Peaks and Troughs

by Nick Perry

  One of the old Welsh superstitions is that you do not eat pork unless there is an R in the month. In August the price of pork was at its lowest, but probably because everybody was on holiday, reducing the demand for it. However, I had a batch ready for FMC and booked in for Friday, and rather than worry about the price I was going to get, decided to go ahead and take them to the abattoir. Harry offered to lend me his Austin A60 van, not wanting me to have to pay Gitto, the local haulier from Groeslon, who would turn up late and clobber me for twenty quid in cash there and then.

  ‘The wipers are buggered, but it has got a tax disc,’ Harry said. ‘It will carry the pigs no problem.’

  So Rob and I loaded eight whining porkers into the back of Harry’s van. It was a warm, beautiful summer’s morning, with not a cloud to be seen. Jack was being a guinea pig for Rose Tobias who was attempting her first portrait painting, and Ros and the children were over in Harlech, enjoying themselves on the beach with Gwyn and Eryl. Harry was going to investigate why the water levels had dropped so low in the stream, and I was giving Rob a lift into Penygroes. He was going to put a card in the newsagent’s window saying Caravan wanted. Must be in good condition. He’d felt for some time that he shouldn’t be sharing the house with us any longer. It was our family home and he wanted somewhere private, so we agreed a caravan should be parked below the house. We would run an electric cable to it and then he could have his own space, put in a TV if he wanted to, listen to his own music.

  He was also going to have a chat with Tom ‘’Tatoes’ (pronounced Tatters), the greengrocer, who drove twice a week to Liverpool and came back with a lorry-load of vegetables to sell in his wife’s shop in Union Street. Rob could smell a business opportunity, thinking that if Tom was driving all the way to Liverpool every week, he would save a lot by selling locally produced vegetables instead. Harry was convinced he would be interested. Rob volunteered to discuss the idea with him for two reasons. One, because he thought we should grow more potatoes in the top fields. And two, because Tom ’Tatoes had an attractive daughter, the only girl in Penygroes who interested him.

  So, after dropping Rob off, I drove to Caernarfon with a van full of pigs. I was wearing only a T-shirt over a pair of jeans, but with the heat coming from the porkers the windscreen steamed up and I lowered my window.

  I was in a particularly good mood. I don’t know why, but stuck in my head was Shirley Bassey’s ‘Big Spender’. I’d always sung my own version; the children loved it. ‘The minute you walked in the room, you could see I was a man in suspenders, great big suspenders, good looking, so refined, honey, honey, won’t you tell me what’s going on in your mind?’

  Approaching Caernarfon high street, the traffic came to a standstill. After a few minutes horns began to sound and people were leaving their cars to find out the reason for the hold-up. Apparently a lorry had broken down, so I turned off the engine and sat in the sweltering heat, hearing the pigs behind me getting increasingly agitated. The van was becoming like an oven, so I opened the passenger-side window in an effort to circulate some air. That was my big mistake. With no grille separating the back of the van from the front, in a split second one of the pigs had jumped over my shoulder, out through the open window, and run off down the high street, scattering pedestrians in all directions. It disappeared into the crowd of shoppers, moving at such speed that I lost sight of it. It didn’t help matters that some of the motorists who had seen what had happened leant on their horns, and cheered as the farce unfolded. I had to think fast, and winding up the windows I leapt out of the van and chased after the blighter. We were in the middle of the tourist season; families ambling with their children sucking lollipops prevented me from getting up any speed. The whole atmosphere in the street was one of a fiesta. By the time I had zigzagged through the nearest group I had no idea where the porker had gone.

  ‘If you’re looking for a pig it’s in WH Smith’s,’ shouted an elderly lady.

  ‘It’s probably gone to pick up the Radio Times,’ I heard some joker with a Brummie accent quip.

  I charged into the shop to find the fugitive tearing a book by Enid Blyton to shreds. On the floor lay the half-chewed remains of a box of crayons.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said to the customers cowering in a corner. ‘Stay calm, it’s only a pig.’

  Some chap was approaching holding a broom, thrusting it out like a lance.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ I said. Grabbing the escapee’s back legs and lifting its arse high in the air, I forced it to walk forward on its front trotters. Step by step we made our way to the door, past a shop assistant holding a mop and bucket. Somehow I tiptoed the porker through the astonished crowd, inching our way up the street. I displayed an exaggerated nonchalance, smiling politely as if it was no more than an everyday occurrence.

  It’s always best to downplay these things. The public don’t know the damage pigs can do, and bloody quickly! This one would have destroyed most of the shop in half an hour. Now all everyone could see in front of them was a pig being manhandled, screaming and squealing as if in extreme pain. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Pigs like to ham it up.

  The traffic was now on the move, although at a standstill behind the van. Despite no offers of help, I managed to get the pig to the back doors. Some of the onlookers had now taken out their cameras and were photographing the debacle.

  ‘Please,’ I shouted, ‘can someone open the door!’ and at last a policeman came forward, and between us we lifted the porker back into the van.

  Out of breath and sweating like a pig myself, I realised the ordeal did not end there. The police officer insisted on questioning me about the incident.

  ‘You say the pig was in WH Smith’s,’ he said, finding it hard to keep a straight face.

  Then Branwen Pryce, the shop manager, appeared, asking what I intended to do about the damage. I gave her my name and address, telling her I would settle up when I returned from the abattoir.

  ‘I will of course have to report the incident to head office.’

  ‘So it really was in WH Smith’s,’ said the disbelieving policeman.

  Within hours the whole incident was common knowledge. That night the telephone rang several times, one of the calls coming from a reporter on the Caernarfon Gazette. I could see the headline already: ‘Pig causes mayhem in WH Smith’. Everywhere I went for the next two weeks people wanted to hear about it. My mother told me I was the talk of the village, that she had received lots of invitations to afternoon teas. ‘Got yourself written into Welsh folklore,’ was how Dewi described it. ‘Something I’ve been trying to do for years, and you managed it with a pig that decided to go shopping.’ When Ros and I took the children up to the Carmel school to be introduced to Bob Parry, the headmaster, he too had to mention it. And so it went on until gradually it faded away, and I was left in peace.

  Over in Pant Glas Rob found the caravan he wanted. Stuck away in the corner of a field, it had been rented out to tourists in the summer months. It had all mod cons: a Calor gas stove, a little kitchen area, electric lights, an Elsan loo. The only problem was getting it out; our Massey Ferguson wasn’t up to the job. The owner wanted £150 but we had to take it away. So Harry got hold of a mate, Boomer Harris, manager of Talysarn Celts, the local football team, a tractor driver on the Glynllifon estate. He would tow it to Dyffryn for £25. We levelled the ground below the house and Harry ran out a length of cable.

  So Rob had electricity, but water was not so easy. From time to time through the summer we had run short, the holding tank not filling up, the stream no more than a trickle. Harry had his own ideas about this: he thought that Gethin Hughes upstream was diverting the flow to irrigate his crops, ‘pinching water’, as he called it. But we had no proof, and if we were going short, why had Hughie never come to find out what was going on? So I went and talked to him about it. He said he was on the mains, couldn’t care less what the water level was. ‘Animals piss in it, your pigs roll in it. I would never take water
from that stream. Water and walls,’ he said, ‘the two main reasons men fall out. So what are you going to do about it?’

  I didn’t answer him, but asked why he was on the mains and Dyffryn wasn’t.

  ‘Distance,’ he said. ‘They only had to run an underground pipe fifty yards from the road down to Llwyndu Canol. You’re half a mile away; that would cost at least a couple of thousand. The Mustos couldn’t afford that. There’s only one thing to do. Go and have it out with him over at Cae Uchaf.’

  So I was going to have to face up to a situation I had been turning a blind eye to. All the alarm bells of Mrs Musto’s letter started to ring out, but now I had no alternative.

  It was less than a ten-minute walk to Cae Uchaf. I climbed the slate stile over the boundary wall, following the stream that ran across Gethin’s fields. The water level was low but flowing clear, the well-maintained banks thick with grass and reeds, wild flowers growing in little clusters. I could pick out the sheep track snaking away ahead of me, disappearing through a gap in the wall where a gate had once hung. Above me I could see the farmhouse with its walls of stone under a slate roof. There were a few sheep penned in the yard, which Gethin was funnelling through a weighing machine. His wife, whom I had never met, was leaning over them, dabbing their rumps with red dye. Gethin saw me approaching and she scurried off into the house.

  Don came running towards me barking, jumping up, pushing me with his front paws. He could smell Meg and stayed with me, sniffing, until I reached Gethin.

  His greeting was friendly enough. ‘What brings you here today?’ Rather than take the long route through the pleasantries, I went straight to the heart of the matter, expressing my concerns about the water.

  ‘What makes you think I’ve got anything to do with it?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said, and asked him again if he knew what could be causing it.

  ‘Well, see for yourself how it flows.’

  I knew already trouble was coming. I could tell he resented my being there; it was the tone in his voice. So I asked him how much water was coming down from the hills.

  ‘How do I know? It’s underground.’

  ‘But it runs as a stream through the fields before it reaches your house,’ I said.

  Then he turned nasty. ‘Are you accusing me of diverting the water, boy?’

  ‘No.’ I asked him if he recalled our first meeting, how he had come to Dyffryn, telling me good walls make good neighbours. At this point I noticed his wife framed in the window staring at us unmoving, like someone hidden away in another world.

  ‘You’d better be off,’ he said, ‘before I say something I might regret.’

  I warned him that I wouldn’t let the matter rest. What lay behind this man’s mean-spirited attitude, someone who had no son to follow him, who was quick enough to exploit Jack’s good nature? So I told him that I would take it up with the union, get them to investigate who was diverting the water. As I walked away he shouted after me, ‘Don’t set foot on my land again.’

  Harry was the next person I saw. He knew immediately by the look on my face that things had gone badly. I was short-tempered with him. ‘I don’t need you to say anything about it. I want no poisoned opinion. It will do no good.’

  ‘Don’t take it out on me. It’s not me pinching your water.’

  When I got back to the house I rang Gwyn and told him what had happened. I needed some calm rational thinking. I was furious, and wanted to vent my anger. He listened to every word, and at the end of my diatribe said that ignorance is a heavy boulder to roll away from a closed mind.

  Rob thought calling in the union was the right thing to do, while Jack said we should keep a door open with Gethin. ‘You keep it bloody open then,’ I snapped. Ros, apart from saying how disappointing it all was, seemed undisturbed, sleeping well that night. I couldn’t get the thing out of my head.

  Tom ’Tatoes rang, and asked me down for a drink in the Vic. Rob had filled me in, following their chat about our plan to grow potatoes at Dyffryn. As I walked into the pub, it came back to me why I stayed away from the place. I felt like a stranger coming to town, walking into a saloon in the Wild West, where the piano player gradually stops playing, heads slowly turn, glasses are lowered to the table. Lined up along the bar, a row of grim unshaven faces were staring into the mirror, watching my every move. Any one of them could have swivelled round, pulled out a Colt 45 and plugged me full of holes. That’s how it felt.

  But they didn’t, and I asked for a packet of crisps and half a pint of light ale. I hate the stuff, but could sip it slowly while I sat waiting for Tom beneath the propeller-blade fans that whirled above me. The brightly patterned carpet was marked by cigarette burns and the wallpaper, embossed with curlicues, was covered with the patina of tobacco smoke. At the next table an old timer with a Jack Russell lit a Capstan Full Strength. Sitting opposite, his wife, no doubt of many years, was staring past him, lost in her own thoughts. Each time she took a drink from her sherry glass, with her head tilted back he quickly slipped a crisp into the dog’s mouth. On the jukebox Ricky Nelson was singing ‘Travelin’ Man’, a melancholy song about someone who was always moving on, unlike the drinkers in the Vic, who stayed put, bound to their habits; you could see it in the look of them. This was a man’s place, women didn’t come in here on their own. On Sundays the men would stay sober, clean shaven in their suits, walk with their wives to the chapel to pray for the mitigating circumstances of their lives to be taken into consideration. A way of thinking can spread like an infection through a small community; it can get into the bloodstream, nobody having the antidote. It leads to fixed opinions and hardened attitudes. There are no new ideas here, I said to myself.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ apologised Tom ’Tatoes pulling up a chair, putting down on the table a pint and two packets of peanuts. ‘I saw you had a drink.’

  Tom, at a guess in his mid-forties, exuded a positive energy. I warmed to him and his wife, the way they ran the shop, always welcoming. We talked about his business and I told him what I wanted to do at Dyffryn. He was keen, thinking of the future and his daughter Angharad who would take over the business, knowing that changes had to come.

  ‘I’m not sure about all this organic stuff. Maybe down south, but here I don’t think so, not in my lifetime.’ It wasn’t long before an hour had passed. He was on his third pint, me still sipping on my half. ‘You drink as though you’re having a cup of tea,’ he said.

  Tom was the first man in the village I felt a kinship with. We agreed to meet again and that Angharad would come along. ‘And bring your friend Rob. He seems to have a lot to say on the matter.’

  We were now making monthly runs to the abattoir, and rather than repeat the experience of the WH Smith fiasco we hired Gitto for cash up front and no invoice. He was good mates with Harry and they doubled up in the Quarryman’s darts team. He had the look of a man who fell out of bed each morning, his thick curly hair matted with insect life; he was obviously without a woman. A wren could easily have been nesting in his untidy beard, and his ruddy complexion reminded me of Jethro Tull. From the evidence of his bumper and smashed wing mirrors, he was not a skilful driver. Every time he reversed through the gate at Dyffryn, removing more paintwork, his reaction was, ‘I’m much better when I’m going forward.’

  Our system for loading porkers was now almost foolproof. When Gitto eventually lined the lorry up with the holding pen, we placed barriers of corrugated sheeting either side and ran them straight up the ramp and into the back. Ninety-five per cent of our pigs graded A; they looked lean and healthy. Rob and I worked well together. We knew the routine; always after a batch left the place there was the inner satisfaction of a job well done.

  Jack was now a full-time working shepherd. We only saw him in the evenings when he came by for a drink and a smoke. We talked about our day, and then he’d be off up to Rose Tobias’s cottage, while Rob enjoyed cooking his own meals and would disappear into his caravan. Ros and I would get the children t
o bed and then eat together, the house quiet and calm, just the two of us. She was keen to push ahead with selling vegetables and to get Harry to butcher our pork, which I could sell door to door in the neighbouring villages. She knew we weren’t making any money, but she didn’t know how much we were losing. No one would ever know, unless they asked to see the accounts.

  ‘We’ll get it right soon, then we could think about having another child,’ she said.

  At which point I turned on the record player and pulled from the shelf one of my favourite Van Morrison tracks, and my brown-eyed girl and I went a-laughing and a-running upstairs to bed.

  7

  Just a-Walking the Pig

  Within us all, to varying degrees, there is the need to take risks. I had taken us to the edge, stood on the financial cliff and stared into the abyss. I decided we had to take a giant step forward if we were going to become viable. In other words start making some money. I was going to have a cold store built in the barn adjoining the house. It would cost £1,000. We had pork, lamb and now at last beef coming through, and to exploit this fully we would butcher our own meat and sell direct to the end user, where the profit was to be made. Everyone agreed. I didn’t feel alone, just nervous.

  It was now the spring of ’74, and all our food came from the farm. We had grown half an acre of wheat which we’d cut by hand using sickles and scythes; after gathering the sheaves, we threshed the grain into metal drums which we emptied into sacks. We had stored it over winter, and now Ros and I drove to Anglesey, where it was to be stone-milled into a fine flour. We decided to disappear for the day; I’d never explored Anglesey. After dropping off our sacks of wheat we drove to Plas Newydd and wandered along the Menai Strait. Looking across at Snowdonia on a spring day when the sun is high one can see the grass greening, advancing up the hills. The blueness of a clear sky accentuating the silvery waterfalls, a gentler face comes upon the solemn grandeur of the mountain ranges.