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

by Jacqueline Yallop

  But Little Pig shows no interest. No interest at all. He ignores us as we demolish one shelter and lumber across the grass with the planks to another. We have to take down the electric fence: he seems to regard such a move with disdain. He makes no effort to bolt. When we walk him across to the new pen, he doesn’t seem to notice the crisp fresh grass under his feet; he steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the bundle of straw waiting for his housekeeping. He’s not even particularly bothered about the bucket of grain. What he likes is to stand with us, right alongside us: nudge, nudge; barge. As I crawl into the shelter on my hands and knees to pull down the plastic sheeting and lay out some of the straw, I see him standing with my dad, the two of them just idling, ambling along the length of the fence at the back of the garden, pausing often, as though to take in the view of the bare winter fields or to watch the crows rising from the tall oaks around the lake at the Mas de Maury; my dad, who’s never touched a pig in his life, guides Little Pig with a soft hand on his head. A light stroke is all it takes to guide him one way or another, to prevent him going on too quickly: Little Pig responds immediately, sticks close, doesn’t want to risk losing his new friend.

  But the wind has whipped up, freezing, and it’s a steely, raw day of dim light, and my dad has not come all this way to babysit a pig, so we finish the shelter as quickly as we can, reset the electric fence and go inside where the fires are burning and Ed is making soup. I can see Little Pig from the windows at the back of the house. He’s not moved since we left him. He’s not gone anywhere near his shelter, nor investigated the limits of his new enclosure; he’s not so much as nosed the soft dry soil under the pines, which I thought he would love, new, leafy soil, perfect for rummaging; he does not grub or dig, he doesn’t eat. He stands still, his head raised towards the house, and he looks towards us with small black eyes.

  Never keep a single pig, we were told, right at the beginning. Always two at least; more, if you like. A pig needs company, stimulation, interaction. A pig needs to be part of a herd. A drift of pigs, it was called, in the Middle Ages. There are other evocative collective nouns for pigs, too – a drove, for example, and a sounder, from Old French and Old English – but I like the sense of ‘drift’: it captures the way pigs move together en masse when they’re ambling forward. If they’re alarmed, or eager to reach food, they simply bolt in an ungainly gallop, but when they’re quietly grazing they drift, one animal taking the place of another, the group swelling and retreating, carving a shape into the landscape. We don’t often get the chance to see large numbers of wild or free-range pigs moving freely now, but it’s a good, honest sight, rhythmical, mesmeric, not unlike the pulse of murmuring starlings or a Grand Tour peloton of cyclists, only slower. A drift of pigs. Pigs together in number, hearing, feeling, touching each other; not alone.

  And in the early nineteenth century, as if to prove the point, our one black Learned Pig becomes many; he metamorphoses and multiplies until there’s a veritable drift of learned pigs. When our first exhausted sapient pig had given his final show, and John Nicholson retired from business to enjoy a quiet life with his young bride in rural Cheshire, there was a rush to fill the gap in the market and to capture the attention of a fond paying public. Suddenly performing pigs were appearing on playbills all over the country. Pigs. More pigs. More black pigs. Nicholson’s back-and-forth from city rooms to country fair and from France to England has done little more than whet the popular appetite, and for the next half a century, the Learned Pig becomes a common sight, imitators and imposters taking to the stage with a set of alphabet cards and a well-turned trotter.

  In its new incarnations, one significant improvement is made which immediately sets audiences in a frenzy. It’s the simplest of things but a brilliant moment of marketing: the pig is given a name. In fact all the pigs are given a name – the same name – and so the idea of the Learned Pig becomes inextricably associated with a single pseudonym: Toby. ‘To be, or not to be’: Toby. Apparently borrowed from Hamlet’s existential soliloquy, the choice was a joke of sorts, and a nod to the questions raised by a sapient pig – to be animal, to be human, to be a success.

  When Ed and I started with our own pigs, we’d been careful not to give them names because that was one way, so we thought, to keep them at a distance. Not pets, not companions, but animals raised for meat. Nameless. In the same way, giving the sapient pig a human name, making him more familiar and homely and recognizable – transforming him into Toby – brought him instantly closer to his public, gave him personality and identity, and provided a striking focus for the advertisements. ‘Toby: The Greatest Curiosity of the Present Day’ claims a poster from 1817. This is, perhaps, the first Toby, making his debut at the Royal Promenade Rooms, Spring Gardens, just off Trafalgar Square in London, not far at all from the Charing Cross rooms where Nicholson had first shown his learned pig, thirty-two years earlier. For four performances a day – ‘precisely at the Hours of 1, 2, 3 & 4’ – Toby does those things we now expect from a clever pig: he spells and reads from cards, adds up accounts, tells the time, guesses the ages of his spectators and reads the minds of those assembled in the crowd. He is, the advertising trumpets, ‘astonishing’, ‘surprising’, ‘extraordinary’, although from this distance, of course, we are less impressed: Toby is an old black pig reinvented, a repetition of tricks, a worn act with a new name.

  This Toby is owned by Nicholas Hoare, a magician. And it’s quite possible that this Toby is already, in fact, several Tobys: some accounts note that Hoare exhibited more than one pig, and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that such a demanding programme of shows was fulfilled by two or three Tobys taking turns to delight their audiences. Unlike John Nicholson and the first pig, Hoare has serious competition and training two or three near-identical Tobys gives him a margin of error. After all, who could tell one black pig from another? Who would look that closely? Hoare needs to keep his tricks fresh and his pigs on their toes because a mere stroll away, at 23 New Bond Street, twice every afternoon, a Parisian with an Italian name, Signor Castelli, is exhibiting Munito, ‘The Learned Dog’. Munito, a highly manicured and modish white poodle, is expanding the repertoire to make a case for canine superiority, not only counting and spelling and telling the time, but also answering inquiries on botany and natural history, and playing a mean game of dominoes. Both the Prince Regent and the Duke of York are said to be overcome with enthusiasm for this new doggy marvel: ‘the doors of the exhibition room are daily thronged with the carriages of the Nobility and Gentry who go to view his extraordinary performances,’ enthuse the newspapers.1

  Pigs and dogs head-to-head, not to mention performing geese and the lure of exotic animals shipped from overseas: tigers and crocodiles and snakes. With so much at stake, other Tobys soon join the battle to uphold the pig’s supremacy in a crowded marketplace. Taking up the London challenge under the guidance of William Pinchbeck in 1818, one Toby boasts the wisdom of the Orient, acquired from a Chinese philosopher, while local fairs are awash with other Tobys who, for a penny, will attempt some basic spelling. American audiences, too, want to see a pig of such talents, and a new iteration of Tobys goes to work in the growing cities of the United States. A poster for the Barnum & Bailey Circus advertises a ‘Troupe of Very Remarkable Trained Pigs […] Showing Almost Human Intelligence’ and William Pinchbeck leaves London for Boston where he sets up with a Learned Pig, only to find his show pirated by charlatans and chancers who tarnish Toby’s good name by exhibiting pigs ‘not by any means competent’.2

  Our old black learned pig without a name has become Toby, an international brand, but not everyone adheres to the original rules of the franchise: there are pink pigs now, and brownish ones; pigs with shorter ears and longer snouts; clever pigs and dunces. It’s a free-for-all of pig tricks and cute goings-on. Some audiences are known to come away disappointed. Toby lingers on, but the panache and excitement of the early days has been lost. Charles Dickens, an amateur conjurer when time allowed, goes so far as to
unpick the mystery of such performances and lay bare its mundane mechanics: ‘It was clear he chose by smell […] the waistcoat had an aniseed scent,’3 he claims. In fact there is more to it than that – a combination of sound and scent, a complicated series of signals – but Dickens’s investigation is a sign that the new audiences of the nineteenth century are wary of ageing spectacles and less likely than their eighteenth-century counterparts to take a wise pig at face value. In an age of invention and discovery, tastes are changing, and by the 1850s, some poor pig, a shadowy Toby, is merely an afterthought in the tawdry, run-down chaos of Savile House in Leicester Square: ‘Acrobats in its drawing-rooms,4 Spiritual Rappers in its upper rooms, the Poughkeepsie Seer in the entrance hall, and the Learned Pig in the cellar,’ notes a writer for the Victorian magazine Household Words.

  Like the pig in the Savile House basement, Little Pig has been left behind. And he doesn’t like it. Less than half an hour after leaving him to come inside the house, I look out of the window to see him striding purposefully up the garden towards us. A Little Pig waddle, his stomach swinging, his tail twirling, his ears flapping. He’s coming quickly. By the time Ed and I have pulled on our boots and coats and rushed outside, he’s made his way up the side of the house as far as the stony terrace and is tramping across the flower bed, pushing through prickly clumps of winter-grey lavender.

  He seems pleased to have found us. When Mo skids round the corner and comes scampering after us, he seems even more pleased. Everyone’s here, playmates and comrades, a drift of sorts. He slows down now, stops. He has a look around. Now he’s no longer on his own in the middle of a big field he seems quite content; this will do – he nips at my trousers in celebration.

  He walks with us back across the grass to the enclosure. There’s no sign that he’s explored his new home in any way. The straw bedding is still outside the shelter; there’s grain in the trough; the grass is untrodden. But the fence is down. Little Pig has pushed through, collapsing a couple of the poles and flattening the wire. ‘We must have forgotten to switch it on,’ Ed says. But the little green light on the battery is blinking away and the wire is giving off a telltale click, click where it’s lying on the grass. We shrug; an oddity. My dad comes out and walks with Little Pig while we work on the fence. They stroll companionably as before, along the perimeter of the garden, back and forth under the trees. Little Pig is calm; he pauses here and there to forage. My dad pulls his woolly hat lower over his brow and clasps his arms about him. Mo runs round them.

  We add extra poles so that the fence is tighter and we uncoil more wire to add an extra layer. Three strings: we haven’t bothered with this much fence since the pigs were weaners, since the first days on the Mas de Maury enclosure when we were frightened of them getting out, or things getting in. We’re careful, thorough. My dad brings Little Pig inside the pen and we turn the dial on the battery so that more current circulates. The green light blinks furiously.

  With Little Pig safely confined, again, we turn our attention to one of the last outstanding butchery tasks: sausages. We’ve bought a meat grinder at one of the local hardware shops, a bulky beast with a heavy handle and a choice of three grinding plates, all of which might be labelled ‘coarse’. It’s supposed to be screwed to a table, but since we don’t want our dining table drilled with holes or clamped at the edges with hefty fastenings, we’ve attached it to a plank of wood and it balances rather precariously on the work surface below the kitchen window. We’ve also bought natural sausage casings, which unpack from their box in a long coil, fragile and slippery, difficult to manipulate. We could have used the intestines from our own carcass, cleaned up and dried out, but as beginners we thought it was safer to let someone else take charge of the process in a small concession to commercialism. Now that we’ve seen the transparent delicacy of the final thing, this seems a good decision.

  We’ve put aside shoulder meat, scraps of this and that from the legs, a few chunks of good belly and some slices of hard fat for the basic sausage. We recruit the unfortunate Christmas visitors in the task of cutting this up into rough cubes and feeding it into the grinder. It’s a slow, unfestive process. It’s only possible to stuff a handful of meat at a time into the funnel at the top of the machine, and grinding is tough work; the handle is hard to turn, forcing the meat through the narrow cylindrical body and then through the plates, like pushing plasticine through a colander. Eventually a thick pasty sludge of sausage mix emerges from the other end and squeezes into the casing.

  A few years after arriving here I watched a very old man cutting hay with a scythe. He was alone. He began just after sunrise and worked the length of the field through the day, slicing through the long grass in a narrow strip – the width of a man’s arms with a scythe attached – until he reached the far hedge and then turning to work his way back. He was in the valley, alongside the stream, but the sun is high and hot in early summer and the field shimmered in the heat, without shade. I didn’t stand and watch: I passed instead, time and again, and each time I passed he was working with the same steady unforgiving cadence. If he paused to drink or eat, I didn’t see that. I didn’t see him rest. I remember him because I was astounded by his strength and determination and concentration, by his skill and by the pure doggedness of the paysan. Peasant – a word we use as an insult in English but which the French around me employ with much respect, often love. Paysan: a man of the pays, the land. A man who can scythe all day because the hay needs scything. A woman who can wield the heavy wooden handle of a grinder over and over, round and round for hours, accepting the pain that sets in around the shoulders and along the arms, because the meat needs grinding. How important is it that people still know how to scythe a field or grind meat by hand? Not very, I suppose. It probably adds nothing to life except toil. But the very fact that the practices of the paysan still linger here, out of date or newly relevant, is at least enough to make us pause for thought, just as I paused by the stream in the valley to marvel at an old man’s rhythmic labour.

  We set up a relay: chopping, feeding in the meat, grinding, manipulating the casings. It’s companionable. The smell of freshly ground pork gives the kitchen the clean, heady scent of a real butcher’s and there’s a definite pleasure in such shared exertion. Neighbours and friends congregating for the tue-cochon – I can see how this worked. Coming together around a dead pig. There was always eau-de-vie, Jean-Claude once told me, towards the end, when only sausages and boudin and the pâtés remained to be made. The men had mostly finished by then, the heavy work done, and they knocked back slugs of spirit while they watched the women wielding the grinding handle. His father always warned him against drunkenness after such cold, tough labour, and against eyeing up the women while they were working: a tipsy uncle had lost the tip of a finger in the meat grinder while he was leaning in to flirt. The girl, flustered, had not acted quickly enough to disentangle him, and the family had spent several months trying to make out the taste of human flesh in their sausages. Sober and unromantic, we manage to get by without any such disaster, but I still doubt it’s what the visitors had in mind for Christmas entertainment.

  I’ve watched a video about tying off sausages and it looks easy, like sculpting balloon dogs at children’s parties. But when it comes to it, the deft flick of the wrist that transforms a single length of meat-stuffed tube into a string of lovely sausages proves tricky. You’re supposed to be able to twist along the length, so that each individual sausage holds in place, but the slippery skin likes to unwind itself and there’s a surprising bulk to this much-ground meat, and it quickly becomes one of the games of the season. Our skein is uneven: some are short and bulging, some long and skinny. But eventually, it holds together, one sausage twisted into the next, a pleasing meaty paper chain.

  In the past, sausage knowledge was passed down among local families, along with recipes for making soap from fire ash and the secret locations for picking mushrooms. All our neighbours, I suspect, know how to make a good sausage, with
out fuss – although Solange and Camille are pleased not to have to do it, and prefer to buy in bulk at the supermarket. But to outsiders, especially those from towns and cities, butchering and processing were a mysterious, rather disconcerting art, a skill acquired from a dark past and practised with knives and grinders and cleavers. It was a trade associated, inevitably, with blood and gore, and all kinds of myths sprang up giving butchers – especially urban butchers – a particularly ambiguous place in traditional communities. These were important men (almost uniquely men, of course) who provided an essential service. But they were often viewed with suspicion, or even repulsion. The influential urban elite of the growing towns didn’t like to be reminded of the horrors of animal slaughter taking place not far from their doorsteps, nor of the workers steeped in blood. Butchers were outsiders, transgressors – they were seen as violent men, not just because their daily work involved chopping up carcasses but because this was simply the way they were, by nature.