'We never had any problems with slugs, or snails, or pheasants, or rabbits, at least not inside the walls. Outside it was much more problematic. There were rabbits everywhere: we ate a lot of rabbits in the war. Then the myxomatosis came and Maurice wouldn't go anywhere without a gun. He would put them out of their misery, poor little things.'
I offer to take Ellen into the pig pen to get a close look at the piglets, but she prefers to keep a wary distance. When Ellen was a young girl, her family had kept a couple of pigs in the back garden. Her mother fed them every day, pouring the food from a bucket into a long trough. One day, desperate to get at her breakfast, one of their sows had lunged forward to grab the edge of the bucket with her mouth. Unfortunately, her mother's thumb had been in the way. Ellen remembers her mother running back to the house, her thumb hanging by sinews, blood pouring from the wound. 'If it had happened today, they could probably have sewn it back on,' she says, leaning on the gate, watching Bluebell and the piglets ferreting around in the dust, searching for stray pig nuts that might have eluded them. 'We didn't get rid of them,' she continues, 'and in the war, it was good to have your own pigs. Along with the rabbits, we were able to eat well.'
Ellen's father used to say that you could use every bit of a pig except for its squeal: bacon and sausage from the body, brawn from the head, faggots, savouries, lard and pate from the innards; rind and gristle were turned into jelly stock or minced up for faggots, and trotters and tails were pickled and kept in jars. In the war, pigs were prized although the Ministry of Agriculture didn't regard them as 'priority' animals. Cows, since they provided milk, had first rights, after humans, to meagre rations. The numbers of pigs on farms were reduced by half and imports fell by 70 percent after Germany occupied Holland, Belgium and northern France.
But two factors helped ensure that pigs played their part in the war effort. In 1940, the Minister of Agriculture, Lord Woolton, passed a law which stated that owners of usable rubbish could be - and occasionally were - prosecuted if they didn't recycle it for animal use. The other was the establishment of the Small Pig Keepers' Council (SPKC), which persuaded local councils to turn a blind eye to health laws and allow people to keep pigs in their back gardens. The SPKC also pioneered pig clubs; these had been popular in the First World War and some had survived the intervening years. If you were a club member you qualified for cut-price feed, help with collection of food scraps, and for 2/6 you could get insurance for your pig. Pig co-operatives flourished in urban areas. In Hyde Park, the police started their own piggery. A correspondent of Farmer's Weekly visited the park in 1941 and reported: 'The sty that houses these important pigs was built by policemen, and built like a gaol. Evidently, the police were afraid that the pigs might escape.' After the lions, elephants and giraffes were moved out of Regent's Park Zoo to the safer environs of Whipsnade, pigs, also belonging to the London constabulary, were moved into the cages. As part of the pigs-at-war drive, canteens were encouraged to recycle their scraps. In Tottenham, sixty-eight garbage collectors bought one hundred pigs; they bolstered their diet from scraps which they collected in special buckets carried on the refuse lorries. Under ministry regulations, any waste that was intended for pig consumption had to be boiled for an hour to destroy organisms that might pass on foot and mouth or swine fever. The Tottenham refuse collectors developed a steaming system which could process huge amounts of waste under pressure, resulting in a concentrated swill which became known as 'Tottenham Pudding'. Any leftover pudding was sold to other pig-keepers.
Local councils saw the benefits of the pig clubs and helped by placing 'pig bins' on street corners. Labels reminded people not to put in certain types of waste - tea leaves and rhubarb leaves, which make pigs very sick. But stories from the time recall strange objects finding their way into the bins: in Bath, a young man called Gordon Tucker found a pair of false teeth and an ebony and silver pepper-grinder which is still in his family today. By 1942, there were over four thousand pig clubs. Despite all the domestic scraps, pigs were eating too much imported food, so their numbers were restricted. Co-op clubs were allowed two per member per year and domestic owners were limited to the same number.
Ellen's father kept pigs, as well as cows, which he rented. And when Ellen and Maurice were newly married, they kept pigs in their back garden. 'A pair of saddlebacks who ran wild all over the orchard,' she recalls. 'We would buy them as weaners and then sell the pork. I used to feed them on scraps from the big house: in those days you were allowed to give pigs leftover cooked food. I think it's a pity that you can't do this today. Such a waste.'
On the evening of 3 May, there are two separate but linked meetings in Ilminster. In the community school, three hundred people join Bryan Ferris, Mike Fry-Foley and Clinton Bonner to protest against the one-way system. I would have been there too, if I hadn't already agreed to take part in a debate on climate change which has been organised by the South Somerset Climate Group and is scheduled to take place at exactly the same time, five hundred yards away, in the town theatre. Both venues are packed, with people sitting on chairs on the stage and standing up at the back. The one-way meeting is clearly the noisiest. At the outset, the councillors are challenged by town resident Malcolm Young, who says, 'There is a great tide of public opinion that thinks you are no longer working for the people of this town but for a £2.26 billion supermarket.' There are representations from emergency services, the taxi companies and the bus companies. None of them feels they have been adequately consulted. The councillors are told that the overwhelming view of the town is against the new one-way system. 'We don't live a particularly grand lifestyle and many shops operate on a shoestring. Tesco has got it all sewn up,' claimed Bryan Ferris, to hearty cheers. At the end of the evening, they take a vote. All hands are raised in favour of asking for a rethink of the decision, except one. Councillor Adam Kennedy draws a sarcastic round of applause when he becomes the only person to vote against.
Kennedy owns a small engineering company, and claims to do much of his family shopping in the town. A few days after the meeting, I reach him on the phone to ask why he is such a strong supporter of both the one-way system and the arrival of Tesco. 'It gives us more choice,' he replies, 'but I won't talk about the supermarket.'
'Do you think there are any downsides to this road system? What about the fact that the emergency services say the new road system will add eight minutes to the journey if you live in the northern end of Ilminster?'
'Not true,' he replies. 'You can drive round a different way and come along the main road.' I point out that this would add several miles to the journey, but he tells me that an ambulance 'with its lights flashing' will be able to speed along the A road and cover the distance in the same time.
But his main reason for voting against re-opening the oneway decision, it transpires, was that it had been agreed at a meeting which he had chaired. 'So it would be disloyal of me as I was in the chair,' he says crossly.
'You mean you would lose face?'
'Much worse than losing face, I would be disloyal.'
Kennedy was co-opted on to the council six years ago. As such, he has never been voted into the job. I ask how much he cares about the town. 'I live here, my children go to school here, I shop here, I'm on the town council . . . I put myself out every week for this town . . . I can't be accused of not caring . . . it makes me very annoyed that people ask this question.'
'So I take it that you are convinced that the arrival of Tesco and the new one-way system are the very best possible things that could happen to Ilminster in 2006.'
There was a pause. 'I won't answer that question.'
I have the phone pinned between my shoulder and my ear as I type his answers directly into my computer. 'So you'd like me to say that in answer to the question, Mr Kennedy said he wouldn't answer.'
'Yes. But you need to ask the question of who is most loyal to the town . . . those friends of yours in the Chamber of Commerce or me. Just ask them where they send their ch
ildren to school. It's not the local school.'
At the Ilminster theatre I've been teamed up with the writer Mayer Hillman, author of How We Can Save the Planet, to talk about the morality of climate change. Mayer's talk is gloomy in the extreme and his solution is based on his belief that the government is shortly going to introduce individual carbon rationing and, in effect, take the moral dilemma about whether or not to drive a more energy-efficient car, change your household heating system or buy yet another cheap flight to Europe, out of our hands. I don't agree with him. Politicians play the green card as a crucial part of their PR and they pretend that we can lower our carbon emissions without having to radically change our lifestyles. Gordon Brown, who says he sees the environment as the biggest crisis we face, maintains that it will provide enormous economic opportunities. But one of his first acts as Chancellor was to cut VAT payable on gas and electricity. In 2006 he taxed owners of fuel-guzzling 4 x 4's just £45 extra, less than the price of a tank of petrol. At the 2006 Tory Party conference, a leaflet had been issued to delegates urging people to make a contribution to preserving the planet by not overfilling their kettles and by picking up a piece of litter every day.
In mid-February 2006, the Guardian obtained a leaked copy of a draft treaty between the European Union and the United States which would prevent the British government taking any action to reduce the environmental impact of airlines without the approval of the US government. It is not the first such agreement, but it may turn out to be the most wide-ranging. The 1944 Chicago Convention, now supported by no fewer than four thousand bilateral treaties, rules that individual governments may not levy tax on aviation fuel. The airlines have, in effect, been spoon-fed all their lives. The only area of air travel where we can, as a country, make a decision in isolation from the rest of the world is in airport development.
Our government could contain, or even reverse, the growth of flights by simply restricting airport capacity. But the opposite is happening. Heathrow is soon to get a new runway, and Stansted, Edinburgh, Birmingham and Glasgow are expanding. Twelve other airports have announced plans to increase capacity. According to the Commons Environment Committee, the growth in air travel the government forecast will require 'the equivalent of another Heathrow every five years.'
One-fifth of all international passengers fly to or from an airport in the UK. That number has risen five times in the last thirty years and is expected to double to 476 million passengers a year by 2030. Aviation represents the world's fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions; unchecked, aircraft emissions will exceed the country's entire output of greenhouse gases in 2050 by 134 percent. Unlike Mayer, I don't feel hopeful that governments are going to be introducing any sort of serious rationing in the foreseeable future. I argue instead that the change will have to come from all of us and that, until we make it a vote-winning condition, no politician will risk his re-election by announcing an intention to impose any sort of restriction, let alone actual carbonrationing. Centuries of believing that we live on a planet which has a limitless capacity to support us and feed us, ad infinitum, regardless of what we do, have been proved wrong; our world has limits.
Maybe this crisis will give us the chance to be part of a generation with a mission. While I never envied my parents having to live through the miseries of the war, I did envy the way they often spoke about it. For them and for their generation, those years of terror bound them into a higher purpose, one towards which everyone in the country was striving. Circumstances had forced them to put aside the bickering and petty squabbles and jealousies of everyday life; they were all in the same stream, heading towards the same goal, united by a wish for peace, both for them and for their children. In my lifetime of prosperity, I've known a few such moments when I think I have had the opportunity to rise above the scratchiness and competitiveness of everyday life and I have treasured them. Working with a team to accomplish a goal brings a happiness which self-centred pursuits never can. Solving the climate problem won't be accomplished unless we can change the way we think and start genuinely working together towards a goal which is bigger than all of us.
The following week, in early May, there is a letter in the Chard and Illy, under the heading 'Climate and Store are Linked'. 'Supermarkets and climate change are connected,' wrote Peter Langton. 'Car journeys to or from the south of Ilminster will soon be two miles longer and the new supermarket will bring us food which has been flown and trucked halfway round the world. We desperately need to cut down our transportation and it would be in all our interests to support local shops which sell local produce.'
That same week, Tesco announces a £100 million environmental initiative. It is unclear what they plan to do. To date, the company's environment record has been less than brilliant. It failed to achieve its target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 4.2 percent in 2004 - because, the company says, of unexpectedly high sales growth. It would take more than thirty corner shops and greengrocers to match the C02 emissions from one average-sized superstore. Grocery packaging still makes up roughly a quarter of household waste and the UK's biggest supermarkets distribute some 15 billion plastic bags a year, which end up in landfill. Peter Langton's connection between the supermarkets and climate change illustrates only a tiny part of the argument. A 2004 study entitled 'How Green Is Your Supermarket?' said that the UK food industry accounts for more than one-fifth of total greenhouse gas emissions. In 1980, the UK imported 6.3 million tonnes of food, feed and drinks; by 2000 this had risen to 17 million tonnes. If the environmental predictions are correct, that figure is wholly unsustainable and we will have to return to growing our food much, much closer to where we live.
Our first cut flowers are ready for sale in the middle of Mayjust chrysanthemums to start with, but soon there will be sweet peas, and sweet williams, day lilies, pinks and small carnations in mixed, bright colours. When we first proposed selling them to Dillington House, along with the eggs and the vegetables, Wayne asked Lorraine, his highly competent manager, where she bought the flowers for the dining-room tables. Lorraine said she went to Asda in Taunton, where she could buy a bunch for as little as £1.99. By cutting off the stems and dividing the mix of carnations and greenery, one bunch could stretch to fill six or seven small vases and they lasted for at least two weeks. We'll never equal let alone beat that price, but Wayne is enthusiastic about having Dillington flowers on the Dillington tables so, early on in the planning of what to grow in the nursery, we decided to grow cut flowers. Now that we have the honesty table, I wish we were growing more, as they'd be a good addition to the eggs, plants and bags of vegetables.
To coincide with Mother's Day, I've made a short film for the BBC's Sunday morning programme The Heaven and Earth Show about the ethics of the flower trade, which I learned about in the first place from the town greengrocer John Rendell. John's flowers arrive twice a week via a refrigerated truck which trundles down Silver Street dropping off its cargo. The driver is Dutch. Every Monday he loads up three containers from the flower markets of Holland and crosses the Channel. In Bristol, two of the containers are detached and coupled up to local trucks. Two go south into Devon and Cornwall and one follows a regular route around Somerset, dropping off cut blooms at local florists. The flowers have been grown abroad: our own flower-growing industry now accounts for just 20 percent of the flowers sold in the UK. Even the once prized daffodils of the Scilly Isles are now little more than a cottage industry. Supermarkets sell 75 percent of all the cut flowers we buy: their huge buying power is reflected in the fact that a bunch of five red Cassini tulips retail for the same amount today, about £1.50, as they did twenty years ago.
John sometimes finds that he gets an attack of asthma shortly after the flowers have been unloaded into the back room of the shop. He reckons it is caused by the chemicals on the flowers. I often find him in the early morning, seated at a small table, creating someone's name, or a cat, out of flower heads for a funeral later in the day. Births, weddings and death
s form a large part of his income. We're not yet ready to entrust our floral tributes for our dear departed to the hands of the supermarkets and the hatches, matches and dispatches business is what is keeping many a small-town florist alive. When John was fifteen, he used to bike to Taunton, then catch a lift with a trader who went daily to Exeter, where he studied flower arranging at Constance Spry's West Country school. John was the only boy in the class. Now he's in his seventies and, with his younger wife Mary, he works every day in the shop, selling vegetables, eggs, fruit, honey, local biscuits, bird food, cheese, butter, bird food containers, cane baskets, artificial flowers, ribbons, plants and buckets of cut flowers.
The supermarkets such as Asda, where Lorraine has been buying flowers, achieve their rock-bottom price by flying the blooms in directly from South America or Africa. Over nine million red roses are sold in the UK every year and 85 percent of the flowers we buy are imported, not just from the flower markets of Europe but from Kenya, Colombia, Ecuador and Zimbabwe, where the environmental standards are low and bosses don't spend much time considering the welfare of workers. The majority of Asda's mixed bunches come from Ecuador or Colombia, where flowers are grown under glass, miles and miles of it. Pipelines carrying water laced with pesticides and fertilisers criss-cross the farms. Trucks loaded with flowers shuttle between the farms and the airport, ensuring that the newly picked blooms are airborne as fast as possible. In order for it to travel so far in a box without any water, a complex cocktail of chemicals is added to the plant, on top of chemicals to speed growth, enhance shelf-life and kill bugs. A survey of 8,000 Colombian flower workers revealed that individuals had been exposed to 127 different pesticides, 20 percent of them banned in the USA because of their known toxic effects, many of which are carcinogenic. Working in glasshouses enhances the effects of the chemicals, and workers - the majority of whom are women - suffer skin trouble, breathing difficulties and miscarriages. In Kenya the story is repeated, with extra environmental consequences. In a region already short of water, a large flower farm can use upwards of 80,000 litres of water a day, leaving local supplies struggling. Lake Naivasha, famous for its extraordinary flocks of flamingos and a crucial water source for much of Kenya's wildlife, is drying up due to the greed of the flower farms and its waters are being contaminated by the pesticides that leach back into the lake.
Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes Page 22