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

by Jacqueline Yallop

  It will have to. It’s the best I can manage. And for good measure, there’s even a romantic postscript. Some time after first reading about the black pig and his adventures, I come across a marriage notice for the parish of Banbury, in Cheshire, in 1812. It’s no more than a sentence, just an ordinary note on the routine list of parish business for the year. But it catches my eye: it’s a name I know. My black-pig story has a twist in the tail. Here, tucked away among baptisms and deaths, is proof of a wedding, a celebration: ‘At Banbury, Mr John Nicholson,18 89, proprietor of the well-known learned pig, to Miss Eliz. Smith of Malpas-hill, 23.’ So, a young bride for an old man who’s been made very rich by a pig, and the traditional conclusion to all good stories: a marriage. A happy-ever-after?

  5.

  A winter night. Cold fizzing in the air. Stars, lots of stars, but still thoroughly dark; a broad, bitter silence.

  Tomorrow is the day. For now I can’t sleep.

  Ed and I go over the plans, one more time. To do this properly we have to be sure, unblinking, and we are: we’re prepared; primed. There’s no place for doubts or second thoughts – that would only unnerve us and unsteady our hands.

  Ed is quiet, organized. And me? My squeamishness, my hesitation, my fears? In the dark of the night they’ve slunk away to hide. I don’t allow myself to visit old memories, to unearth old piggy joys. I feel as though I’ve grown a shell. I test it, tentatively, tappity-tap, as if looking for a patch of hollow wall beneath a plaster veneer: I imagine snippets of the slaughter, form speculative gory pictures in my mind, sneak a look at them – and sure enough, it all bounces off and I’m intact inside my defences, calm and collected, untraumatized. That’s all right, then. I’m all right, the soft part of me hidden away, protected. I’m ready. I can do this.

  Now it’s come to it, we’re keen to get on. We bustle. It’s still night, still dark, but it seems important to be doing something. And amidst all the activity there remains a taunting, uneasy dread. Our fear is not that we won’t or can’t kill the pigs, not now. What we’re afraid of is that we’ll do something wrong. The point of this home slaughter is that Big Pig and Little Pig are assured a humane end, but if we mess up somehow then it could be worse than any factory death: frantic, painful, slow. Ed takes the killing knife from the box and practises: a long thrust forward, a turn of the blade, a brisk, upward flick. He does it again, and again, a sword exercise. I watch the clean lines cut in the chilly air, the repetition mesmeric. I watch it without emotion, the knife click-clacking against my crisp, impenetrable shell; watch it as nothing more than a show of dexterity, although I know that with those fluid movements we need to sever all the major blood vessels around the heart, the carotid arteries and the jugular vein, slicing the animal’s life into pieces so that it dies quickly without any risk of it regaining consciousness or suffering in any way. I know, too, that stabbing a live, moving pig with such accuracy is not an easy task. It’s nothing like as effortless as the deft flick of the knife suggests – which is why the village pig-killer was traditionally so respected, of course; in the mass of dense muscle packed into a pig’s body it’s not easy to be sure exactly where the knife is. It’s like slicing a grape in a bowl of treacle, blindfolded.

  Big Pig and Little Pig in the dappled dawn. They stir from their shelter as they hear us approach, greet us as usual with soft grunts. Mo scampers ahead of us; a small family of deer – a buck and two does – skips across the bottom of the garden and bounces over the adjacent field in a bob of white bottoms. The pigs heave through the mud to meet Mo at the wire. They stand with him, nose to nose, offering a sniffly ‘good morning’. Then Mo slips away and the pigs focus their attention on us, expectant. But we don’t feed them. There’s no last meal. Instead they’re on a fast, water only, so that their stomachs and intestines will be reasonably empty when we kill them. One of them – whichever is left behind – can have a meal later, to tide him over until his time comes. But for now they must both stay hungry.

  They don’t understand this, of course; they’re indignant at the lack of breakfast and the change to routine. Little Pig chews at the top of my wellies, in hunger or protest; Big Pig seems to think he must be mistaken: surely there must be food. He checks behind us for evidence of a bucket, sniffs hard, snout high, wades a step or two through the gloopy mud to make sure there’s no telltale tub on the other side of the fence. He slurps back, ruffles through my pockets and then, finally convinced, raises his head and glares at me. The long summer of pears and pumpkins and acorns and chestnuts tumbling down the slope in the woods, abundant, juicy, a game, has come to this last morning: a hungry dawn of hard frost, the cold grip of mud, disappointment. We do our best to settle them and to ease their discontent – we talk to them and scratch the tufts of hair between their ears; I tickle Little Pig on the tummy as he likes – but perhaps they sense our nervousness, because they soon slink away.

  Which one, then? Which one first? We reckon we can kill one pig today and butcher it tomorrow morning, then kill the other pig and finish butchering it the following day if need be. Three days in all. If we stick to that timetable we’ll be neatly finished a few days before Christmas, with time to collect visitors from the airport, hang tinsel and baubles, bake mince pies. Because of the mild rainy weather we’ve been forced to wait longer than we’d hoped – we hadn’t meant to run this close to the festivities – but we can just press on with the slaughtering, back to back. And we’ve got an early start. So now all we need to decide is which pig to begin with. Which one first?

  We choose Big Pig. No particular reason. Random fate, perhaps – and a nagging sense that his more placid nature will help us do this calmly, this first time. He’s also closer to us, which decides it. Little Pig has gone off behind the shelter; it’s Big Pig who’s stuck at our side and it’s this, in the end, this proximity – or loyalty – which settles it for him. I take a piece of white chalk from my pocket and mark a cross on his forehead, smack in the middle. A dusty white cross on a dusty black pig. Then we go in for breakfast.

  It’s a bright day, as the coldest days are. The sun rises in a smear of reds and oranges, the frost hard and white on the trees and fields, the sky hard and blue. When we’ve eaten (what do we eat? I can’t remember) we check the equipment again – the knives, the captive bolt, the scaffold, the chains – and stride out across the grass, crunching the ice underfoot. The cold and the damp-wood smell of winter and the unmistakable twitter of my excitement shut down thought. This is physical now, sensual; nothing else.

  Is there doubt now? Right at the very end? If there is, I can’t feel it: I’m tucked down in my shell.

  I distract Little Pig with a handful of old chestnuts, letting him snuffle for them in my pocket, drawing him away towards the wall, heaving through the mire so that Ed can drop one of the fence posts and let the wire fall. He has a bucket of grain. Big Pig, hungry, doesn’t bother with me and Little Pig at the back of the pen, hardly glances at the collapsed fence, just pulls himself through the last few feet of mud towards the food. I let the nuts fall for Little Pig and squelch back as fast as I can to reconnect the fence. One pig in, one pig out.

  There’s a surprise now. Big Pig moves out across the grass, takes a few steps towards the middle of the lawn, pauses – and then gambols. Liberated from the horrible heavy mud that’s held him tight for days, his feet and legs suddenly light again and his body free, he gambols. Out over the crisp grass, a dance of sorts, clumsy but sprightly too, trotters flailing, head bobbing. I’ve never seen this before. I’ve seen the pigs scamper and shove, run and skip, but not this, this romp. It looks like happiness. He circles, cavorts. He’s forgotten the grain for the moment; forgotten everything but this agility and weightlessness. He prances like a show pony; his ears flap, his tail twirls. In the early light he steps out a gavotte, a big old pig about to die and dancing.

  It takes us a minute or two to attract his attention. We rattle the bucket, call, flap our hands at him. Eventually he calms and
is more the Big Pig we know, stately, imperturbable. He stands still again – I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s out of breath – and in this more usual pig state he remembers his hunger; he’s pleased now by the scent of food, another pleasure, and after a moment he comes hurrying for the bucket. I let him bury his head in the grain, so that I can be sure of him, and then I lead him a few yards to the sheltered dip of land alongside the woodshed. He shuffles against me, grunts contentedly and puffs flour through his nose, snorting it in a cloud into the cold air.

  I empty the grain in a soft pile on the ground. Big Pig leans forward, his head down, his snout low to the ground. He’s motionless, for a brief second or two, while he eats. This is the moment. Quick now; this is it. The chalky white cross. Ed stands up close to Big Pig’s head, steady, feet apart. Big Pig takes no notice of us. He’s snuffling through the grain. I watch him eating; I watch the flop of his ears and the gentle roll of thick hairy skin at the neck, but out of the corner of my eye I can see Ed, too, gathering himself, and the minute seems to stretch on, everything brilliantly clear, suspended in the winter morning.

  Aim. Ed presses the pistol end to the chalk cross.

  Fire. He shoots the bolt.

  Big Pig falls. He just keels over heavily on his side without a sound and lies completely still.

  The recoil from the bolt surprises Ed, catching him hard in the shoulder; he staggers backwards, pained. But there’s no time for this. The bruises can come later. We have to carry on, now, while the pig is out cold. We have to keep our wits about us and act promptly.

  There it is, the sword. Ed picks it up and flexes his arm. I don’t see him hesitate. ‘Hold the legs,’ he says. I hold the legs, gripping hard just above the trotters, and he pushes the knife through the skin at the base of the neck, just above the dent of the breastbone. He drives in deep and jiggles the blade as he’s practised, dropping the handle so that the knife rises.

  Blood streams from the wound. Hot, deep red. It floods through the frost, melting the ice, sinking into the earth. And the pig kicks. Convulses hard. Thrashes like a live beast. I’m not expecting this. I expected death to be motionless, I suppose, serene perhaps, a quiet slipping away. But this is frantic, as though Big Pig has woken at the last moment and is battling to save himself, flailing against oblivion. I think I cry out; I certainly recoil and let go of the legs and they flail uncontrollably, catching me several blows in the stomach and arms.

  The convulsions ease. Slow. It’s a shudder, a twitch. Then nothing.

  I’ve watched an animal die for the first time. It was alive and then I killed it. Inside my shell, I think I hear part of me screaming.

  ‘He didn’t come back, he didn’t feel it; that wasn’t him, was it, waking up?’ I throw my anxieties at Ed who mops them up.

  He appears calm, certain: ‘It was involuntary. He didn’t feel it.’ Ed has done it all correctly, the stunning, the sticking, keeping his nerve when I lost mine to the thrash of death throes.

  ‘So the last thing he knew, then, was being out in the grass and getting grain – being happy?’ I ask this question several times, and afterwards I think about it a great deal. I believe it’s true: Big Pig’s final minutes were content, free of anxiety, even joyous. It was a good death, the kind we’d planned for. I think of him dancing across the grass, his last moments filled with pleasure, animal pleasure in food and freedom, and I’m pleased we went through with this, with killing him here at home.

  Ed stands back, rubbing at the ache from the captive bolt, the knife beside him on the ground. He watches the blood seep away. ‘We should have saved that,’ he says mournfully. ‘It’s a waste.’

  Take a breath. It will be a little while until the blood drains through. There’s nothing to be done. It’s quiet, calm. The pig’s wound steams in the cold. In the bare trees alongside us, pigeons flap for a moment, like plastic bags caught in a breeze. That’s all.

  We’ve elected to do this alone. Paintings like Teniers’ Winter Scene, accounts from the past, snippets from nostalgic literature like Lark Rise to Candleford, the stories told to us by Jean-Claude or Solange – they all agree that this is a job for a family, a team: friends and neighbours working together. But there’s just the two of us, hidden from sight behind the wood store with a dead pig. And when we come to try to move the carcass, we suddenly realize what we’ve taken on. This thing, this dead weight, is massively heavy. We take it by the hind legs, one leg each, and attempt to drag it the short distance to the scaffolding frame and the pulleys, but it hardly shifts. A warm, black stone, immovable. We try again; heave. But in the end all we can do is slide the body round and roll it slightly so that it has its back to the frame, edging it forward just far enough so that the chains can reach it.

  There are two big metal hooks on the end of the chains. We have to slide these through the hind legs, just above the trotters, right through from one side to the other, hooking them round small bones and sturdy tendons, making sure they’ll hold and not just rip straight out. It feels like unnecessary violence. I remember a lesson from school, a long time ago: how was it, Miss, that Jesus didn’t just slide off the cross? How come the nails were strong enough to keep him hanging there?

  The hooks have strong sharp points. They push through the legs with surprising ease, like driving tent pegs into soft ground. We take out the slack in the chains and begin to winch. It’s clanking, mechanical; it seems more to do with fixing cars or loading trailers than animal husbandry. But the pig carcass moves, sliding steadily through its own blood, feet first across the crimson-frost grass, its bare grey stomach skywards as it inches towards the sheltered leafy ground that supports the frame. We winch rhythmically, one of us on either side.

  Wait. Ed calls. We stop. There’s a thick metal pole across the top of the scaffolding tower which holds the structure tight and to which the winches are attached. It’s begun to buckle under the strain. There’s a disconcerting curve, a sly smile, in what had been a perfectly straight bar. We stare at such evidence of pig weight, not quite believing, and unwind the chains a foot or two to loosen them; the carcass slides back down on to the ground. We climb up to examine the scaffold. Even without the load, the top pole remains bent. Prod. Sigh.

  We’re acutely aware of the potential physical dangers of what we’re doing. Knives; thrashing animals; heavy lifting; boiling water; slippery ground. We’d whispered to each other in the dark of the night: ‘Be careful; above all, be careful.’ But this is a new threat: the collapse of a scaffolding tower along with 170kg of animal as we work below. What a way to go, crushed by a dead pig. We don’t want to take the risk. We decide we can’t go on. So we unhook the carcass from the chains and there it is, again, flopped.

  Well, then, it doesn’t matter. It’s not important. We’ll get on with taking off the bristles. That’s the first job, anyway, and it can be done just as well here on the ground, surely. How hard can it be? In 1911, Beatrix Potter reminisced with pleasure about her early experiences of scraping ‘the smiling countenance of my own grandmother’s deceased pig,1 with scalding water and the sharp edged bottom of a brass candle-stick’. The author who encouraged us to fall in love with Peter Rabbit and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle was matter-of-fact when it came to the practicalities of country living and believed that shaving a carcass was good family entertainment. Protesting against legislation which aimed to prevent children taking part in the slaughter process, she was disgusted: ‘The present generation is being reared upon tea – and slops,’ she huffed. So, then, all it needs is an old candlestick and a kettle; child’s play.

  Because we’re short of a scalding tub, and it’s a long way from the scaffold behind the wood store back to the house to a source of boiling water, we’ve actually eschewed candlesticks and the like, and decided instead on a modern method of stripping the hairs. The shops sell a powdery white concoction that claims to make it simple to pluck the feathers from fowl and the bristles from pigs. You mix it with water and paste it on, like a beauty mask, and �
� swish – a quick pass of an old wallpaper scraper, and off come the hairs. The packet shows a smiling old woman holding up a perfectly plucked goose; there’s no sign of a shorn pig, but the message is clear: a tiresome chore made swift and simple.

  Winter-thick, wild black bristles. A dense, outdoor-pig coat. We slap the gunk on to one of the pig’s flanks and we scrape. Nothing much happens. There’s a nasty chemical smell, and some of the hairs break; there’s a sludge of them attached to the scraper, it’s true, but after ten minutes or more of energetic work the coat looks much the same as ever, only more scraggy and matted. Here and there we can see patches of elephant-grey skin, but nowhere have the hairs fully lifted. It’s an ugly mess. Perhaps with a nice, sleek pink pig, raised indoors so that its coat is thin, the gloop might be enough to do the job, but this just looks as though Little Pig has nipped out mouthfuls of bristles in a scrap. It won’t do.

  We chuck away the powder, cursing the unnecessary expenditure and the delay. The morning is already advancing more quickly than we’d imagined and we’ve not managed either to hang the carcass or even to begin stripping the hairs. Today is the winter solstice, the old-fashioned St Lucy’s Day of John Donne’s poem that ‘scarce seven hours herself unmasks’. We need to get a move on.