kinds of pork products rolled off the production line: Hygrade was so efficient that orders that couldn't be completed in other factories were often sent to the Chard outlet with demands that they be filled in record time. 'It was a very successful place,' Andrew says sadly. 'What a message to give out as to how you want people to behave. "Work hard, do really well, and we'll kick you in the teeth."'
The birds and the sunshine wake me up early the next morning but we need to be up, as we have to load the Transit and get the herb stall set up at Montacute by ten o'clock. It is a beautiful morning, the light outlining every detail of every branch, the daffodil heads turning towards the early morning light. The garden, which has survived the long vicissitudes of winter, is undoubtedly waking up and there is evidence of life everywhere I look and in every sound around me. In the garden pond there is a newt hanging in the water, a strange small dragon with long fingers suspended in the stillness. Long strings of toad spawn have appeared in the last few days, the little black eggs held in the tapioca-like goo, hundreds and hundreds of them, lying draped across the pond weeds like the carelessly discarded necklaces of a forest fairy queen. In the wood pond the wind has blown football-sized clumps of frog spawn into one corner. A female can lay up to three thousand eggs at a go, and there must be literally thousands of eggs in the greenish white jelly.
Bob, David and I set off to Montacute with almost a thousand herbs crammed into the Transit. David has rigged up a makeshift two-tier system with a couple of tables, but on the way a tray of mint falls off, scattering earth and plants all over the other herbs. Montacute has been described as the 'most beautiful Elizabethan house in England', built in the last years of the I 500's for the Phelips family. They used the local honey-coloured stone from nearby Ham Hill, and in the early morning light the mellow bricks look warm and welcoming.
Phelips had been chancellor to the young Henry VIII and his family lived there till 1911, when they hit hard times and moved to London, renting out Montacute to high-paying tenants. Lord Curzon snapped it up just after the First World War. It was grand enough for one of the more arrogant political figures of the time. In 1923 he was waiting there to be called by the king to form the new government, but the call never came.
The market is taking place in the old stable yard and we park close to the archway and cart the trays of herbs to our corner pitch. There is a jolly camaraderie among the stallholders and, although we are clearly the newcomers, we feel welcomed. David isn't staying for the day as his football club is playing in the semi-finals of the local league. Earlier in the week Bob had phoned to ask me if he needed to wear a tie to the market. I reassured him that ties were absolutely not needed, but he looks touchingly smart in a neatly ironed shirt and jacket, by far the best dressed of the three of us.
Roughly 75 percent of the food being unloaded from vans, containers and polystyrene freezer boxes has been grown or reared on the Somerset Levels, the mysterious region that occupies the centre of the county, running inland from the north coast. It is low-lying, with some parts below sea level, and the seemingly endless flat fields are dissected by small drainage canals or rhymes, as they are known locally. Flat land is always weirder and stranger than mountains: the mists swirl and it is easy to lose your way. Before the lands were drained the vast tracts of reeds and rushes concealed dank, dangerous marshes, where, legend has it, huge dragons hid, the smoke and flame from their breath mingling with the mists that rose from the bogs. Glastonbury Tor rises from the Levels like a lighthouse in a sea of green, the focus of the area, itself a place of so many myths and legends.
There are records of people living on the Levels for almost six thousand years, and in 1970 a peat digger called Ray Sweet discovered a pathway in the bog: here, between the autumn of 3807 and the spring of 3806 Be, the dwellers on the Levels first figured out how to make a flat surface. They needed to construct bridges and pathways to connect areas of dry land. First they cut stakes which they would push into the earth in an X shape, driving the bottom tips deep into the peat to give the structure stability. They then laid branches between the two arms of the X. But that winter they did something that, as far as archaeologists know, had never been done before. They used axes to makes splits in the ends of oak logs and, with wooden mallets and oak wedges, forced the splits open till they had planks, some of them up to fifteen feet long and three feet wide. It was these traces that Sweet discovered a little over thirty years ago, preserved by the peat over the centuries and able to be dated so accurately through the growth rings still visible in the wood.
By nine-thirty I am starving. At a stall selling pies, cakes and jams I buy a couple of sausage rolls, the flaky pastry meltingly delicious, the meat well-flavoured and juicy. Sue Warrington used to be a full-time rep for a medical supplies firm as well as a mother of three. She'd learned to cook as a child and had always made her own jams, chutneys, jellies, pies and juices. But three years ago, her fifteen years in the medical business suddenly seemed like absolutely long enough and she chucked it in to become a full-time producer of home-cooked food.
'It was amazing, it just took off,' she says, as she unloads yet another box containing pies made of chicken and leek, spinach and ricotta, lamb and apricots. 'Four months after I stopped working, Keith gave up being a metal broker to join me. Then we thought we'd have another baby and went and had twins.' She laughs. 'That wasn't in the plan. With four boys and a girl under ten, I'm often cooking in the middle of the night and the twins always
start yelling just when the jam is hitting boiling point. My seven-year-old has become a dab hand at labelling the pies.'
In their garden they grow their own vegetables as well as green tomatoes for chutney. They have apple, pear and plum trees which, with storing or freezing, fill their pies throughout the year. Sue is at Montacute on her own, as Keith is manning their stall at another farmers' market at Axbridge. In addition to her own products, which include cakes as well as the pies and the jams, she's also selling a friend's cheeses. It's going to be a non-stop day, without a minute to sit down. She reckons that she now works far longer hours and knows that their bank statements never look as healthy as they used to. 'But I wouldn't change it for the world. The kids eat better. The community in our village of Chedzoy is lovely. I like being outside. I like being in charge of what we do. I like coming to the markets, you get to know people, they all value food and knowing where it has come from. Traceability, that sort of thing.'
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 17