Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes

by Rosie Boycott

  On the other side of the table, Aaron is trying his best to put a positive spin on the situation. 'We'll have to hold more festivals, organise shopping evenings. I could do wine tastings. How about barrel races? Pub Crawls? Cider and cheese? Raffles?'

  I suggest buying brightly coloured plastic wheelbarrows, which could be left in the car park for anyone to use to cart their shopping from one end of town to the other. Aaron turns to Mr B, who's sitting at the end of the table. 'How about a raffle? I'll give a case of wine, you put up a whole turkey and if anyone can carry them all the way from our shops, up East Street, down Frog Lane and all the way to the car park without once putting them down, then they win!'

  Mr B laughs, but despite Aaron's cheeriness we're a depressed group, sitting round the table while outside the window a full moon appears above the rooftops, bathing the Market Square in its silvery light. It feels hopeless. We are just a handful of local people, wanting concessions from a multinational, and we are losing every step of the way. Even the small but important agreement to keep the two-way system in place until Tesco opens its doors has now been ambushed by the engineers. On the way to the pub, Bryan has picked up that week's copy of the Chard and Illy from the garage. The same company which is developing the supermarket, Alborne Estates, has put in a planning application to construct 42 two-, three- and four-bedroom homes in the open area on the far side of the new car park. 'I wonder how long they've been cooking all this up,' he says gloomily, staring into his beer glass as though the rich amber liquid might reveal the answer.

  'Isn't there an issue with the badgers?' asks Henry, reaching across the table to take the paper out of Bryan's hands. Holding the paper well out in front of him, he reads out the final paragraph of the article: '''The planners say the northern part of the site will be kept free of development and will provide a foraging area for the badger community as well as a corridor linking the sett to the open countryside." Well, that's that, then, isn't it? Another bull's-eye for the planners.'

  Henry gives me a lift back to the Dairy House. I stand by the gate, watching the taillights of his car disappear through the park, the moonlight so bright I can make out the black and white markings on the young Friesians who are sleeping nearby under an oak tree. The evening has reminded me of an evening in late 2000, the day after it was announced that Richard Desmond had bought the Daily Express. With my friend and deputy editor, Chris Blackhurst, I had been in the Founders Arms, the pub across the road from the Daily Express building on Blackfriars Bridge. It was early evening, the busiest time in a newspaper's day as the office gears up for the eight o'clock deadline, but the two of us were shell­shocked by what had happened and this had been our first opportunity to get out of the office.

  It had been an agonising autumn, knowing the newspaper was up for sale and living with rumours and uncertainty. Editing a paper means you are expected to know what's going on, often long before the rest of the world, and often you do. But in those autumn months, I was wholly in the dark about the future of the institution I worked for. Chris and I had been working together for almost six years by then; he'd come with me from the Independent to take on this seemingly impossible task. Now it was falling apart, our work and effort to transform the lumbering right-wing newspaper into a modern leftish publication that could challenge the supremacy of the Daily Mail just a distant dream. We felt both betrayed and powerless and, in my case, infinitely sad. In time, Chris returned to the Independent and is now the City Editor of the Evening Standard; he divorced and remarried and now has a new son called Archie. I often find myself missing his great humour, wit, intelligence and integrity. And as for me, unlikely as it might once have seemed, I now have a farm and own a part-share of sixty pigs.

  I unlock the back door to let the dogs out into the garden and follow them along the grass path beside the long herbaceous border, and through the crooked metal gate into the wood. The moonlight is so bright that I can see the outline of the big oak tree in the flat reflective surface of the pond. The roots of an oak stretch for hundreds of yards and you are walking within the oak's domain long before you step under the first overhanging boughs. They branch frequently: the first roots are as thick as a man's waist, six feet from the trunk they're the diameter of a wrist, at thirty feet as thin as a pencil lead, at fifty feet as slender as grass and at one hundred feet thinner than a human hair. The smaller the roots, the less time they live: the thinnest are replaced several times a year but the hair roots, the almost microscopic ones that work in tandem with fungi to collect nutrients from the soil, survive for only a few hours. An average-sized oak has some five hundred million root tips which will graft themselves on to the root hairs of another tree of the same species. In time, an oak wood becomes a single living entity. If a tree is sick, or has been attacked, and can't feed itself through photosynthesis, the root system enables the other trees to keep it alive.

  I lean against the gnarled trunk of the old oak. The night before the paper was sold I had invited Ewen and Caroline to dinner. It was the first time I had seen Caroline since the late 1970s. They came to our house in Notting Hill and the four of us walked round the corner to a now defunct restaurant in All Saints Road. I didn't often forget to take my mobile phone with me but I did that evening and when I returned, old friendships restored and promises to visit them in Somerset exchanged, I had twenty-three missed calls. On the front page of the following day's Financial Times was the story of the sale of the Daily Express.

  What I didn't know then was that while those calls were going unanswered, I was rekindling a friendship which would, in due course, lead to this moment: leaning against a tree in a Somerset wood, watching the park glisten in the moonlight and listening to Fat-Boy rustling through the beech hedge in search of an old tennis ball, as he never considers it too late in the day for another game of catch.

  POSTSCRIPT

  The Ilminster Tesco opened its doors on 5 November, four years to the day after Dad died, which might help explain the utter bleakness I woke up to that morning. It was misty in the park, but not an exciting mist with the clear sign of sunlight hiding behind its tendrils. This was grey, cold, and definitely wintry.

  There weren't many people outside the store when I got there at nine-thirty; just Bryan Ferris, Patricia Fry-Foley, Henry Best and David Gordon, an ex-councillor who works tirelessly for local concerns. He marched in from the car park wearing a dark-blue suit with a red pin-stripe, a bowler hat and a neatly rolled umbrella. On his back, he'd pinned a hand-lettered sign saying: 'Tescopoly . . . Taking over a high street near you. Today.' He looked like an undertaker. Patricia was wearing a poppy, which was a further reminder of Dad as we buried him on 11 November with a Union Jack covering his coffin.

  The finished building is horribly ugly - just a yellow brick box, with no windows at all on the south, west and east sides with only the north side open to the world. I noticed that the large flat, grey roof could have easily accommodated solar panels. You enter it from the north, via a narrow path between a wall and the front door. The car park stretches out behind, smaller now since Tesco won a further planning battle when they announced that they wanted to move the store fifteen feet into the agreed parking area - to provide more space for trucks to turn around. It meant one more victory for big business.

  Standing around with mikes on big booms covered with furry material, members of the local press eagerly awaited the big story. There were almost as many of them as there were of us, and they interviewed each of us in turn. Carol Goodall, the mayor, arrived and went into the store. By five-to-ten there was quite a crowd outside. Our little band - now swelled to some eighteen people, went and stood between the well-wishers and the store, whereupon a number of them walked around us to get closer to the shop, tut­tutting with annoyance about our presence. And indeed, there's no doubt we were spoiling the party.

  Tesco had put out a blue and yellow carpet and there were big trays filled with glasses of champagne, set out on tables just inside the stor
e. A cheap-looking plastic ribbon was stretched across the entrance and behind it were school children from Swanmead and Greenfield schools. The bearded manager had four outsized cardboard cheques under his arm: two for £750 to give to the children, one for the police and one for the mayor. All the children were given plastic bags containing four donuts.

  At ten o'clock sharp, Carol cut the ribbon and the store was declared open. Everyone rushed inside to drink the booze and eat the snacks. We were still standing outside, where there was a wooden barrier hiding the new loos, Tesco's 'gift' to our town.

  'If they'd been open I would have gone and had a celebratory pee,' said Henry dolefully. One of the reasons why I like Henry so much is that he reminds me of my father - eccentric, kind and passionate about what he believes in. By ten-fifteen, it was all over and we adjourned to find coffee. With one snip of a ribbon, we had become just another town with a superstore in its midst.

  Four months later, on an astonishingly sunny mid-February day, I went to ask the town's traders what effect Tesco had had on them. The worst hit was one major retailer whose takings had reduced by a dramatic forty-to-fifty percent. In the evening hours, the store was like a ghost town and although they haven't had to layoff any staff as yet, unless something miraculous happens, cuts will surely have to come. All the shopkeepers I spoke to said it was hard to decide what had affected the town more - the opening of Tesco or the new one-way system. Silver Street, where most of the shops are located, is still buzzing with people at the weekends, but weekdays are decidedly quiet. There used to be tussles to find parking spaces, but those days have gone, according to Clinton Bonner, who admits to a slight loss of trade at the beginning of the week, but more custom than usual at the end of the week. Boots has fared reasonably well, but that might be because they have refitted the store and widened their stock range.

  Many stores have changed their look, smartening up as they compete for trade, but the only business which has actually benefited from the advent of Tesco is the pet store, Paws, located in a small square through which you have to walk if you want to reach the town from the Tesco car park. Andrew Broom, the manager, reports trading up by fifteen-to-twenty percent, a success achieved by the increased footfall as well as by an aggressive marketing strategy which specifically targets the supermarket: he sells the same brand of pet food but at a lower price and lets his customers know about it. This strategy has raised both their profile and their earnings.

  The owner of the bookstore, Chris Chapman, has no worries whatsoever about Tesco infringing on him. 'Tesco customers don't read', he told me. Most of his customers have special interests; they're not looking for the new John Grisham. Just that week he'd ordered books on subjects as diverse as Aids in the twenty-first century, living and working in Switzerland and a set of road maps of Sri Lanka. Chris reckons that he can get any book into his store within twenty-four hours of the order being placed.

  Bryan and Elizabeth report that the footfall is down in Lane's Garden Store, but again, they believe that's mostly due to the one­way system, which has the effect of dividing the town in two, always favouring those whose final destination is the Tesco car park.

  There is a pleasurable gossip running around amongst the Ilminster traders: Tesco isn't doing as well as was expected; they have already laid off staff and many people who do tend to go to superstores for their goods still go to Chard, as the Ilminster Tesco is just a bigger version of Tesco Metro, with disappointing stock. No wonder Charlie couldn't find the caraway seeds which I needed in order to cook a Moro recipe. After failing to find them in the Co-op he set off to Tesco, but they didn't have them either. They were to be found, though, in the health-food store which adjoins the chemists. Ilminster hasn't taken the arrival of Tesco lying down. There's a new monthly farmer's market, held in the town square, and this summer there are plans for a four-day festival which will include concerts, an international barbecue competition, a flower festival in the church and a one-day street market. My friend, John Rendell finally retired from running his greengrocer's and, even though we now have a supermarket, the new owner has continued selling flowers and vegetables and catering for the town's weddings and funerals. Before John shut up shop for the last time, he created a dazzling display for the funeral of Clinton Bonner's father, Mike, who died suddenly in October at the age of sixty-nine. The funeral was attended by over six-hundred people who packed out the minster on a Monday afternoon.

  I don't think that the arrival of Tesco will sound the death knell for the shops of Ilminster, but it is hard to see that it has done anyone any good. The one-way system, which only exists to smooth the path of the supermarket, has definitely made our small high street a less bustling and vibrant place. It pleases me that Tesco is not doing well. Maybe people now realise that supermarkets are not doing us a kindness with their pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap philosophy, which pretends to be the consumers' friend. These days, how you shop is as defining as how you dress and shopping in a supermarket has become an ethical decision. We like the idea of the 'cheapest option', but these cheapest options come at a price. In the worst cases, it means no bookstores, butchers, bakers and greengrocers and that is no option at all.

  FURTHER READING

  Bakewell, Joan (ed.), Belief, Duckworth, 2005

  Balfour, Lady Eve, The Living Soil, Soil Association, 2004

  Baskin, Yvonne, Underground: How Creatures of Mud and Dirt Shape Our World, Shearwater Books, 2005

  Bellamy, David, Conflicts in the Countryside, Shaw and Sons, 2005

  Benson, Richard, The Farm, Penguin, 2005

  Blythman, Joanna, Bad Food Britain, 4th Estate, 2006

  Blythman, Joanna, Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets, Harper Perennial, 2004

  Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, Penguin, 2000

  Chatto, Beth, Beth Chatto's Woodland Garden, Octopus, 2002

  Diamond, Jared, Collapse, Penguin, 2005

  Don, Monty, My Roots, Hodder & Stoughton, 2005

  Dunning, Robert, A Somerset Miscellany, Somerset Books, 2005

  Flannery, Tim, The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, Penguin, 2006

  Harvey, Graham, We Want Real Food, Constable, 2006

  Hedgepeth, William, The Hog Book, Doubleday, 1978

  Hillman, Mayer, How We Can Save the Planet, Penguin, 2004

  Humphries, John, The Great Food Gamble, Coronet Books, 2002

  Jenkins, Jennifer (ed.), Remaking the Landscape: The Changing Face of Britain, Profile Books, 2004

  Kaminsky, Peter, Pig Perfect, Hyperion Books, 2005

  Kohnke, Helmut, and D. P. Franzmeier, Soil Science Simplified, Waveland Press, 1994

  Lawrence, Felicity, Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate, Penguin, 2004

  Levitt, Steven D., and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, Allen Lane, 2005

  Lien, Marianne Elizabeth, and Brigitte Nerlich (eds), The Politics of Food, Berg, 2004

  Livio, Mario, The Golden Ratio, Headline, 2002

  Logan, William Bryant, Oak: The Frame of Civilisation, W. W. Norton & Co., 2000

  Lovelock, James, The Revenge of Gaia, Allen Lane, 2006

  Mabey, Richard, Nature Cure, Pimlico, 2006

  Maharaj, Niala, and Gaston Dorren, The Game of the Rose: The Third World in the Global Flower Trade, Institute for Development Research, 1995

  Masson, Jeffrey, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon, Vintage, 2005

  Maycock, S. A., Livings from the Land, C. Arthur Pearson, 1947

  McIntosh, Christopher, Gardens of the Gods, I. B. Taurus & Co., 2004

  Monbiot, George, Heat, Penguin, 2006

  Pollan, Michael, The Botany of Desire, Bloomsbury, 2002

  Porritt, Jonathon, Capitalism: As If the World Matters, Earthscan Publications Ltd, 2005

  Prince, Rose, The Savvy Shopper, 4th Estate, 2005

  Russell, Sir E. John, The World of Soil, Fontana, 1961

  Schlosser, Eric, Fast Food Nation, Harper Perennial, 2
002

  Singer, Peter (ed.), In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave, Blackwell Publishing, 2005

  Smith, Nancy, The Story of Dillington, Dillington House, 2000

  Spencer, Colin, British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, Grub Street, 2002

  Stewart, Ian, Nature's Numbers, Phoenix, 1998

  Taylor, Moss, In the Countryside, Wren Publishing, 2003

  Thomas, Jeremy, John Heath and Ernest Pollard, Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland, Viking, 1984

  Tudge, Colin, So Shall We Reap: What's Gone Wrong with the World's Food and How to Fix It, Penguin, 2004

  Tudge, Colin, The Secret Life of Trees, Penguin, 2006

  Watson, Lyall, The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs, Profile Books, 2004

  Wiseman, Julian, A Pig: A British History, Duckworth, 2000

  Young, Rosamund, The Secret Life of Cows, Farming Books and Videos Ltd, 2003

  Young, William, Sold Out: The True Cost of Supermarket Shopping, Vision Paperbacks, 2004

  Booklets and reports:

  Conisbee, Molly, Petra Kjell, Juliam Oram, Jessica Bridges Palmer, Andrew Simms and John Taylor, 'The Loss of Local Identity of the Nation's High Streets', part of the Clone Town Britain report, New Economics Foundation, 2004

  Gold, Mark, 'The Global Benefit of Eating Less Meat', Compassion in World Farming, 2004