Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France

by Jacqueline Yallop

  Big Pig, Little Pig

  * * *

  JACQUELINE YALLOP

  A Tale of Two Pigs in France

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Notes

  Follow Penguin

  1.

  There is only one photograph of me on my fortieth birthday: January, a clear blue midwinter sky, sharp shadows. I’m wearing dark green overalls and wellies. The overalls are new, criss-crossed with pristine white zips, only a dusting of mud around the knees. I’m sitting on a pile of clean, fresh straw. Across the top of the picture, around head height, there’s a long strip of old corrugated metal, some thick weathered tarpaulin and a couple of planks; another piece of metal is propped upright behind my shoulder. Beyond, in bright light, it’s possible to make out the textures of a ragged stone wall and trails of ivy. I’m at the edge of a kind of den which recedes darkly behind me.

  Later that day, before the sun drops too low, we have a celebratory barbecue. The front door to our house is on the first floor, approached by a broad flight of cracked stone steps; the top of the steps widens to create a concrete platform, a small square terrace by the door. This faces south: the sun pounds it all summer and even in January, on a fine day, it’s sheltered and warm. We’ve eaten Christmas lunch here once or twice. And this is where I sit now, in a pool of faint warmth, while I open presents. Pork chops cook on the grill and Ed, my husband, pours wine. We talk about the odd construction we built that morning out of bits and pieces unearthed from the shed and garden: the main structure is cobbled together from a large plastic picnic table covered with the sheets of corrugated iron and secured with heavy planks. It has extra support at one end from two wooden pallets set upright and wedged against a tree stump; the other end is blocked off by another, smaller sheet of corrugated iron which is too holey to form any kind of roof but which encloses the space, in the same way a windbreak at the beach marks off a patch of sand. At various points, the slim trunks of young plum trees act as buttresses. Inside, it’s high enough to crawl easily on your hands and knees, or to crouch. You can lie out flat, should you want to, nestling into the straw, with enough space for a friend to lie alongside you, although the end of your legs will poke out into the open.

  This is our pig shelter. We’ve built it on a small piece of land about ten minutes’ walk from our house, a disused orchard surrounded by ivied stone walls and accessed through a small wooden door. No one has paid any attention to this land for years. It’s only around twenty paces wide and long – too small a patch to be of agricultural use – and, in addition, cut off from the fields around it by its walls. It’s stuffed full with brambles, nettles and weak trees; the walls are crumbling in places, or completely fallen, the ivy roots pulling the stones apart. The door was once painted white, but now has a blueish-grey tone; the wood is rotten at the edges and along the bottom; you feel it give as you push it open. The first time I did this, fighting to open the door against the foliage beyond, catching my first glimpse of the enclosure within, full of skittering great tits and bramblings, snakes, no doubt, rabbits and mice, hidden things, I felt my heart in my throat; a secret-garden moment of discovery. And just as in The Secret Garden, this land does not belong to me; I have no rights over it. But it feels instantly special, intimate. It feels like my land, my patch, a hidden place. I’m already curious about its histories. Who planted the fruit trees? Why is such a small piece of land enclosed so carefully? Who tended this before me; who was it who came and pushed the little door, who whitewashed it?

  In this derelict part of France there are plenty of such unanswered questions, glimpses of forgotten lives seen out of the corner of your eye: in every cluster of houses there are those which are dilapidated, sunken and ruined; between the neatly kept pastures, with fences and gates, there are frequently parcels of overgrown land with old or fallen trees, high, tangled weeds and crumbling walls through which deer and boar and badgers come and go. This is a long-peopled but empty land, a place of ancient dolmens, crumbling medieval villages half-lived-in, a network of old drystone huts, caselles, which once gave shelter to those working the fields or tending the animals – protection from the hot sun or the rain, an overnight bothy – and which are now crammed with bits and pieces of rusting farm equipment, or simply forgotten. The web of walled paths and tracks which divides the meadows one from the other and links each small hamlet with the next is unmarked and unreliable: here and there the tracks have been dug over and the stone taken away; others have been fenced off or blocked by tangles of brilliant-blue agricultural string; many are simply too overgrown to pass. This is the département known as the Aveyron, the rural heart of south-west France, a poor region on the edge of the massive, unforgiving limestone causse, a long way from motorways and TGV connections and urban centres, not well marked on tourist maps: the evidence of many pasts has been left to rot down here.

  Our would-be pig enclosure is one of these abandoned remnants, too insignificant a plot for farmers to bother with, not worth the time and money required to salvage it. Our house has a large garden, almost an acre, mostly just a grassy field with a few patches of lavender and roses, hollyhocks and sweet william close to the house, a long wide strip given over to growing vegetables, some fruit and nut trees and a boggy pond that burps with frogs. But it’s not ideal land for pigs: it’s too open, bitty and irregular in shape, difficult to fence, making it almost impossible to keep livestock from encroaching on the house, the flower beds, the washing line. So we’ve borrowed this plot from some friends who have a portfolio of similar scraps of land, and who have agreed to lend us this one for a few months until the pigs outgrow it. It is accessible down a rutted track which turns off the lane which runs to our house; at one side there’s a small barn; across the track a ruined farmhouse with sagging outbuildings and a charming circular tower, a pigeonnier once used to keep doves, a fairy-tale relic. This place, this hamlet, has a name, Mas de Maury, and a deep well which remains full except in the driest of summers; here and there you can see the broken outlines of other walls, buried and scrappy. Mas is the way of naming many of the hamlets here, the lieu-dit, the way a place is called; it’s from Occitan, the local language, which borrows and lends to other languages in the area like Catalan and Provençal. Mas apparently comes from the Latin mansum, ‘the place where one remains’. From the same root, modern French gets manoir and maison. The designation Mas was used through the Middle Ages to mark a farmhouse of stature with dependent workers, a relatively wealthy place, a key player in the feudal system. What we see here are the remains of several families, or several clusters of the same family, a thriving enterprise, a community. There’s a simple stone cross at the end of the track to the Mas de Maury, where it leaves the road; it’s marked at the base with initials: I. B. A whisper of the family that lived and farmed here, nothing more. Now there’s no one, except us.

  We’d taken several days to clear the dense nettles and brambles. We had to cut our way through the door; cut our way into the door in the first place, hacking at the thick boughs of ivy that looped across it, and then inching it open, feeling the planks shudder, pushing it in the end just far enough to squeeze through. We borrowed a heavy-duty strimmer and worked painstakingly towards the centre of the land, disturbing all kinds of things with the noise and upheaval: a female kestrel that had settled in the barn and wheeled back and forth over our heads, flicking shadows; cormorants passing the winter in a huge ash tree by the lake a little further on; d
eer that bolted out of the hedges and bounced away, their white rumps bobbing. For a while, the skies and fields were skittish with anxiety and it felt as though we were intruding.

  But the commotion, the disturbance, passes. The land gets cleared. The cormorants hunch again on the high branches, still and slightly sinister, and I trust that the deer return too, invisibly, lightly. Our comings and goings become part of this place. But I never lose the feeling that I’m being granted temporary leave to belong here; I become aware, all around me, of time, as though you can see it, as though it thickens the air, and I see quite clearly my smallness, my briefness, here, on this patch of land which other people, many other people over many centuries, have cleared and tended and abandoned, and which has allowed me to inhabit it for a while.

  We’ve set up the shelter close to the highest of the stone walls for protection. Crawling in underneath, we push at the makeshift sides in the way we think a pig might. Nothing gives. We congratulate ourselves on its stability. When we lie in the straw, this feels like a cosy place, a den. I sense the primeval rush that comes from having made a safe shelter, the home-making impulse stripped bare: here among the fields that fold and stretch away on either side, the dense blocks of forest and the old tracks which join them, here is a square of land protected by a high wall, and inside this square is a new three-sided shack that will keep out the rain and wind and could be thought of as a ‘house’.

  Ten years earlier, when I turned thirty, I was working as an art gallery curator, indoors, in an immaculate, catalogued, climate-controlled environment. I did not own overalls or even wellies; I walked out at weekends on footpaths, and occasionally, at the end of a summer’s day, I would lie back in the heather on the hills. But mostly I went shopping in my lunch hour, waited for buses and trains, accommodated myself to a townscape. To celebrate my thirtieth birthday, I met a few friends for a drink in Sheffield town centre; we ate burgers and ice cream in an American diner. The evening was drizzly and a bit grey. I don’t remember much about it. It was pleasant enough, ordinary. But this, for my fortieth birthday, this is memorable; this now feels extraordinary. I wriggle in the straw; I lie out flat, staring at the metal roof above, pocked with holes through which the sky burns blue; I smell the rawness of this earth all around, laid newly bare, the freshness of the stalks of weeds that remain standing here and there, the damp dust of the old stone. I hear the silence of a cold winter morning when the air is crisp and pinkish with frost.

  This is when the photo is taken: click: happy birthday.

  It was Ed’s idea, first, to get pigs. I’m not sure such a thing would ever have crossed my mind. We didn’t move to France with any particular plans for self-sufficiency or a back-to-nature odyssey. We came more or less accidentally, on something of a whim, because we could, because our freelance writing work and the inexorable spread of the Internet made it possible to live anywhere and this seemed as good a place as any, a workaday, inelegant, unhurried place of distant horizons. Neither of us comes from farming or even rural families; neither of us had expressed a secret passion for a smallholding. I was a middle-class, suburban, only child, brought up in the cul-de-sacs of Birmingham and Manchester, in nice family streets where the gardens were taken up with lawns and flower beds and paddling pools, and everyone laughed at Tom and Barbara trying to keep livestock in the potting shed because that was the nature of The Good Life, a comedy, an eccentricity, not something real people did. I’d been taught to value the clean and orderly, the predictable. I didn’t have a pet. But I did love being outside. At this point it couldn’t be called anything as grand as a passion for nature, since I really only glimpsed nature by default in fleeting moments, disconnected from my daily life, but it was bright and auspicious, nonetheless: gathering conkers on a windy day, digging up worms in the garden, kicking through leaves on the way to school, summer picnics in country parks. There was a specialness about the outdoors, I realized that already. It had something to do with freedom and adventure, independence, courage; it also, somehow, touched on my interest in history and archaeology, in how people had lived and the things they left behind. But I didn’t know where the connections were, or how to express them; I didn’t know what it was that drew me to green places of moss and air, old trees, tatty urban fields, a mysterious outdoors where the sky and the land slipped away together in the distance, and layers of me peeled away, too, so that what was left was essential and unequivocal.

  One of my clearest childhood memories comes from the summer when I was eleven. I went on holiday with my parents to the Yorkshire Dales. I went from a road in Birmingham, a busy commercial road with shops and petrol stations and traffic lights, to a cottage in Nidderdale. As soon as we arrived, while my parents unpacked, I ran up the hill, a distance of no more than a couple of hundred yards, and threw myself down in the shelter of a stone wall. Below me, the valley opened up, green and rolling and apparently without end; a few cottages here and there, a sweeping sky. I remember this, even now, with absolute clarity. I felt as though I had been tipped out of a box and fallen to this place, this utterly unexpected other world, and the landing had taken my breath away. I remember small things: a bee buzzing near my head, a beetle at my feet, the prickle of grass. I remember the wind, a gusty summer breeze, unlike any wind I’d known, smelling different, feeling different, and I remember the complete and absolute astonishment at such openness, such space, such powerful land.

  I kept a secret diary, a tiny notebook with lilac pages, and in it I recorded the succession of marvels I continued to find breathtaking: crows lined up on a wire, flowers in a hedge, mist in the valleys, horizons. This was the first time I had really seen things; this was the moment when the world around me was not just there, like some kind of theatrical backdrop, but was alive and enveloping, irresistible. There are wilder places, of course, than the Dales and in time I discovered some of them. But the passion I felt at that moment, at eleven years old, was elemental and overwhelming; like a young gull launching from a cliff into the endless rise and fall of the thermals, I was sustained in a kind of euphoria until, a week later, we drove back home down the M6.

  That emotional, instinctive, intense reaction to the nature of the land was to remain with me, become important to me, help decide who I am and where I should be. But I didn’t think then that it would have anything to do with keeping pigs.

  First came a dog, Mo, the summer after Ed and I moved to France, an indefatigable, scatty Dalmatian of imperfect spots. And around the same time, we started growing things. We’d come from a neat little terrace in Sheffield and a tiny garden of pebbles and paving to this old farmhouse with a sprawling piece of land, surrounded by woods and meadows. We hadn’t been desperate to leave Britain; such a migration wasn’t a lifelong dream for us as it is for some. But we already had a suspicion that we might like to stay; we were quickly seduced by the easy, free, sunny days, and we began to put down roots, literally, by making ourselves a garden. There wasn’t a great deal to be done to the house. It’s built to the local pattern: a straightforward construction of two or three living rooms on the first floor, with stores and workrooms below. There’s a small barn to one side and another (mostly ruined) outhouse to the other, enclosing a yard to the front. On all sides, the building is protected by trees so that it’s sheltered from winds and shaded from sun and often seems to hide away, like a rabbit squatting in the undergrowth.

  The house had all been knocked into a decent state by the previous owner and didn’t need any real attention from us. But outdoors was a different matter: neglected and overgrown, the grass head-high and slithering with snakes, the trees packed too close, a droughty yellow, the soil jaded and stony. So we waded in to clear the field with strimmer and scythes and shears, dug over the vegetable patch and extended it, cutting out a new piece of growing land. We retrieved the currant bushes from their cloaks of brambles and pruned the cherry trees; we planted a peach tree, too, and some vines. We began to spend more and more time outdoors, working on
the flower beds at the front of the house and thinning the mass of plum and beech and oak that shaded them, planting herbs against the barn wall, learning how to germinate and bring on seeds. Tentatively, because they were new to us, we experimented with ‘exotics’ like aubergines and chillies that, to our delight, quickly flourished in the hot, dry conditions. We discovered that tomatoes don’t have to be red, that black and green and white and orange varieties each have their own distinct flavour. A short while later, with great excitement, we brought home four black hens in cardboard boxes from the market, letting them wander freely in the garden and the adjoining fields, becoming accustomed to their friendly repertoire of squawks and discovering the daily tactile delight – and frustration – of searching for eggs among the straw in the woodshed, in leafy corners, alongside walls, in nettle beds – anywhere but in the neat little hen house.

  But nearly all the local families dig vegetable gardens and have a few chickens; we were simply keeping up with the neighbours, fitting in. Whereas the raising of pigs was not a visible part of the lives around us. Next door, beyond the field beyond our garden, is a small farm, typical of the area, a muddle of old buildings in a patchwork of land. The old-fashioned farmer used the network of caselles as he walked his cattle about daily, moving them from one small patch of grazing to another, much as shepherds do, to be sure of the best pasture. The cows here are raised for young beef – Le Veau d’Aveyron – a deep-pink meat that has protected status, produced from cattle brought up in large, open spaces, kept alongside their mothers until they’re stocky, muscly young adults. Traditionally, most herds were small – perhaps no more than ten or a dozen animals – and there’s a photograph of our neighbour from twenty years ago driving his handful of buff-coloured cows beneath summer trees, his shoulders covered with an old sack, his smile sheepish beneath his beret. There was a pig at his farmhouse in those days and the days before – habitually, inevitably – just as there were chickens and rabbits in hutches and three large vegetable gardens. But shortly after we moved in, our neighbour was kicked by one of his horses and died in a field, a little over eighty years old. Now, there’s no longer a pig. His widow, Solange, is relieved not to have to keep such an animal in the stall alongside the house; she prefers the smell of cows, she says.