Wayne is optimistic: he's had experience of honesty boxes and tells me confidently that we will probably end up getting more, not less, money. 'People always round up - not down,' he says. 'Otherwise they think they're being dishonest.' I bought a new notebook to keep a list of what is on sale: eggs, soap, herb recipe books, herbs, hostas, irises, daisies, grasses, flowering currants and larger pots stuffed with four or five different herbs. On the first day of the experiment, Dillington House is hosting a West Country education conference for 146 people. Over the weekend, there are courses taking place in digital photography, 'Women in Ancient Egypt' and 'Plant Hunters', as well as a course on the importance of hand evaluation in bridge; some 150 people are expected to attend. Byteatime on the first day we have made £58, on the second £46 and on the third £38 - as much as we made in Montacute after deducting the rental price of the stall. Suddenly, the farm's financial future looks quite different. If we can sell £200 of produce on the honesty table every week, we'll earn £10,000 a year and that, in our parlous financial set-up, is a fortune.
Charlie is chuffed: throughout that first weekend he goes to check the table every few hours, making sure that anything that has been sold is replaced and that the pots are tidy and earth isn't being spilt on the flagstone floor of the hallway. Unlike Members of Parliament, visitors to Dillington are clearly an honest lot. The honesty box in the Strangers' Canteen in the Commons, which had been introduced to allow MPs and staff to pay for cups of tea without having to queue for the checkout, has just this week been removed after too many 'forgot' to pay. I get out the old cash flow charts and revise them with this new, unexpected addition. It looks good. The chickens are now laying two hundred eggs a day, we have six more pigs, and we are shortly going to be able to sell the first of our home-bred rare-breed chickens.
Eggs - 1,400 a week: £160 a week
Pigs - by the autumn selling six a month: £900 a month Vegetables - by midsummer selling to DH: £1,600 a month
Honesty table: £800 a month
Plants to the South Petherton Flower Shop: as yet unknown
Herb markets: £200 each time, five more markets to go
That adds up to £4,140 a month, not counting the flower shop, the sale of rare-breed chickens and the proceeds from any other markets at which we can rent a stall. It also doesn't count selling vegetables to other outlets with which we may strike up deals over the summer when the produce is full grown and ready to eat. Are we finally turning a corner? David has pinned up a plastic notice on the door between the office and the potting shed. Illustrated by drawings of cartoon pigs with stubby little wings, it reads:
Another Month Ends
All targets met
All systems working
All customers satisfied
All staff eager and enthusiastic
All Pigs Fed and Ready To Fly.
10
A Market Stall at Langport
The strings of toad spawn hatch into tadpoles just before the end of April, when the weather warms up and spring arrives like a tidal wave, unstoppable, changing every day, the trees seeming to explode into a million shades of green. There are hundreds and hundreds of tadpoles clustering round the edges of the garden pond, clinging to the muddy black lining, next to the water snails which the warm weather has lured out from under the weed in great quantities. Early one morning I watch a group of tadpoles eating the pale grey innards of a snail which hangs limply out of its shell. The first time I look I can still see the eyes on the tips of its two front tentacles, but quite soon afterwards the eyes have been gnawed away and by the following day the whole nibbled body has parted company with the shell. Like a shoal of piranhas, the tadpoles are feasting on the stringy flesh which floats slowly through the water like a life raft.
Bluebell's piglets need tagging, and when they are three weeks old David and I decide to brave their indignant screams. Using a device that looks like a stapler, we clip their ears with a metal tag which has been engraved with our licence number. No pig can be moved around the country and thus to slaughter without such identification, and it is easier and less painful to do it to the piglets when they're tiny and their ears are still soft and pliant. We bribe Bluebell to leave the run with pig nuts and half a dozen parsnips, then, with the gate firmly shut between us, David grabs the first piglet and passes it to me. For something so small, piglets make an incredible amount of noise. They squeal, bark, kick, wriggle, whistle, grunt and honk, keeping up the same level of outrage right through the process, without any change of emphasis or volume at the moment David punches the metal tag through one ear. But once back on the ground, all noises instantly cease and they trot off to join the rest of their siblings, wholly unaffected by the experience. Any maternal instinct that Bluebell might still be harbouring is clearly insufficiently strong to displace her interest in the parsnips: she chomps and chews throughout her offspring's ordeal without even bothering to look up. All the same, David and I are glad of the gate: sows are unpredictable and Bluebell now weighs about 200 lbs.
As I watch the punching machine pierce the piglets' ears, I remember having my own ears pierced. It was 1974. I was twenty-three and living in a first-floor hotel room in a dusty little street in the Kathmandu bazaar, known locally as Freak Street. It was so called because it was where the countless hippies and exiles from the sixties congregated to explore Hinduism and Buddhism and, above everything, to take drugs. With my boyfriend, John Steinbeck, I'd arrived in Kathmandu on a green Royal Enfield 350 cc motorbike, a machine developed by the British Army and the workhorse of the Indian police. We'd come to India three months earlier, accompanying an old friend of John's to Bangalore to visit the guru Sai Baba. Steve had cancer and Sai Baba had a reputation for performing miracles. As we discovered when we arrived, most of these miracles involved producing quantities of holy ash from his fingertips and the occasional Rolex watch, which would emerge from the folds of his long saffron robes. Despite liberal applications of holy ash, or vibutti, after two months, Steve died. We cremated his body, flew north to Delhi and bought the Enfield. From the bazaars we acquired mattresses, sheets, a mosquito net, cooking pots and pans, a gas-canister cooker and plastic containers for food. We loaded it all on the back of the bike and set off north, travelling up the Ganges to Rishikesh and then east to enter Nepal.
Within minutes of checking into the hotel, there was a knock on the door and a young Nepalese, carrying a square leather briefcase, was offering us the contents of his mobile pharmacy. John had been a soldier in Vietnam and after his tour of duty he'd returned to the country as a journalist. He'd broken a lot of stories, lived as a monk on an island in the Mekong and become briefly addicted to heroin. He'd made the experience sound exciting and I wanted a part of it. Inside the bag there were slabs of rich brown hashish, lots of multicoloured pills and little white vials of clear liquid with the words 'Welcome Drug Company, Bombay' etched on the glass. I persuaded John to buy the morphine, plus a couple of syringes. Then I lay back and let him inject the liquid into the vein in the crook of my left elbow and floated away on a tide of opium dreams. A few days later, he bought me a pair of circular gold earrings, forgetting that I didn't have pierced ears. Undeterred, we sterilised a needle in a candle flame and he pushed the point through my ear lobe and into a cork. The holes that resulted were out of balance and messy: one is lower down than the other, which makes many styles of earring look ridiculous. They bled on and off for days. But I put the earrings on and carried on drifting through the opium haze.
In the days that followed, we would spend hours lying on our twin beds, the windows open, the noises of bells and drums and chanting drifting up from the street outside, and reading aloud to each other, working our way through as many of his father's books as we could buy from the local bookstore: East of Eden, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Cannery Row, The Grapes of Wrath, The Red Pony, Of Mice and Men and, one of John's favourites, St. Katy the Virgin', a short story about a wicked pig who undergoes a religious
conversion after chasing two monks up a tree. Fearing for their lives, the monks try to exorcise the evil out of Katy. They lower a crucifix suspended on a girdle down to the sow's eye level.
'The face of Katy was a tiger's face. Just as she reached the cross, the sharp shadow of it fell on her face, and the cross itself was reflected in her yellow eyes. Katy stopped - paralysed. The air, the tree, the earth shuddered in an expectant silence, while goodness fought with sin. Then slowly, two great tears squeezed out of the eyes of Katy, and before you could think, she was stretched prostrate on the ground, making the sign of the cross with her right hoof.'
John Steinbeck's motto had been 'To the stars on the wings of a pig,' a sentiment he felt was both 'earth bound but aspiring'. Steinbeck had always liked escutcheons; he liked the way that people with a profession had symbols of their trade: cobblers had shoes, pawn merchants had their three gold balls, aristocrats had seals which told of their armies and castles and worldly possessions. He claimed to be proud of his common stock and thought that a flying pig aptly represented the aspirations of a hard-working, ambitious though lowly man. The image, which he called Pigasus, was turned into a gold and steel seal by a craftsman in Florence, with the words 'Ad astra per alia porci' stamped around the flying pig. He took delight in punching the seal into hot red wax to close his letters.
The idea of flying pigs dates back to a 1586 Scottish proverb which curiously states that 'pigs fly in the air with their tails forward', but Steinbeck, according to his eldest son, Thorn, pinched the idea from Lewis Carroll, a writer he much admired. It appears in the poem 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', which Tweedledum recites to Alice shortly after she has met him and his brother, Tweedledee, in a wood.
'The time has come,' the Walrus said,
'To talk of many things;
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings -
And why the sea is boiling hot -
And whether pigs have wings.'
Steinbeck taught his sons to memorise 'The Walrus and the Carpenter' when they were old enough to read, along with all seven verses of 'The Jabberwocky', which they would have to recite before their father would consider granting a favour, like staying up late or going fishing on a weekday. He never owned a pig himself because, he told his sons, a pig wouldn't take to life in New York City, but when his famous black poodle Charley died, shortly after their marathon trip together round America which formed for the basis for Travels with Charley, he bought a white bull terrier, which he named Angel, after a pig that had been owned by his best friend at junior school in the Salinas Valley. One Halloween, he cut out a pair of wings and taped them to Angel's sloping shoulders and walked her round Sag Harbour, his two sons following behind, doubled over with laughter.
By mid-May, every inch of the walled garden is planted and the seeds are growing well. Outside the walls in the five-acre field, 1,000 cabbages and 1,000 cauliflowers are safely sheltered under a long length of white fleece, which looks as though someone has chucked a giant blanket across the earth. Another length of the white material covers early carrots, and 1,000 sprouts, 2,500 parsnips, 1,000 French beans, 1,000 spring onions, 500 Swiss chard and 3,000 leek seeds are beginning their magical underground journey, which will, in a few short weeks, transform the small dry seeds into lush, energy-rich plants, full of taste, nutrition and vitamins. If Alice in Wonderland had been asked to choose which of the following two scenarios was most likely to happen, that pigs would learn how to fly or that a tiny seed could become an eight-foot-high leafy plant, producing well over one hundred red flowers and well over one hundred pounds of green beans, which taste delicious and which, moreover, if you eat them yourself will make you grow tall and strong - and it will do all this in about eight weeks - I think she would have plumped for flying pigs as being by far the most plausible.
I am beginning to understand how lucky we are to have the walled garden. Correctly positioned and designed, the temperature inside the walls is estimated to be 7°C higher than outside, which means that inside the garden we're effectively in Bordeaux. Melons, pineapples, peaches and grapes were all grown here in the eighteenth century, when Dillington House, under the ownership of Lord North, had a reputation for its excellent kitchen. Thomas Beedall, a parson from Langport, recorded in his diary in 1769 that he had occasion to call upon his Lordship.
'Read the newspapers until his Lordship came back when I was hard into his Lordship's room and he talks with me and gave me five guineas . . . at five o'clock I went for dinner with the head servants and had for Dinner a Dish of fish, a sirloin of Beef roasted, a Loyn of Veal with colly flowers, carrots etc. for the first course, and for the second a Roast Turkey, a Hare, Pidgeon pye, fried Oysters, Chicken Tarts, Lavor etc. Drank water at dinner, after Dinner drank 4 glasses of Port Wine.'
A huge variety of vegetables were cultivated and, though there are no records of exactly which were grown in Dillington, records from the nearby Selborne estate in 1749 show that the head gardener was planting forty different varieties, including endive, mustard and cress, white broccoli, skirret and scorzonera, marrowfat peas, leeks, squashes, cucumbers, three types of artichoke, asparagus, all manner of lettuces and onions for pickling. His hot bed for growing melons was fortyfive-feet long and used thirty cart-loads of dung a year. Our range of vegetables is modest in comparison.
Walled gardens are of ancient and almost universal origin. There is detailed evidence of Egyptian gardens dating from the fourteenth century b.c with huge walls, towering gateways and oblong outlines, echoed by a garden within, which would always be laid out in the same, symmetrical lines. Instinctively, when we first looked at the garden in early winter of 2004, we wanted to carve it up into straight lines, pathways, perfect circles, above all into symmetrical shapes which would complement and perhaps soften its innate austerity. The Egyptian love of gardening was echoed and enhanced by the Persians, who had several ideal forms of garden: small ones, built close to the house, protected by mud walls and containing pools, watercourses, trees and flowers, and much larger, free-flowing parks. In Sardis, Cyrus the Younger created a famous palace garden when he walled in an area of park land and referred to it as a pairidaeza, from pairi (around) and daeza (wall). The original meaning of the word 'paradise' thus describes an enclosed garden in the Persian style.
Traditional Persian gardens were designed in great rightangled crosses which symbolised the four corners of the universe. Running water would divide each section, which would be planted with scented flowers, fruit and shade trees and embellished with architectural details. The Old Testament descriptions of the trees in the Garden of Eden follow this pattern. Now I can see that, with the exception of flowing streams, we've created something that more or less accords to the old designs. The apple trees on their wires create areas, or gardens within the garden. The walls cradle the peaches, apricots and plums. The herb bed is a semicircle against the west wall. The whole area has gradually filled up, until there is not a wasted square inch, but somehow it is in proportion and it looks right.
The walled garden had lain fallow for forty-three years before we took it over. The last occupant was called Leslie Barker. He'd acquired the tenancy in 1951, the year I was born, and like us he'd supplied the college with carrots and cabbages and onions. After nine years of trying he went broke and moved to Sussex, where he found a job as head gardener to Lady Astor. I learn all this from an elderly lady in the village, Ellen Doble, who, as a young mother, had started working for Leslie Barker in 1954. In 1947, Ellen had married her childhood sweetheart, Maurice, a thatcher. For four years they lived in a tied cottage near Honiton on the estate of Lord Sidmouth. After his death in the early fifties, his heirs sold up and Ellen and Maurice moved to Whitelackington, where Maurice became the Dillington estate thatcher. Initially they lived in the mews of the main house, but when the house was converted into a lecture theatre they decamped to the village, to the house where Ellen now lives alone after Maurice
went into care.
'If Mr Barker had had his own shop, it would have been different.' Ellen and I are walking along the path between the rows of flowering plants and the vegetable beds. Ellen uses a walking-stick; since my accident I'm no speed freak, and I find we naturally keep pace with each other. 'Mr Barker used to sell his vegetables in town and he never made very much money. He also grew flowers in the glass houses - chrysanthemums and irises and really lovely dahlias - which we'd pack into brown cardboard boxes and send to the markets in Bristol. He was very fussy: all the flowers were individually checked: we had to pick off any loose petals. We packed the flowers in rows, alternating the direction of the heads so that the box was very full and the flowers didn't move around and get damaged.' Ellen worked five days a week in the garden, from nine till one o'clock, and she was paid two shillings and sixpence an hour.
On the inside of the south wall there are two rectangular patches of flaky white paint which were once, respectively, the back walls of a shed and a small house where, Ellen says, the gardeners used to live in the days when Dillington House was a home, not a college, and the gardeners worked exclusively for the family, supplying all their fruit, flowers and vegetables. 'There was a black kitchen range and that's where little Maureen, who was two when I started work here, used to play when it was cold.'
She shivers, although the day is warm and she's wearing a thick grey coat over a blue wool jumper. Ellen's eyes are bright blue and I can see that she is really pleased to be walking around the old garden again, pleased to see that it is coming back to life. 'It was often very cold. I remember digging the celery, throwing it backwards into a pile, then cutting the outside leaves and grading it. Our hands would be blue. We would freeze. And it always seemed to be raining when we had to bring in the parsnips and the carrots.' Ellen's first job had been picking and grading the strawberries, so I showed her our strawberries, growing in boxes, standing on top of two rows of bales of straw, out of reach of the slugs. 'How did you stop the slugs?' I asked. She thought for a minute.
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 21