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

by Jacqueline Yallop

  Big Pig and Little Pig may only be the darlings of La Graudie, rather than the toast of London, but they’re revelling in their status nonetheless. Jean-Claude and Camille’s son, Matthieu, has arrived from the city for a few weeks. He works in a plastic booth in a call centre and so now for his holidays he wants to be outside. He strims, weeds, digs, chainsaws. Most of the day he’s coming and going in the garden; the pigs listen for him and he chats to them, hoses them, scratches their ears and their tummies. He sits on the wall and drinks beer while they grub at his feet. On a huge bough from one of the largest oaks in the woods, he sets up a rope swing and in the middle of the night, long after everyone’s gone to bed, he sits in the dark and swings. The pigs find this nocturnal attraction a great improvement; they need hardly be alone now at all. I think they believe Matthieu’s been stationed in the hamlet specifically for their entertainment, and they accept his company graciously.

  A few evenings before he leaves, Matthieu organizes a barbecue. He lights a bulky pile of seasoned wood that he’s humped across to a quiet corner of the garden, and we sit while the flames burn down. We can hear the pigs on the other side of the wall. They’ve come as close as they can and spike our conversation liberally with their grunts. They’re not demanding attention, just taking part, and if we fall quiet they snort more vociferously, as if to prompt us. Mo goes back and forth between the barbecue and the pigs, perhaps relaying news. Over the easy weeks of summer, he’s become their best friend. Little Pig especially trots across when Mo appears, mumbling happily. They like nothing more than to go nose to nose, a leathery pig snout and soft dog nose; they’ll happily stand together in this way for several minutes.

  The barbecue is a slow affair. By the time the tree-trunk logs have burned down enough to cook on, it’s thoroughly dark. It’s a night of lunar eclipse; we’ve been told to expect a spectacular red moon. At the moment there are only wisps of cloud at the horizon and a normal creamy moon above, but something about the prospect, the strangeness of the event, prompts reflection. I sit to one side of the crackling fire and think, again, about our future here. Back in the UK, my mother has been ill, rushed to hospital out of the blue with acute intestinal pains. Thankfully, it’s nothing that can’t be cured with an operation or two and a course of pills, and she’s recovering now, but there were anxious days at first, a reordering of plans, a surge of battle-stations adrenalin. And with a sudden emergency of this kind, the occasional inconvenience of distance becomes more intractable. Coming and going is expensive and exhausting. But it’s also an emotional tug, an unsettling reminder of ties that lie in places other than here. I begin to wonder whether I’m being drawn slowly but inexorably away. There are the uncertainties of making a living, always, but these are niggling and annoying, fretful. Perhaps the greater, though more subtle, force is simply to do with time and natural change, which means the way my family functions is mutating and, with it, my role and priorities. Just as the landscape alters here relentlessly, although almost imperceptibly, from generation to generation so, perhaps, that’s how it is with Ed and me. We’ve been here a long time – longer than any other place I’ve lived – and perhaps Big Pig and Little Pig are not enough to anchor us, after all. Perhaps they’re an expression of something that’s already passing. But on this beautiful, balmy, smoky night pitted with flames and the grunt of curious pigs, I’m not at all sure about things. Because if this isn’t my place then where is?

  Eventually we eat well; drink; talk about the pigs. Camille remembers the woman in their village who went from house to house helping to make the sausages and pâtés on pig-killing day, before the meat – and especially the offal – spoiled. For years, at every house, there was a suspicion that she was stealing. When the meat was all packed away, families found they couldn’t find the best joints, but no one had seen her carry anything away – she had no baskets, not even large pockets – and no one could work out how she was doing it. No matter how close an eye they kept, they could not spot anything untoward until, one night, there was music and dancing to celebrate the slaughter and processing of two good animals. It was in a house like theirs, Camille says, but deep in winter, so everyone was dancing in the big barn. The whole village was there, more or less, with an accordionist and a drum, and as one of the farmers took the woman in his arms and twirled her in 3/4 time, a slab of pork fell from her knickers. Le filet mignon, literally the ‘cute fillet’, the best bit of butchery, lying there on the trampled straw, a giveaway.

  We laugh, and are suddenly propelled into stories of pig slaughter. Matthieu wanders off to look for the moon, but his parents are intent on recalling the best tue-cochon. They try to remember all the occasions they’ve witnessed, each one ritualized, codified by each village, each hamlet, each community, the men killing and butchering, the women preparing the meat. There are a great many rules about blood: the pig’s blood was not to be spilled, not a drop; menstruating women should be left out of the way in the house; stirring the copper cauldron of blood collected from the animal’s throat to keep it liquid for the boudin was a job reserved for old women, post-menopausal, free of blood. No blood to be shed on a Sunday or a religious holiday; no slaughter during Lent, or on a Friday (a meat-free, blood-free day in the Catholic calendar that each week marked Christ’s death on Good Friday). On the morning of the tue-cochon a prayer was offered to St Anthony, the official patron saint of charcutiers, because he was commonly shown grasping a pig (although the pig was actually supposed to represent the Devil, rather than the prospect of hearty saucissons) and the last meat scraps from the previous year were fried up for breakfast – it was the end of one annual cycle and the beginning of the next. In the evening, the other animals and fowl on the farm were fed some of the soupy water in which the blood puddings had been boiled, so that they could show their gratitude to the poor dead pig.

  In nearly all cultures, pig-killing day is a momentous occasion, a cause for celebration and nostalgia, a bustle of noise piqued with pungent, unforgettable smells. It’s a day of shared excitement, because just as a pig’s life was often a communal affair, so was its death. ‘When the appointed day came round for the slaughtering,’ wrote Edwin Grey in Cottage Life in a Hertfordshire Village, in 1935:17

  there was a subdued air of excitement and expectancy among the immediate cottagers of which the pig-keeper’s cottage was one, for had they not contributed their quota to the wash-tub, and would presently be the recipients of a nice plate of fry or maybe a few pork cuttings …

  Jean-Claude asks us how we intend to kill our animals. At home, we say. ‘Yes, of course, but how?’ How are we going to hang the carcasses? Eviscerate them? Strip the hairs? I sense that he’d like to be invited to help us; he’s envious of this most historic, most intimate of smallholding tasks, but we don’t want to feel constrained by someone else’s methods and although we listen well to his advice, we don’t ask him to join us. Am I afraid that if something goes wrong – if the whole thing turns into some kind of grotesque massacre – our neighbours will recoil from us, horrified? Or do I suspect I might lose my nerve, after all, and not manage to go through with the killing at all, showing myself up in the end as just another flimsy, urban foreigner who has no place here?

  Matthieu comes to fetch us all: the moon is turning red, a proper, deep blood red. We go out on to the lane where there’s a less obstructed view and from there we can see the bright slither encroaching from one side as the eclipse passes, already washing away the colour. It’s a disappointing spectacle but the night is clear now and glutted with the noise of crickets and nightingales, so that it’s a pleasure just to stand here. Beyond the pig enclosure, beyond the woods, we can see into the distance, looking across the valley to where the land rises again; at our feet, the village packs tightly around the church at its centre, the spire softly illuminated and the fontaine, too, dappled with light; there’s a cluster of lights very far away on a remote hill. Between there is nothing, just fields and woods, dark. Except just tonight t
here’s a paper Chinese lantern drifting upwards, just one, already high in the sky. We don’t know what it is at first. It’s brighter than the moon, and stranger. We’re puzzled by the flickering of the light and the way it bobs and slides; when we finally identify it, Jean-Claude worries that it will fall to earth on parched ground and start a fire. But it floats on up, away to one side. To watch it, Ed and I follow along the lane and then cut back in at the far end of the enclosure from where we can see it finally sailing off over the ridge.

  The pigs are delighted that we’ve come to see them; they truffle contentedly at our trousers and shoes. We scratch them behind the ears and wallow-dust puffs across our hands. The night smells of pig hair and dry grass. I look through the canopy of old oaks to the speckled sky, and my earlier melancholy falls away, like shrugging off a heavy coat. I know there’s nowhere else I could really be.

  4.

  Summer fades, becomes autumn without effort, the days shortening, the mornings cooler and dewy but the evenings still long and warm. A huge soft moon rises at dusk and sits plump on the horizon like a laying hen. Big Pig and Little Pig are putting on weight, maturing with the season. During the summer, their growth slowed: when we measured them in July and August they’d put on little more than a couple of kilos a week – for over a month, Little Pig’s figures remained unchanged. But when we measure them during the first week in September, there’s been a growth spurt: Big Pig is now a mighty 126kg, Little Pig just behind at 119kg. Little Pig’s graph – the thin red line – is spiky, unsteady, a roller coaster of ups and downs compared to Big Pig’s regular progress, but they’re both shaping up well. And Little Pig’s shaky ridge of peaks is less to do with any significant lurches in weight and more to do with the difficulty of keeping him still enough to peel out the string along his back. When we loop it round his tummy to measure the girth he’s sure it’s tickle time, play time, and he squirms and nibbles and thrusts his head into us. A wriggling graph for a wriggling pig.

  On the way back from morning feeding time, early, I call at Solange’s farm. It’s a hotchpotch of buildings – barns and stables, cottages, stores, sheds, shelters and huts – clustered around a patchwork of yards and gardens. In its time it was another small village, like the Mas de Maury, home to half a dozen families and their animals, but now it’s crumbling and only Solange remains. There are three or four similar farms within walking distance of our house, sprawling half-ruins populated by widows. These fragile landscapes of building and field are hardly held together as it is, but when Solange dies, and the other women of the neighbourhood, it’s hard to know who will take their place to tend them. Solange’s children and grandchildren come occasionally to help pollard the trees or dig over the garden, but they have their own homes, and none of them show any interest in moving here. The farm has looked this way for many years – since long before we arrived – and I suspect it will look just the same for years to come, but the life of it has dwindled. There’s little market for such scruffy, expensive heaps of old stone: the boom is in lotissements, estates of new-build houses, designed to type, efficient and practical and affordable, with neighbours and streetscapes, a modest suburbia. Fashions will change again, no doubt, but sluggishly: in this forsaken nook of modern Europe, we’re too far from the wealth of cities to feel anything but the most dogged of influences as they wade upstream along the slow, wide rivers of the Aveyron and the Lot and the Garonne. In the meantime, Solange lives alone while young families buy up lotissement plots to build their dream homes.

  The back of the farm is visible from our house and garden, and so I see Solange every day as she goes about her chores. She works every hour of light, except for the siesta; most days I see her with her mattock, bent over, her skirt riding up to her thighs and her wide straw hat drooping over her face. She works through the heat and the cold, growing things. She is well over seventy years old but she chops her wood and stores it in huge stacks in one of the more derelict cottages, piling it up to the rafters on the ground floor, the attic above stuffed with what remains of the furniture; she cooks over a wood fire in another of the old dwellings, using the large room at the top of the stone steps for long, slow cooking in copper cauldrons. She only has a tiny sink and a table in the new farmhouse kitchen and prefers to prepare her ducks here, in the old room, even though it’s dark and smoky.

  She replies to my shouted greeting as I enter the front yard, but I can’t quite hear where her voice is coming from. I try the small vege-table garden, where she grows lettuces, leeks, spinach, a flurry of crisp green leaves, but she’s not there so I make my way round, past the large open hangar, scattering the chickens. This beautiful open-sided, oak-beamed, tiled barn is a place of ancient ploughs and tractors, neatly stored; there’s a cluster of ducklings squabbling beneath a wooden trailer. Built against one side is the wall of the old well; against the other is a line of double-decker rabbit hutches, shaded by pollarded trees. This is where I find Solange, with a bucket of animal feed.

  The rabbits are fat, quiet. The cages are small. We talk while she dispenses the food and water, and then she goes to the end hutch and grabs the rabbit by the ears, hauling it into the open. It dangles from one hand as she flips the cage closed adroitly with the other and picks up the bucket to return to the house. The rabbit makes remarkably little noise; it just hangs there, floppy, heavy, its unblinking eyes fixed on the clear morning distance.

  Solange continues to talk. ‘I don’t think I’ll keep rabbits much longer,’ she says, ‘they’re too much work. Just for me. Too much.’

  I’m astounded, always, at how much physical effort her day involves. ‘You’ve got a lot already with the poultry and the gardens,’ I offer.

  She stretches for a moment from her habitual stoop, pleased by such sympathy. ‘C’est dur,’ she replies. It’s hard.

  She places the bucket by a stone trough outside the door to one of the barns, and goes a step or two inside. I follow to the threshold: there are onions laid out to dry all over the floor and I daren’t go any further. Solange picks her way in and reaches across to a shelf, putting some tools in the pocket of her apron and coming back out into the sunshine, the rabbit still dangling. Then we make our way to the garage, at the far end of the front yard, where the line of walnut trees begins. This is where her washing sink is, with a large flat stone, a table of sorts, alongside.

  She has a story about another neighbour who’s had an accident. She tells me that his daughter ran over him somehow with the tractor, and now he’s stiff in plaster and can’t work. She doesn’t like the family much, and picks away at worn grudges. While she talks, she takes the rabbit firmly in her left hand and places it on the stone, holding it with her palm flat on the neck so that its head is sideways, still. Its eye stares up at the sky. ‘The thing is,’ she says, ‘they’re first cousins who married.’ She takes a screwdriver from her pocket, holds it for a moment about six inches above the rabbit’s head, and then with a fluid motion drives it down through the eye. The rabbit convulses under her grip, and makes a noise like the pigs do when they’re surprised: a high, anxious screech.

  The rabbit kicks. Blood squirts from the wound. Solange keeps a firm hold on the neck, makes a quick movement with the screwdriver and then withdraws it. I can’t tell if the rabbit is dead yet.

  The body flops, twitching. Solange pushes it to one side and sluices the stone with water from the tap. The edges of the rabbit’s fur darken in the damp, but the back and rump shine, rust and silver, fine and soft; the ears lie neatly on the stone. She glances up at the blue sky, perhaps to judge something about the time or the nature of the day, or just to clear her thoughts, and then she invites me into the house for a drink. She gestures at the rabbit. It may or may not be quite dead. Apart from the empty eye socket and a thin dribble of blood, it looks exactly as it did a few moments before: ‘I’ll leave it here,’ she says, ‘it’ll be fine. I can skin it later.’

  There was a time when pigs were slaughtered in a similarly
direct fashion. Indeed, some people still consider the old methods the best: the itinerant pig-killer who visited our neighbours simply ‘stuck’ their pig, in the traditional way. ‘Sticking’ involves either slitting the animal’s throat with a large knife, or driving a spike through its skull: ‘while someone held the poleaxe on the pig’s forehead,1 the butcher would take a heavy wooden mallet and drive the spike into the pig’s head,’ explained a Durham countryman in the early twentieth century. Both methods could involve a slow and painful death, and in fact many people, like Arabella in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, believed that this was the only way of obtaining clean, pale meat with the blood fully drained. In general, pig stickers who could achieve their task with the minimum of noise and mess were much in demand, but there are accounts of those who quite openly enjoyed the ‘sport’ of killing a pig: one Wiltshire cottager recalled that large pigs were ‘upended, had their throats slit and were allowed to tear around the orchard,2 squealing, till loss of blood caused them to collapse’; while in 1813, William Gooch, a Cambridgeshire clergyman, recounted ‘a most barbarous and disgraceful way of killing hogs’ which amounted to ‘a man standing in the middle of a stye,3 and striking them on the head (by an instrument somewhat like a cricket-bat)’.

  We intend to dispatch our pigs humanely. Of course we do. We read as much as we can about how best it should be done, and settle on using a captive bolt which will render the pig instantly and painlessly unconscious (if we do it correctly) so that it can then be killed without trauma for either the animal or for us. We investigate ways of removing the bristles, the next stage after the slaughter. Black pigs: black bristles. Commercial pig farmers prefer sleek pink pigs because their hairs are more or less invisible, so if one or two bits of stubble get left behind, it doesn’t really matter: no one notices them sticking out of their roast pork crackling. But our pigs have thick, coarse dark hair which we’ll need to take off without damaging the skin underneath. The traditional method is not unlike a high-class man’s shave: scald the carcass to soften the hair and then scrape off the bristles with a sharp blade. But with the added complication that a pig carcass is a big thing to dunk in very hot water. A wine vat, a beer barrel or an old bath would do nicely, but we don’t have any of these. The best thing we have is a blue plastic tub that we’ve been using as a water butt. We think it might do.