Peaks and Troughs

by Nick Perry

  And so we walked, and had lunch in ancient Beaumaris with its castle, looking down on a beach that stretched for ever. Where sea birds floated between the yachts, Ros recalled her days here as a child when holidaymakers were few and only the locals dared to swim, for not even in the height of summer did the water warm. Late in the afternoon this little interlude in our lives came to an end and we made our way back to Newborough to pick up our flour from a Belgian farmer called Boinders who had farmed here since the war. Weighed down, we drove back to Dyffryn, Ros with her hand on my knee. All day she had felt like my girl friend, as though we were back in the past.

  We reached another milestone when Ros carried our first loaf from the Aga. Although we should have let the yeast settle for forty-eight hours we couldn’t wait that long. We sat around the table eating warm, buttered slices of freshly baked wholemeal, savouring the taste of each mouthful. Give us this day our daily bread. Sam and Lysta spread honey on theirs, Rob Marmite. Between us we ate the whole loaf. It was a meal in itself, our efforts rewarded, with wheat that we had grown no more than fifty yards from the table. Good for body and soul.

  Every building was now full of pigs; we had forty sows and two hundred porkers fattening up. We’d planted three acres of spuds which Tom ’Tatoes was selling in his shop in Penygroes and wholesaling to the smart hotels in Llandudno. It would tell us whether we had a market for organic produce, apart from those individuals who cared about how vegetables were grown. We weren’t selling to the middle classes in Tunbridge Wells. In that part of the world health food shops were springing up. There people had larger incomes than the rural population of North Wales. On one of our walks, Gwyn told me it was the right idea but too soon; he thought there would not be much interest from a community that of necessity believed in thrift. But people were getting to know about us. Through Vida Koeffman, Jim Best and Rose Tobias a network of people was building up who were prepared to pay a premium price. My mother, too, had joined various groups and was propagating the idea that Dyffryn’s organic foods couldn’t be beaten for taste.

  Ros put together boxes of vegetables fresh from the soil. Earthy, with nothing topped or tailed, leaves and roots attached; at three pounds a box we were making money.

  Harry came up on Thursdays and jointed the meat. We weighed and bagged it, stuck a price tag on. On Friday mornings I loaded the van, a Morris 1000 that my mother had lent us the money to buy, and began my weekly deliveries through the villages of Caernarfonshire. I was able to undercut the local butchers, which I knew might lead to conflict, even a price war, as I built up the sales. Feuds here lasted for years; Gethin Hughes hadn’t spoken to me for fifteen months. Even the union man, who had received no reply to his letters, had been turned away at the gate. Following a solicitor’s letter and the threat of court proceedings the water finally flowed again, clean and uninterrupted, but there had been no reconciliation, and once when we met at the Paragon garage, he gave me a threatening glare, spitting at the ground in front of me.

  ‘There’s bad blood in the man,’ is what Hughie said. ‘But it will die out with him.’ At least with Hughie we had achieved a polite level of mutual toleration. He had his own troubles with Bryn, Dewi having told us the boy had problems holding his alcohol on a Friday night.

  Rob’s hopes of having a fling with Tom ’Tatoes’ daughter Angharad were short lived. They did get together for a time, had a drink in the Vic, played darts, climbed Cwm Silyn. But it went no further than that. She was the only attractive girl in Penygroes and, what’s more, she was switched on to new ideas. Who knows why it didn’t work between them. Maybe because Rob was a traveller. He’d grown up in the metropolis, walked around India, pursued and lived a spiritual life. I couldn’t see him staying much longer at Dyffryn. One day he’d roll out a map of a foreign land and hit the road again. He was still searching, whereas my brother had found a way of life that completely suited him. Jack was planning for us to rent another fifty acres of grazing, up at Cesarea above Carmel. A wild, remote place where the wind was fierce. I’d been there with him to take a look. We could only hear each other if we stood shoulder to shoulder, and were both hoarse after ten minutes. Meg’s fur stood on end, the wind buffeting her like a toy. The whole place was exposed, with only the odd tree bending away from the prevailing winds. In winter the snow would fall heavy and deep. I gave him my opinion that we could only keep sheep here for six months of the year.

  ‘Do you think I’m a fool? Of course I know that.’ Then he told me the rent: ‘Two hundred pounds a year, that’s cheap. We could fatten lambs up here in the summer.’

  We decided to take it, and when he told me an Englishman living in Shrewsbury owned it I said, ‘Can’t we do a deal with him? Let’s offer him some meat for his freezer, if not for all of it, at least for part.’

  ‘Not everyone is receptive to bartering,’ he said.

  ‘Try him; offer him a hundred quid and a pig for the freezer.’

  Jack just laughed. ‘You really are a wheeler dealer, aren’t you?’

  ‘One of us has to be,’ I said.

  ‘You’re becoming just like them,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘No I’m not. I’m learning how to survive, that’s all.’

  On Friday, with a van full of meat and boxes of vegetables, I drove to Llanllyfni to knock on the doors in the high street. I had dressed for the part, wearing a white coat and a Panama hat. It was easier than I thought to tempt the householders to the back of the van, offering a ten per cent introductory discount. My sales pitch was ‘local produce, farm fresh, brought straight to the door at prices cheaper than the shops’. I had sold out by lunchtime, hadn’t even got all the way down the high street. I’d taken over one hundred and eighty pounds; a much larger profit, three times in fact, than if we had sold to FMC.

  I was back at Dyffryn by half past one, when I saw Rob chasing a sow out of the potato field.

  ‘We’ve sold out already,’ I shouted.

  ‘Help me get this bugger back.’

  In my white coat and Panama hat I joined Rob as she zigzagged ahead of us. I knew this sow, a regular escapee. She enjoyed the fun of the chase. She’d let us get close, then be off again. Wearing leather shoes with no grip, I wasn’t up to the task, but she ran into a dead end where we thought we had her cornered. Even then she wasn’t finished but squeezed past us and made her escape down the drive past the house towards the lower fields.

  These breakouts had become almost a daily occurrence. If a pig can work something loose it’s like a child who keeps wobbling a tooth until it comes out. The bolts slotted into the wall were never a tight fit, so the sows played with them constantly. Eventually gaining unexpected freedom, they roamed at large, causing havoc. I put it down to boredom. I was always telling Jack that the way to tell pigs are much more intelligent than sheep is that they get bored. I told Harry we should change the name of the farm to Colditz.

  If it happened during the night they could be a danger to themselves. One morning we found a gilt lying stone dead in the stream, her four trotters stuck up in the air. We lifted her out and she was unusually heavy. Always loath to call the vet, we carried out our own autopsy. With a scalpel I cut open her stomach, and saw it was full of a partly congealed grey powder, some of which had hardened into concrete balls. A mystery, until we discovered that after her escape she had broken down the door of the shed where we kept building materials, found a bag of cement powder and scoffed the lot. Naturally, after that she had needed a drink and made her way to the stream to quench her thirst. I cut enough cement out of her to make half a breeze block. It was no laughing matter, just another item for the loss column.

  I had to get out of those clothes. On my way to the house I was met by Sam and Lysta who were involved in their own little drama. Both carrying bamboo canes, they looked most concerned about something.

  ‘Dad, quick, come and see.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s a snake in the loo and it’s alive.
’

  They dragged me towards the lavatory.

  ‘Where’s Mum?’ I said.

  ‘In the vegetable garden with Granny. Dad, it’s a huge snake.’

  ‘Why have you got those sticks?’

  ‘We’ve been trying to get it out.’

  I leaned over the loo bowl. It was grey, curled up, looking at us with a serpent’s face.

  ‘It’s not a snake,’ I said, ‘it’s an eel.’

  ‘What’s an eel?’

  ‘It’s like a snake, but it lives in water.’

  ‘Shall we kill it, Dad?’

  ‘No!’

  It had obviously come down the stream and into the holding tank, slid along the pipe feeding the house, and ended up in the loo. It was a repulsive sight, and I supposed we would have to flush the thing away to meet its doom in the cesspit. But during these gruesome deliberations Ros and my mother joined us.

  ‘What are you all doing in here?’ Ros asked.

  ‘Take a look for yourself.’

  ‘Oh, how frightful,’ said my mother. ‘It’s an anaconda.’

  ‘No, it’s just an eel. I was about to flush it away.’

  ‘No, don’t be so horrible. Get me my Marigolds,’ said Ros.

  She grabbed the eel behind its head and put it into a plastic shopping bag. We carried it out to the stream, released it below the holding tank and watched it slip away to continue its journey downstream, none the worse for its experience.

  Sam and Lysta were straight on the phone telling the whole story in Welsh to their grandparents.

  They wouldn’t settle that night when we got them to bed, asking if it could happen again. ‘Could one come down the bath tap?’ Lysta wanted to know. ‘I’m frightened of sitting on the loo.’

  Such had been the distractions since my return from a highly successful morning in Llanllyfni that it was only at supper, when Jack and Rob had joined us, that we talked of the exciting possibilities that lay ahead. There was no false optimism in our discussion of what I truly believed was a turning point in our dire financial situation. Ros suggested we print business cards to put in letter boxes, asking people to telephone if they would like us to call. And what a response we got! I never knew there were so many people with freezers, most of the calls coming from customers wanting a price for half an animal. Our margins weren’t as good when people bought in bulk, but it was still better than selling to FMC. The money rolled in, mostly cash from door-to-door sales. We banked it every Monday, Geoffrey Nicholls warming to me as the loan diminished.

  One Monday he saw me standing at the counter depositing another £300 and he signalled to me to come and join him in his office. I had always felt his friendliness towards me was exaggerated, because of his relationship with Gwyn. But today his expression showed a self-satisfied smugness. I sat with him as he examined his fingernails, softening me up with superficial flattery such as ‘You must be feeling very proud of yourself’.

  ‘Just pleased to be paying off the overdraft,’ I said.

  He changed tack then. ‘What an extraordinary man your father-in-law is. He’s been telling me about the new paediatric ward that’s opening soon. We’re all helping to raise the money, each of us doing our bit.’ But, finally he got to the point.

  ‘A baler.’

  ‘A baler?’ I repeated.

  Had I thought about buying a baler, rather than bringing in a contractor?

  No, I hadn’t.

  ‘I could extend the loan. Perhaps you should consider it.’

  Maybe I would, but rather than giving him an answer I suggested he should support my enterprise and buy half a pig for his freezer. It startled him somewhat. I said, ‘You do, of course, have a freezer?’

  ‘Yes, in the garage, next to the golf clubs.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘have a word with your wife. I shall look forward to your order.’ I shook his hand and left the office.

  Geoffrey Nicholls had seen another side to me that day. I’d come to realise that banks are sellers, just like any other business. Psychologically, we go to them cap in hand, our heads bowed, pleading with them to agree an idea’s viable. But Geoffrey Nicholls’ business was lending money, so why shouldn’t he become my customer just as much as I was his. Maybe Jack was right when he said that I was becoming like them. But I hadn’t pushed my luck too far, for the very next day his wife Gwenda rang, ordering not half a pig but a whole lamb to be delivered to their house in Bontnewydd.

  It had crossed my mind that every day Dave wasn’t shagging he fell into a state of boredom, pacing his pen and chewing the metal bars of his prison. It had always been my plan to run him down in the lower fields. But this was not possible for he needed to be near the sows after their piglets had been weaned. His presence stimulated their cycle, helping to bring them into season. Not a good idea to remove him from his kingdom and keep him far away, even if it meant he was living a more interesting life. So, just as one walks the dog, I walked the pig. Or rather the pig walked me. Dave never knew his own strength, and although he ambled along in what you could describe as a pedestrian fashion he was unaware that he was pulling the ball out of my shoulder socket. As Lysta watched me struggling to hold him she told me I’d soon have one arm longer than the other. This remark brought tears of laughter, as Sam imagined me having to wear a pullover with an extra-long sleeve.

  When the children began at Carmel school I decided Dave should accompany us on the walk to wait for the bus that crawled up the hill from Penygroes. His lead was a double-linked chain attached to a metal ring on a studded leather collar. Very diamond Del Monte. We could see the single-decker bus some way off, labouring around the tight bends. It would appear then disappear, a thin exhaust cloud floating across the fields like a blue halo carried on the breeze. When we spotted the bus passing the cemetery gates we knew that it would arrive in three and a half minutes and in that time, every morning, we started to train Dave as one would a dog. We all had a go at trying to make him sit, but to begin with it was a complete waste of time. Sam lifted up his great floppy ears and shouted ‘Sit’, but it had not the slightest effect. However, in the animal as well as the human world, treats are a big incentive. Bribes serve a purpose, and Dave’s taste buds succumbed to a broad spectrum of delights. So on these morning walks to the farm gate we filled our pockets with whatever we could lay our hands on. Toast crusts with Marmite were a particular favourite, and banana skins. It took a week, but eventually we got him to sit, not exactly like a dog because that would have flattened his balls, but slightly to one side in a rather elegant pose, his head always tilted upwards, fitting for a king from a long line of masculine success. Dave did indeed have a regal presence.

  And more was to emerge from this pig with a developing personality. One morning Sam and Lysta were in the doldrums and were too grumpy to do anything, lagging behind, grumbling, dragging their heels. I shouted to them, ‘Come on, Dave will give you a lift to the bus.’ And to my surprise he readily accepted them, allowing them to ride him like two little jockeys. Sam and Lysta told their classmates how they arrived to wait for the bus, but no one believed them, so the next day when the bus pulled up there they sat astride Dave, holding their satchels. A busload of faces pressed to the windows. It became a daily occurrence if the weather allowed it, until Sam brought home a letter from the headmaster.

  Ros read it to me over supper after the children had gone to bed.

  Dear Mr and Mrs Perry

  It has been brought to my notice that your children ride on the back of a pig to meet the school bus. Although this does not contravene any of the school rules, they unfortunately bring the smell of the animal with them into the classroom. The unpleasant aroma lingers, and some of the children sitting close by have been seen holding their noses.

  This of course is a distraction to the teacher, who has informed me she does not have the class’s full attention. If you could please resort to a more orthodox mode of transport, namely walking to meet the bus, this would be greatly
appreciated by all members of staff.

  Yours sincerely,

  Bob Parry.

  Rob now covered for me on the farm on Fridays and Saturday mornings. Leaning over the gate into Frieda’s field one evening, watching an autumn sunset glowing over a phosphorescent sea, we discussed his being paid a wage. I would be lost without him. As we passed a joint between us, I said how about thirty-five quid a week. ‘Cash, of course, on top of full board and lodging, I think they call it.’

  It took him by surprise, and he told me it was far too much. ‘Give me twenty,’ he said, so we settled on twenty-five, the first time I’d had to bargain in reverse.

  He did ask for some perks to be thrown in. He wanted the Land Rover on Sundays to get away from the place, go further afield than Penygroes. Who could blame him? ‘Fine,’ I said, realising that would be the end to any over-indulgences on a Saturday night. It was the only time Ros and I went to town with each other, the way we used to.

  Standing there in that chilling evening, as the stars illumined the heavens while the Wicklow Mountains darkened like the spines of prehistoric creatures, we turned to talking of other things. Rob wondered why we were here. ‘The ultimate question,’ I said.

  ‘No, not here as in why do we exist, but here in North Wales. What’s it all about, this bit of our lives?’

  I struggled for an original response, considering feeble alternatives such as ‘It’s better than living in a city’ or ‘Well it’s a good place to bring up children, living off the land’. But I supposed he meant the way of life, hard as it could be. ‘It’s probably my favourite way to waste a bit of time.’

  ‘What, living here at Dyffryn?’

  ‘No, leaning over a gate watching the twilight unfolding.’

  Then, from an upstairs window, came the call that we had heard far too often. ‘Dad, there’s a pig out.’

  And off we ran, yet again armed with a broom and shovel, pushing the sow back up the drive, cursing the beast for breaking our reflective mood. Nothing could bring you back down to earth like a straying pig.