Chewing the Cud

by Dick King-Smith

  So I wrote to my old master there, and he was perfectly agreeable, either for old times' sake or, more probably, because I was asking too modest a price.

  And for many years afterwards, I like to think, for he was only a youngster, the gleaming satiny black shape of Ben-the-bull roamed the rolling downlands with his many-colored heifers and passed on to hundreds of sons and daughters his quiet and amiable ways.

  Chapter 7

  PIGS

  Wednesday 27 May

  Monty off his food. Vet to see.

  As well as cow keeping, we began pig keeping. The poor old pig, linked always with gluttony, obesity, and squalor. As greedy as… as fat as… as dirty as… In fact, pigs are very like us. Their digestive systems are almost identical to ours, they are omnivorous as we are, and they very much enjoy their food as we do. They are also intelligent, strong-willed, and of an independent nature, all gifts we admire in ourselves. We can hardly blame them for fatness and greed, since we have bred and fed them for just such qualities, licking our lips with an anticipation that is almost cannibal as we lean upon the wall of a sty and look down upon these creatures that so nearly resemble us.

  As for being dirty (by which we mean not just muddy but incontinent), given half a chance there is no cleaner animal on the farm. Humans, once out of diapers, pride themselves on confining their excretions to a particular spot, as opposed to the random discharge of cattle or sheep or poultry; and they instruct the dogs and cats that share their houses to respect that privilege. But without any training the pig from an early age will use a lavatory only if he is given one.

  As for intelligence, when next you get a chance, look closely into a pig's eye. The expression in the eye of a dog is trusting, of a cat supercilious, of a cow ruminative, of a sheep vacuous. But the look in the eye of a pig is, quite simply, knowing. Other beasts think, This human is looking at me. The pig thinks, I am looking at this human. There is all the difference in the world.

  My pig keeping could best be described as amateurish with flashes of professionalism. The pigs suffered more than the other livestock from my love of trying to do things on the cheap. For example, I fed my store pigs large amounts of swill, cooked swill that arrived weekly in great steaming drums, filled with waste food of every imaginable kind, including on two occasions whole boiled cats. These had presumably fallen into the vats from some overhead mousing walkway and been cooked. The pigs chomped them up with gusto. They seemed to love swill. But they fattened rather slowly.

  At Woodlands Farm we converted the old barn into a modest piggery, dividing the floor space with walls into a narrow feeding passage at the front, four roomy sties through the middle, and at the back a dung passage running the whole length and divided by a system of doors so that each sty had its own latrine. Mucking out was a simple matter of shoveling, brushing, and hosing down the dung passage, which forty pigs had meticulously used. The sties themselves would be spotless.

  The conversion of the barn was a sensible enough idea: a good investment and well designed. The same could not be said of the housing that I provided for the sows to farrow outside. Most people would have invested in good, strong, weatherproof huts built for the purpose, with stout floors and farrowing rails, and skids and proper linkage for easy moving. Not I, I bought a job lot of old fowl houses. I removed the perches but left the nest boxes on as an escape area for piglets at risk of being overlaid. I also took the wheels off and thus lowered the ancient structures to the ground, having just enough wit to realize that otherwise a 350-pound sow would go straight through the floor.

  When we came to move the first of them to fresh ground, in a field aptly named the Wilderness, we hooked a chain onto it and pulled merrily away with the tractor. Whereupon the whole thing fell to pieces like a pack of cards. Later movings were nervous occasions, each hen-house tied up with rope like a giant parcel. Gladwyn and I would proceed with the utmost caution, one driving the Ferguson at snail's pace, the other monitoring progress with anxious shouts of “Hold it! She's twisting!” or “Steady! The floor's going!”

  There was, however, one successful economy, the fencing of the Wood. This three-acre block of humps and hollows covered with a tangle of trees and undergrowth was useless for any other purpose. It would be ideal, I thought, to run pigs in. For shelter there were two good brick-built Nissen huts, in which the Home Guard had once stored their ammunition. There were many oak trees, whose acorns in due season would be gratefully received. And there would be no need to ring the pigs, for they could root away to their hearts' content. True, there was no drinking water laid on, but that was easily solved — an old bath at the nearest point to the tap and a length of hose. Why spend money on a proper field tank and piping? No need even for feeding troughs. Take a bag of pignuts and throw them on the ground.

  The only problem was one of containment. The perimeter of the Wood was perhaps 600 yards, of which 100 were walled. So I should need 500 yards of pig wire, a formidable outlay. And in practical terms, though the pigs would be unable to get through or over it, how could I be certain that they wouldn't squeeze under it? Somewhere, especially on such rough and steep ground, someone would find or force a way beneath the bottom strand, and the thought of three or four dozen pigs making their way to Bristol or Chipping Sodbury was nightmarish. Any fence must be pigproof or I should never sleep easy.

  I went to the sawmills. “

  Coffin boards,” said the sawyer. “It's coffin boards you want.”

  “Coffin boards?”

  “Like these.” And he showed me a stack of them, long slices of elm an inch or so thick and six feet in length. “Not good enough for the undertaker, these ones. Got a split or a shake or a knothole in them. Ideal for your job.”

  “But they're only two foot high. Any pig'd get over them.”

  “Ah, for the base to your fence, I do mean, young man. Set them well down flush to the ground with a stake driven against them either end, and then all you do want is a bit of wire on top of 'em.”

  And that way it wouldn't need to be so high, I thought, so I bought not 500 but 250 yards of pig wire and Gladwyn and I solemnly cut it all in half longwise.

  And then round the Wood we went with our stakes and our coffin boards and our foreshortened wire. And over the years hundreds of pigs lived there happily, and not one ever escaped.

  This kind of success story was not the general rule. Take my dealings with dealers. Later, in the heyday of the Woodlands pigs when I was running ten sows with my own boar and producing at least 150 weaners a year, there were plenty to fill the sties and a surplus to sell. But in the first days, when the only pig on the place was a large white gilt called Molly that I had bought from the farm attached to a local lunatic asylum, I had to buy “slips”' eight-to ten-week-old youngsters, just off the sow. I knew the sort of pig I wanted to buy and I knew the sort of price I wanted to pay, and even now it amazes me how seldom the two coincided.

  What a joy I must have been to Mr. Hamper.

  Mr. Hamper was distinguishable from his larger pigs by virtue of wearing clothes and standing on his hind legs. Even then his face was so porcine that it was almost a surprise to see hands rather than trotters protruding from the sleeves of his ancient dust coat. Above his several chins, thick lips that half hid yellowish tusks were topped by a squashed nose whose nostrils pointed forward like the mouth of an aimed shotgun. His cheeks hung pendulous, his little eyes glinted, and he always wore, perhaps to conceal huge hairy ears, a woolen hat like a giant's tea cozy.

  Behind Mr. Hamper's house was a yard flanked by a range of a dozen brick-built pigsties, in the nearest of which my trading with him always began, since he used the inner part of it as an office. Or perhaps he lived there, for whenever I knocked on the door of his house and it was opened to me by Mrs. Hamper (a gaunt, ratty woman), the exchange would be the same…

  “Oh, good morning. Is Mr. '”1

  “Round the back.”

  And round the back I would go, across the
yard, into the first sty, and duck low beneath the doorway to find Mr. Hamper inside, in a sitting position. Somewhere underneath him, that is to say, there was a long-suffering chair, but his bulk overflowed and concealed it. The only other furniture in this sparsest of business premises was a rickety table upon which stood two thick pint glasses and a fat black bottle. Here the conversation was also standard, regardless of the time of day.

  “You'll take a drink, young man?”

  My reply evolved from an initial “That's very kind of you” through “Well, it's a bit early (or late) for me” to “No, not for me, thanks, Mr. Hamper,” but the outcome was always the same, since no dealings in the stock market were ever permitted until my glass had been filled and emptied. Only then would he lever himself up with a grunt and allow me to make my wobbly way out of the sty to view what pigs he had to offer.

  Mr. Hamper kept Saddleback sows and crossed them with a Large White boar (that might have been his brother) to produce a very useful sort of blue-and-white pig. Over the years I bought a great many slips from him, and always when we shook hands at the end of a deal, I thought I had had the best of it. True, I had to pay his price. But where would I find a better bunch of pigs? Or a pleasanter man to deal with? Well worth a bit extra. That's what a pint of parsnip wine does for you.

  Eventually I deserted Mr. Hamper for a dealer called Alfred Easy, who never offered me a glass of anything and found for me, more cheaply, pigs of a lesser quality. And he in his turn became unnecessary when, after five years or so, I was in a position to breed my own requirement of store pigs.

  Molly, the first sow, was a pedigree Large White. Early on I had had pipe dreams of establishing a herd (“Bath & West Champion comes, yet again, from the world-famous Woodlands Large Whites”), but as time passed, I decided to do as the rest of the Romans and stick to the local practice of putting the Wessex Saddleback sow, an outlying pig and a good mother, to a Large White boar. This cross resulted in a sensible, trouble-free sort of pig that grew on well to pork or bacon.

  But before I got to that stage, while still at the tender mercies of Hamper or Easy, Molly used to go by trailer to a boar at the other end of the village and would then produce, three months, three weeks, and three days later, a fair number of pigs and do them well. She kept this process up, twice a year, a model mother, until while still in her prime she managed to break a leg out in the Wood and had to be slaughtered.

  Quiet and biddable as she usually was, Molly had seemed to me the ideal subject for an experiment in pig management in the shape of tethering. I bought a very expensive piece of equipment that I had seen attractively advertised, consisting of a complicated harness of the best leather attached by an arrangement of chains and springs to a kind of anchor driven deep into the ground.

  Molly submitted, almost without protest, as Gladwyn and I trussed her up in a positive web of straps and buckles and then condescended to walk, like a huge dog on a lead, to the chosen spot. The tether was clipped onto the harness, and we stood back.

  For a few minutes Molly rooted around, the chain lying slack, the spring unstretched. But in due course she came, first literally and then metaphorically, to the end of her tether. Finding herself restrained by some unknown agency, she gave a loud squeal of fury and put out all her strength. The mighty anchor stood firm, the strong spring expanded but a little, the stout cable tautened and held her tight.

  “You're wasting your time, old girl — that chain would hold a battleship!” I shouted above the squealing. And with that, the beautiful leather strapping all burst like so much binder twine, and Molly galloped angrily into the sunset, the tattered remains of the wonderful patent pig harness flapping forlornly against her sides.

  Molly's replacement was a Saddleback, and by the autumn of 1953 there were four living in the Wilderness henhouses, and trailer rides up the village were becoming altogether too much of a performance. I needed my own boar.

  In those days before the introduction of the Landrace, there was no breed to touch the Large White for bacon production, and when I saw two six-month-old boars advertised locally, I rang up a farmer friend and asked him to come over with me to have a look at them. I suspected that his head was a little leveler than mine. I did not want to buy a pig in a poke.

  It is a most pleasant and comfortable thing to hang over the wall of a sty and look upon pigs. Any kind of pig is of interest, but people who work with stock learn to tell quality; and the two young boars whose backs were scratched that October morning were a picture.

  Litter brothers, they stood shoulder to shoulder and grunted their appreciation of our fingers in the coarse hair of their long, strong backs. Their fringed ears stood stiff, their tails curled tight, and the white lashes lay thick on their closed eyes as they swayed like belly dancers to our touch. The price was right, the bystanding breeder reliable. All I had to do was choose.

  There was nothing in it. Lord knows they had length and to spare. But perhaps one was a shade longer than his brother, and I leaned over and gently pulled his ear.

  “What d'you reckon, Peter? Which would you pick?”

  “There's very little in it, Dick. Perhaps the one you're touching is a shade longer than his brother.”

  Maybe the one we left behind also had a happy and memorable life, but I'm glad I didn't take him. I'm sure he could never have been the pig that Monty was.

  Something-or-other Field Marshal was his registered name, so he had to be called after that self-important little soldier. But everything about my Monty was big — his heart, his appetite, and eventually his size. Once he became too large to get into my pig-weighing machine, there was no way to gauge his weight but by eye, but before his last illness, five years later, I reckon he would have topped 600 pounds.

  By that time he had had for a long while a harem of ten Saddleback sows, roaming the dells and hillocks of the Wood. And always when one happened suddenly upon him around a bush or saw him come crashing through the undergrowth at the cry of “PIG-pig-pig-pig!” and the rattle of the bucket, there would be an instant of shock at the sheer bulk of him. The sows were hardly sylphlike, but when Monty covered one, it seemed that her back must break.

  Yet he was the gentlest of animals. Like all his kind, he loved to be scratched, but he had two particular penchants in the matter. He liked it done on the top of his head, between his great ears; and he liked it done while he was sitting down. Perhaps in the belief that it made things easier for the scratcher — though in fact the reverse was true — he would lower his hams, place his forefeet neatly together, and sit bolt upright, eyes already closing in anticipation.

  If the children were playing in the Wood and came upon him, Monty would immediately sit to attention. And though the girls could reach the tickling spot without too much difficulty, Giles at the age of four or five had to reach right up, his nose level with the boar's tusks, his face almost touching the huge snout.

  A diary entry in 1959 tells the end of the story:

  Thursday 28 May

  Monty died in the small hours. Shall miss him, having had him five years, seven months. Vet did postmortem constipation due to eating earth.

  I hadn't liked the look of him on the Wednesday and was worried enough to seek professional advice but was not at all expecting what I found on the Thursday morning.

  Behind the back doors of the barn was a square area, fenced of course with coffin boards, which led by way of a narrow passage directly to the Wood and thus allowed us to move pigs between one place and the other. In the center of this square was a hollow, the bed of an old pond. Like some African water hole it was often bone-dry, and the sows would lie on its slopes and enjoy the sun like fat ladies at the seaside. Sometimes, in the wet, it had a lovely muddy mess in it and became a wallow.

  That morning there was only one animal lying stretched out on the bank of the pond. For a second I thought that Monty was simply sleeping. But somehow he seemed flattened, almost two-dimensional like a great cardboard figure, and e
ven longer than in life. Later, when the vet cut him open, the endless length of his gut was chock-full of earth, like a giant sausage. Some depravity of appetite had led him to eat the mud of the wallow until at last he was bunged up solid. Not much of a death.

  I have one splendid memento of Monty, a photograph of him in his prime, taken by a press photographer who had come to interview me for an article in a local paper. Majestically, the boar sits on his great backside, and respectfully, I squat before him on my haunches, my fingers making their customary obeisance upon his bristly brow. Some pig.

  Of course there were plenty of other, lesser casualties. Small pigs often died of what we called “the thumps,” a lung condition caused by an infestation of worms. And there were accidents. A slip drowned in one of the old baths that were used as drinking troughs.

  Most losses were from overlaying. In the first days after farrowing, piglets are always at risk. Even the most careful of mothers, getting up or going down with all the caution at her command, cannot alter the fact that she is about 100 times as heavy as one of her newborn children. And squashing apart, sometimes she will accidentally step on one so weightily that the sharp hoof will slice it beyond repair.

  There are devices for the babies' protection — farrowing rails for them to shelter behind, corners for them to withdraw into, crates to contain their mothers — but as a rule, the early part of a piglet's life is hazardous. Maybe it doesn't prove anything, but the times when we never lost babies were when a sow farrowed completely naturally out in the Wood.

  She would make a huge nest, the size of a small room, out of bracken and coarse grasses and twigs and all sorts of other vegetation, always choosing a well-sheltered spot. I remember going out one morning of heavy frost, and all the Wood was white but for one place. It was under a bank that kept the wind away and beneath a big evergreen that would hold the rain off later, there was this enormous bird's nest in which a contented mother brooded a crowd of newborn piglets all as warm as toast.