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

by Jacqueline Yallop

  ‘You’ll enjoy your pigs. There’ll be good eating,’ the man said. He laughed, shook his head, and went away smiling.

  But I was left with my heavy bidons slopping water down my legs and over my feet, and the niggling anxiety that we might not have the chance to enjoy our pigs, after all; that it might all be taken away from us just as we were getting used to it.

  When I take the water to the enclosure, the pigs have knocked down the shelter, just as Benoît foretold. There’s a heap of green plastic and metal roofing and planks. Because of the upheaval, the pigs have not noticed my approach; I poke my head through the doorway and in the moment before I’m rumbled I see Little Pig nosing the debris energetically, even frantically, as if in the hope of a resurrection, and Big Pig eyeing the disaster with indignation. It’s raining lightly, and it’s quite obvious that they resent having to stand outside in the damp when they could be flopped side by side in the nice dry straw.

  As soon as they sense me, they rush to the fence, clamouring; each time I move to one side of them to step over the top wire, they move with me. It’s some kind of country dance, and it takes me a while to find enough space for my wellies and my bucket among the flurry of pig. They’re always delighted to see someone with food; in fact, they’re delighted by visitors of any kind. But this greeting has extra urgency to it: Look what’s happened. What are we going to do? It fell down, just fell down. What are you going to do?

  Grain in the trough takes their minds off the calamity. It sticks to their wet hair, coating their noses and trotters, dusting them around the eyes. They tussle and squabble, as they always do. Big Pig never manages to maintain his dominance at feeding time, or to make his larger frame count: Little Pig’s greed is a relentless force. My chickens have a pecking order, to keep mealtimes nice and tidy, to enforce hierarchy and order; everyone knows where they are. My pigs pile in, head to head or shoulder to shoulder; they barge and bite, kick and butt, not with any kind of vehemence or enmity – in fact, usually with a fraternal good nature – but with a single-minded determination to be first to the food, and to eat the most. It’s easy to see why pigs have long been synonymous with poor table manners: ‘Don’t fall on your food like a pig,1 snorting and smacking your lips,’ Erasmus warned the youth of the early sixteenth century.

  On this occasion, though, I’m grateful for the pigs’ enthusiasm. While they’re trotter-deep in grain, I take the opportunity to examine the damage to the shelter. It’s clear what’s happened. The rain has softened the soil and the scratching-post table leg has finally given way with the constant nudge of growing pig, bringing down the roof and the supporting walls. It needs a complete rebuild. And as I begin the process of balancing and buttressing I understand two things. Firstly, the pigs are much bigger, already, than when they came. I know this, in a factual way, from our piece of measuring string and the graph of their growth: over 50kg a pig now, more than double the weight they were when they arrived. But the statistics come to life in a real sense when I examine the shelter carefully – where they used to snuggle into a corner, they now fill almost the entire thing and so roll and push against it at all sides. What had seemed perfectly adequate for two weaners back in January now suddenly seems rather mean and cramped. And secondly, this makeshift affair of garden and household rag-and-bone is not the solution to pig housing that I once imagined. I now know how rumbustious Little Pig can be and with what vehemence he makes his feelings clear; I realize how powerful and heavy Big Pig has become. In view of all this, the shelter appears flimsy and ragged and a bit hopeless. I’ve become so used to the routine of the pigs that I’ve not really noticed how much they’ve flourished. It’s like one of those spring mornings when you stroll out and discover that the trees are in leaf, full and green, as if all of a sudden: you know it’s been happening – you’ve even seen the buds swelling – but still it comes as something of a surprise. And so it is with the pigs. I’m startled to see how large they are; as I run my hand along their backs, I’m impressed by the solidity of them; I’ve been caught out by their evident maturity. As if overnight, they’ve outgrown their shelter. Big Pig and Little Pig – both big pigs.

  Over the following few weeks the rain continues to fall and so does the shelter. I prop it up; it slips. I wedge the dodgy table leg; it sinks lower and collapses the roof. I try a new arrangement with the corrugated metal; the pigs take umbrage and knock it down. They’re very protective of their home and don’t like it to change. They like to arrange the bed of straw as it’s always been. They prefer to consolidate what’s already there, rather than risk an unfamiliar setup. But it’s getting to the point where making do, bodging, just won’t work any more – and the pigs are quick enough to show their fury if the roof is leaking or the rain is running down one of the tree trunks and on to their straw.

  It’s not only inside the enclosure that the wet weather is causing problems. The lane that leads to the Mas de Maury is little more than a dirt track; one of the farmers has been driving a heavy tractor along twice a day to see to cattle in a field up beside the lake, bringing straw sometimes in a trailer, cutting through the mud with massive tyres. Deep, pooled ruts have formed; when Ed tries to drive the car down with containers of water it gets wedged in the mire, its undercarriage clamped against the stony ground and its wheels disappearing. In the rain we stuff sticks and stones under the tyres and try to ease the car forward far enough to turn on to more solid ground, but it’s well and truly stuck. We can hear Big Pig and Little Pig grunting and squealing further down the track, behind their high wall, listening to our endeavours, calling out for their bucket. They always recognize the sound of the engine and know that if we’ve brought the car to the enclosure it usually means a new delivery of grain. But they’re going to be disappointed. Supper has to wait until we’ve managed to unstick ourselves.

  Ed and Mo walk across the fields to Paul’s house: Paul is an Englishman with a garage full of useful tools and a barn packed with all kinds of unlikely equipment. He’s come to our rescue in the past: once to solder closed a hot-water pipe when we’d sawn through it; several times to lend us an ancient rotavator to plough the garden; many times with curious-sized spanners and specialist wrenches and air compressors and all manner of things you never think you’ll need. Now he drives round slowly in his weighty old Peugeot, loops a long tow rope to our car and hauls us out. ‘I’ll come down and see the pigs,’ he says.

  With the rain, the growing season is suddenly upon us. The climate here is testing but predictable: hot dry summers punctuated with ferocious storms of thunder and hail; long soft autumns, turning foggy around Armistice; freezing winters of bright skies and brittle cold; and then these wet, mild days when everything bursts into life. Birds are busy everywhere: swallows gliding into Solange’s open barn; sparrows and tits and redstarts nesting in the walls of our house; the hens turning broody. Mornings are suddenly bouncing with rabbits. New growth pings through the soil in the pig enclosure, luring them with the promise of nettle shoots and succulent roots, and we need to turn our attention to digging the garden and getting seeds planted. No time now to sit and contemplate the mysteries of pig behaviour. All around us field hedges are being trimmed, cattle brought out to pasture, land ploughed; on a small scale we do the same. We dig and hoe and weed, get in the early crops like potatoes and peas, sow summer seeds like courgettes and cucumbers in layers of wet tissue and hang them in the fireplace to germinate.

  And we talk about moving day. The Mas de Maury enclosure is already showing the strain of three months’ stomping and grazing and digging by growing pigs; we don’t want to exhaust the ground. It’s time for Big Pig and Little Pig to go to a new home, to the bigger patch of oak woodland and scruffy meadow that will tide them through the rest of their lives. They will have shade there for the summer, a water supply, good sources of wild food; they will clear the land and rejuvenate it. Early April, we calculate, would be the perfect time to move them on and get them settled before the weather turns
warm.

  But it’s a distance of perhaps a mile from the Mas de Maury to the new land, and we already have over 100kg of animal: boisterous, spirited, independent. This is too much pig to fit in our car, and we don’t have a trailer. We’ve always intended moving Big Pig and Little Pig – the orchard was only ever meant as a nursery pen for weaners – but we haven’t really given much thought as to how we might actually get them from one enclosure to another. Now we have to.

  We will walk the pigs. It sounds simple: we’ll lead them from the patch of orchard, along the rutted track to the stone cross, over the lane, down a grassy path to the edge of the next hamlet, turning by the fig tree and another stone cross, over another lane and through a field to the new terrain. It’s a walk I often do with Mo, early in the morning, a walk full of rabbits and foxes, partridge scuttling from the undergrowth. It’s lined most of the way with big old oak and walnut trees; the path is banked with plum trees, too, and brambles, and I collect fruit here in bucketfuls, but if you’re not pausing to gather produce and you go on at a good pace then it takes no more than twenty minutes.

  But it’s notoriously difficult to walk a pig. They tend to move slowly, but they can also show a surprising and sudden turn of speed if they feel they want to; their enthusiasm for nuts and berries, insects and leaves means there’s always something tempting just a sniff away; their curiosity about new things lures them off track; their tendency to take fright at sudden noises can have them veering aside in a panic. They don’t follow a herding instinct, like cattle or sheep, and if you slip a rope around their necks, dog-lead fashion, they protest noisily and are likely to haul you away or simply refuse to move. If you watch pigs in the ring at agricultural shows, they’re often shuffled in front of the judges by a handler wielding a stick and a large board which is supposed to keep them moving steadily and prevent distraction, rather like blinkers on horses. Quite often it doesn’t work. Quite often the pigs find their way into the crowd.

  In the past, the pig drovers who plied back and forth on the old routes from farm to market were skilled animal handlers, and patient men. Pigs rarely managed to travel more than about six miles a day. There are remarkable stories of great ‘hog drives’ in America before the age of rail, walking thousands of animals with resounding ‘soo-eeys’ across the Appalachians, or out of Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap, or along the Kanawha River in West Virginia – in 1855, more than 83,000 pigs were recorded on the trail through Mount Airy in North Carolina – but in Britain most of the droving was on a reasonably small scale. Nonetheless, walking pigs to market was not an easy undertaking. Drovers set off from the remote farms of Wales or Cornwall to the pig market at Bristol with the prospect of at least a hundred miles’ slow progress ahead of them: that’s over two weeks of pig walking, all day, every day. From Wales there was also a journey by boat to contend with, linking Sully, near Cardiff, to Bridgwater near the Somerset coast, a short cut, but a noisy, stinking, chaotic affair.

  In an attempt to make the task more manageable, drovers often muzzled the animals, or those of them with a more fiery temperament. The Victorian travel writer George Borrow also noted on a visit to Llangollen Fair that handlers there had a nifty routine for managing each pig, ‘keeping the left arm round the body of the swine and with the right hand fast grasping the ear’.2 This kind of hands-on approach highlights just how valuable these animals were, and so how much effort went in to keeping them in good condition. Here’s one of my favourite pig facts, for example: because pigs’ trotters are not as robust as horses’ or cattle’s hooves and not as well suited to covering long distances, they were sometimes fitted with little woollen boots with leather soles to protect them on their travels.

  A pig in boots.3 Since Samuel Bisset dressed his pig in a gorgeous red waistcoat, I like to think he prepared for their trip to Dublin by acquiring, or making, some equally rakish boots. After all, this was the age of the dandy, the self-made man of refined habits and elaborate costume, and Bisset was a lover of spectacle and rumbustious display. I can find no evidence of boots, but I like to imagine the two of them on the road, ambling along side by side between high hedges, a flash of brilliant colour and fine linen in the thick greens of summer.

  Boots or no boots, Bisset was still faced with the task of walking his pig from their old home at the inn in Belfast to their new rooms near the theatre in Dame Street in Dublin, a hundred miles of man-and-beast negotiation. This is not the same as a performance, which can be practised, perfected, choreographed; this is not like running through a routine in the pub’s backyard. This is an expedition, a journey into the unknown, a test of togetherness. Even if they manage to walk ten miles a day, they still have to find many places to overnight, and Bisset would not want his special pig shut in some putrid sty or mixing with more lowly beasts or teased by village children. During this hot August, the nights were fine and short; it would have been easy to find a place to settle out in the open, away from the main turnpike roads and the clatter of passing coaches, and no doubt they slept comfortably together, tucked under trees. But they could not avoid calling at inns for food for Bisset and water for the pig; they could not skirt all the villages. It was not such an unusual sight, a man walking a pig, but when a stranger appeared with a stout, sleek black pig (possibly in boots) it was still an attraction, a diversion from the grind of daily life, and it must have taken all of Bisset’s ‘unwearied patience’ to keep this most precious of animals in his sights and out of the clutches of curious housewives,4 measuring its rump for bacon, or unscrupulous landlords who would steal his livelihood from under his nose.

  There are few details of the route they took or the journey they made. All I know is that Bisset kept the pig constantly with him, sleeping, dining, walking. One hand on the pig, one hand on his stick. Through the undulating lands of the north, down close to the coast, crossing rivers and farms. And by the time the two of them arrived at their destination, their partnership was well and truly consolidated. They’d walked together from Belfast to Dublin; a crowd of expectant pleasure seekers was nothing after that. They could begin again with what they knew, their learned routines. And I take heart from the thought of Bisset’s journey. I find I’m enjoying the prospect of walking the pigs. People have done this thing for generations: eighteenth-century impresarios, French paysans, drovers, farmers, children earning a penny. I have some confidence in Big Pig. He’ll be sensible, as far as a pig can be, and prudent. Little Pig I’m less sure of. He’s naturally more scatty, more susceptible to panic. The expedition might test his mettle. But his greed is surely in our favour: he’ll do anything for food, even for the prospect of food; the whiff of a treat should, surely, be enough to secure his attention.

  And so we set a date for the following week. This gives us time to prepare the new enclosure. The move is on.

  The blackthorn bursts into flower, all the hedges breaking out white against the tired browns of winter. The moon rises full in the morning – white, too, in a blue sky – and hangs through the afternoon in the high bare twigs. Blackbirds sing loudly in the trees in front of our house until, a few days later, the first of the nightingales arrive and bully them with their louder torrent of song. The days seem to lengthen all at once; the light is suddenly, impossibly bright. In the garden pond the frogs begin to croak in chorus, harsh and discordant; the frogs at the lake by the Mas de Maury call back until the air rings with echoes. Every day I come across cars pulled up in odd places, precarious on verges or jutting into the road: a few yards from each, inevitably, someone will be bent over, picking, a carrier bag in one hand and a bouquet of floppy green stalks in the other. This is the first harvest of the year, rapountchou, the early tendrils of a climbing plant, a wild asparagus. Although it’s strong and bitter, an acquired taste, it’s a local obsession, gathered in bundles and salted or pickled in jars, but it’s eaten fresh, too, the first new growth of the season, traditionally a vitamin boost after a long winter surviving on conserves.

  Th
e pigs are also gorging on shoots and new leaves. They’re delighted by the arrival of spring. I find them lolling in the sunshine; they’ve pulled some of the straw out of their shelter so that it catches the early warmth of the day and they lie here in a snug muddle of dark flanks, one half on top of the other, eyes sleepy, limbs lazy. They have the thick, coarse hair of adult pigs now, bristling after the winter, matting over the paler elephantine shade of their skin so that they are well and truly black. They fill the shelter. They’re about six months old, the age at which many commercial pigs are slaughtered. They’re hefty, muscular, meaty: as they sprawl and stretch, it’s easy to see the way their bodies are constructed, and some of the butchery cuts that correspond – there’s the shoulder, of course, and a nice row of ribs, Little Pig’s good-looking belly, Big Pig’s shapely haunch for a fine ham. When I look at them objectively in this way – as poster boys for the meat trade – I wonder whether I’m losing my misgivings about my ability to kill them when the time comes. Perhaps I’m toughening up. Perhaps I’m learning enough about what it takes to be a smallholder (a small smallholder) to be able to set aside my sensitivities.