by Jonathan Coe
I have never seen it since, but many of the details have stayed with me. The beautiful white carthorse keeling over as a spike is plunged into its neck, bringing forth fountains of blood; calves juddering after their throats have been cut, the violent jerking of their heads sending pans of hot blood crashing over and skimming across the floor; rows of headless sheep, their legs still kicking furiously; cows having long steel spikes banged through their skulls into their brains. And then, by way of counterpoint, the girl’s voice introducing us to the sad suburbs of Paris – les terrains vagues, jardins des enfants pauvres … à la limite de la vie des camions et des trains … The workmen singing Trenet’s ‘La Mer’ as they chop up the bodies – ‘ses blancs moutons, avec les anges si pures’ … A flock of sheep, bleating like hostages as they are led to the slaughterhouse by the decoy, le traître, who knows the way and knows that his own life will be spared: les autres suivent comme des hommes … The workmen whistling, laughing and joking avec le simple bonne humeur des tueurs, wielding their hammers, knives, axes and cleavers sans colère, sans haine … without anger, without hate.
I could not forget this film, and over the next few weeks, during bored moments in the university library, I would look through catalogues of film books and magazines to see if anything had been written about it: hoping, perhaps, that the poleaxe of academic criticism would deal a death blow to the images which continued to twitch horribly in my memory. It didn’t happen that way: for instead, after a good deal of searching I came upon a long and brilliant essay by a writer who seemed to have unlocked the secret of its dreadful truthfulness. When I finished reading it I opened my exercise book and copied down these words:
It’s a reminder that what is inevitable may also be spiritually unendurable, that what is justifiable may be atrocious … that, like our Mad Mother Nature, our Mad Father Society is an organization of deaths as well as of lives …
∗
‘So,’ said Henry, ‘what’s new down on the farm?’
‘The usual,’ said Dorothy. ‘Business isn’t bad, although it would be a lot better if we didn’t have to spend half our time fending off the environmental cranks. These are rather good, aren’t they?’
‘These’ were the fresh quail’s eggs, wrapped in roasted green and red peppers, which constituted their hors d’oeuvre. Henry and Dorothy were having supper together in a private dining room at the Heartland Club.
‘That was partly what I wanted to talk to you about,’ Dorothy continued. ‘We’ve been getting some scare stories from the States. You’ve heard of a drug called sulphadimidine?’
‘Can’t say I have. What does it do?’
‘Well, as far as pig farming’s concerned, it’s invaluable. Absolutely invaluable. As you know, we’ve made enormous advances in production levels over the last twenty years, but there have been one or two adverse side-effects. Respiratory diseases, for one thing: but sulphadimidine can help with some of the worst of these, you see.’
‘So where’s the problem?’
‘Oh, the Americans have been testing it on rats and they reckon it causes cancer. Now apparently they’re going to legislate.’
‘Hm. And are there other drugs you can use?’
‘Nothing as effective. I mean, we could probably cut down on these diseases by stocking less intensively, but …’
‘Oh, but that’s absurd. There’s no point interfering with anything which helps you to stay competitive. I’ll have a word with the minister about it. I’m sure he’ll see your point of view. Tests on rats don’t prove anything, anyway. And besides, we have a long and honourable history of ignoring the recommendations of our independent advisers.’
The main course consisted of glazed loin of pork, with garlic potatoes. The meat (like the quail’s eggs) was Dorothy’s own: her chauffeur had brought it down in an ice-box in the back of the car that afternoon, and she had given the chef detailed instructions on how to prepare it. She kept a small herd of free-range porkers in an enclosure at the back of the farmhouse, for her personal use. Like Hilary (who never watched her own television programmes), Dorothy had no intention of ever consuming the products which she was happy to foist upon an uncomplaining public.
‘These environmentalists get up our nose just as much as yours,’ said Henry, tucking in with gusto. ‘They’ve wrecked the veal trade, for instance.’
This was true: Britain’s largest retail producers of veal had recently scrapped their narrow crates and gone back to straw-yards. In response to public pressure, the managing director had admitted that the intensive system had been ‘morally repugnant’.
‘Well, I shall carry on using crates,’ said Dorothy. ‘We can still export them, after all. Besides, there’s so much stupid sentimentality about veal calves. They really are the most filthy creatures. If you don’t give them anything to drink for a few days, do you know what they do? They start drinking their own urine.’
Henry shook his head incredulously over the vagaries of the animal kingdom, and refilled their glasses of Sauterne. Meanwhile Dorothy was cutting the fat off her meat and carefully pushing it to one side of the plate. ‘We’ve got to watch out for the lobbyists, anyway. I’ve a suspicion they’re going to get more and more vocal.’
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ said Henry. ‘The newspapers are never going to run stories about anything as boring as food production, and even if they did, the public wouldn’t be interested, because they’re stupid. You know that as well as I do. On top of which, most of the data’s protected by the Official Secrets Act. Absurd, but true. And anyway, whenever one of these boffins in white coats starts popping up with some crackpot report, what’s to stop you getting your own people to produce a set of figures which prove the exact opposite?’
Dorothy smiled. ‘You’re right, of course. One’s inclined to forget that not everyone’s as sceptical as you …’
‘It surprises me to hear you say that,’ said Henry, leaning back and loosening his belt with a pleasurable grimace. ‘I’m not a sceptic by nature. If anything I’m an idealist. And besides, I happen to believe most of what the nutritionists are saying at the moment. The difference is that I tend to be heartened rather than alarmed by the social implications.’
‘Meaning?’
Henry paused, absently wiping gravy from his plate with a finger. ‘Put it this way: did you know that over the next five years we were planning to scrap free school meals for more than half a million children?’
‘Not calculated to be a very popular move, I wouldn’t have thought.’
‘Well, there’ll be an outcry, of course, but then it’ll die down and something else will come along for people to get annoyed about. The important thing is that we save ourselves a lot of money, and meanwhile a whole generation of children from working-class or low-income families will be eating nothing but crisps and chocolate every day. Which means, in the end, that they’ll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower.’ Dorothy raised an eyebrow at this assertion. ‘Oh, yes,’ he assured her. ‘A diet high in sugars leads to retarded brain growth. Our chaps have proved it.’ He smiled. ‘As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy.’
The meal concluded with apple-quince bread pudding, smothered in a honey and ginger sauce. The apples, as usual, were from Dorothy’s orchard.
∗
Ingredients: Modified starch, dried glucose syrup, salt; flavour enhancers monosodium glutomate, sodium 5-ribonucleotide; dextrose, vegetable fat, tomato powder, hydrolysed vegetable protein, yeast extract, dried oxtail, onion powder, spices, flavouring; colours E150, E124, E102; caseinate, Eioz; caseinate, acidity regulator E460; emulsifiers E471, E472(b); antioxidant E320.
Once when I was about twenty-five, I came home to visit my parents for the weekend. There were many such weekends during my time at university, but this one stands out because it was then, for the first time, that I noticed how drastically their eating habits had changed since I was a child. It started, p
robably, when I was eleven and they decided to send me to a fee-paying school. From then on they never seemed to have enough money. My father’s rises in salary were small and infrequent, and I think he continued to wish that they had bought a house in a less expensive area. My mother, at this point, went from part-time to full-time teaching. And yet it was a point of honour with her that there should be a hot meal on the table for us every evening. Increasingly, these meals were starting to come from packets, and in the mid 1970s this process was accelerated when they bought a small deep-freeze which was kept in the garage. My father, far from complaining, had developed quite a taste for this sort of food, partly because it bore a resemblance to the lunches which he enjoyed with his colleagues at the office canteen every day. I remember coming home that weekend and finding that the deep-freeze was stacked with more than twenty cartons of one of the Brunwin Group’s more lethal inventions: hamburger fritters with chips. All you had to do was shove the whole tray in the oven, and voilà, you had an appetizing meal on your plate in about twenty minutes. He explained that this came in very useful on the two evenings a week when he had to cook for himself, when my mother was working late at the school, supervising extra games. I said that it didn’t sound very balanced to me, and he explained that he supplemented it with two more Brunwin delicacies, viz. a powdered soup for starters, and then a strawberry or chocolate flavoured instant whip for pudding.
Ingredients: Sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, modified starch; emulsifiers E477, E322; flavourings, lactose, caseinate, fumaric acid; gelling agents E339, E450a; whey powder, stabilizer E440a; colours E110, E160a; antioxidant E320.
All those years, I see now, my father was clogging his arteries up with saturated fats. He would die of a heart attack, not long after his sixty-first birthday.
Does this mean that Dorothy killed my father?
∗
Dorothy’s record of success in pig management was just as impressive. These are only a few of the difficulties she was able to surmount:
1. CLUMSINESS: As soon as she started taking her sows off the earth, away from straw and into concrete stalls, she found that their chain of instinct would be upset: they would become clumsy and often lie on their own piglets while suckling.
SOLUTION: To fit a farrowing rail, allowing piglets access to the teat without getting close enough to be crushed.
2. CANNIBALISM: Denied the opportunity to exercise their rooting instincts, the sows started to eat their own piglets.
SOLUTION: To fit them into closely confined farrowing crates where they could neither move nor turn around, their movements usually restricted by a device known as the ‘iron maiden’. The piglets would then be lured away from their mothers with an infra-red light. This would reduce the weaning period to two or three weeks, instead of the more usual eight.
3. DISEASE: Unfortunately the piglets treated in this way became subject to severe pulmonary diseases which could only be partially halted by antibiotics and rigid temperature controls.
SOLUTION: Embryotomy. It was discovered that living piglets could be cut from the womb of their dead mother in aseptic conditions in order to establish what was to become known as a ‘minimal disease herd’.
4. TAIL-BITING AND BOAR-TAINT: Weaned piglets moved into densely stocked pens soon develop aggressive behaviour, of which tail-biting is the most obvious example. ‘Boar-taint’ is the strong, unpalatable taste which is alleged by some butchers (notably the supermarket chains) to be found in meat from male pigs.
SOLUTIONS: Tail-docking and castration. Preferably to be done with a blunt instrument, as the crushing action helps to reduce bleeding.
5. DEFORMITY: Dorothy once conducted a survey of 2,000 of her pigs kept on concrete floors, and found that 86 per cent suffered from lameness or serious damage to their hoof horns.
SOLUTION: None. As she once drily remarked to a journalist from Farmers’ Weekly, ‘I don’t get paid for producing animals with good posture.’
∗
One evening when I was about thirty-seven, I came home to my flat carrying a small plastic bag, half filled with provisions from the local supermarket. I had a pint of milk, some cans of soft drinks, a packet of chocolate biscuits, four Mars bars, a loaf of bread, and one serving of the Brunwin Group’s ‘Heat’n’Eat’ Bangers and Mash, which I put in the oven at once, before transferring my other purchases to the fridge or the food cupboards.
Twenty-five minutes later, when it was time to turn the oven off, I fished the packet out of the waste bin to check that I had followed the instructions correctly: and that was when it happened. It was, I suppose, a sort of epiphany. You have to remember that at this stage I hadn’t spoken to anyone for more than a year: I may have been going mad, but I don’t think so. I didn’t start laughing hysterically, or anything like that. None the less, I experienced what you might call a rare moment of lucidity: a flash of insight, very subtle and fleeting, but enough to produce a lasting change, if not in my life, then at least in my diet from that time onward.
It wasn’t so much the picture on the front, although that in itself might have given me pause for thought. A family of four were shown gathered around the dinner table: the healthy, white-teethed paterfamilias, two ruddy-cheeked children beaming with anticipation, and their young, pretty mother, her face lit by an almost beatific glow as she laid the last helping of Bangers and Mash before her husband, as if this meal, the final, crowning triumph to a day of honest toil and wifely achievement, offered the ultimate confirmation of her own self-worth. Such fantasies are thrust upon us every day, and I’ve become immune to them. But on the back of the packet was a photograph I was not prepared for. It was captioned ‘serving suggestion’. It showed a portion of Bangers and Mash on a plate. The Bangers took up one half of the plate, and the Mash took up the other. The plate was on a table, and there was a knife and a fork on either side. And that was it.
I stared at this photograph for some time, while a nasty suspicion began to creep over me. All at once I had the feeling that someone, somewhere, was enjoying a monstrous joke at my expense. And not just at my expense, but at all our expenses. I suddenly took this photograph to be an insult aimed both at myself and at the world in general. I pulled the plastic tray out of the oven and threw it into the bin. It was the last Brunwin meal I ever bought.
I remember being hungry that night.
∗
On his way back from the Lake District, only ten miles or so from the farm, George stopped his car by the side of the road and stood for a while at a gate, looking out over the moors. He was reasonably sober, and had no hangover (he never got hangovers these days), but still managed to feel weighed down by a curious heaviness, a sense of foreboding. As usual, he was nervous about seeing his wife again; and to make matters worse, they would be entertaining her insufferable cousins Thomas and Henry the next evening, along with a couple of senior managers from Nutrilite, the Brunwin animal-feed supplier. He was supposed to have discussed a provisional menu with the cook, but had forgotten all about it. Dorothy would probably be furious.
He had been away for three days: three wasted days, because he had come to no important decision regarding his marriage, even though – now he came to think of it – that had been the purpose of the trip, originally. He knew, at least, that he would never be able to leave Dorothy and live with the knowledge that she retained control of the farm; and in that case, it seemed there was nothing for it but to carry on as before. There were always the animals, of course. Pathetic though it might seem, he did not feel that he was completely wasting his life as long as he was able to bring some kind of comfort to the creatures who had suffered the worst of his wife’s abuses. He was already looking forward to seeing them again, to revisiting the cowshed and drinking their health from the whisky bottle he kept hidden behind the loose bricks in the wall.
It was late in the afternoon when he arrived home. Dorothy’s car was parked in the yard but he was able to sneak round to the kitchens without being se
en. The cook was sitting at a table with her feet up, reading a magazine. She did not give a guilty start and resume working when George appeared: it had long been the case (although he never noticed it) that he had absolutely no authority over his staff.
He asked if everything was in order for the dinner tomorrow night, and she told him that it was all under control, that they would be having veal, and that Dorothy herself had chosen the calf and carried out the slaughter less than an hour ago.
George felt suddenly sick. He ran to the cowshed and kicked open the door.
Herbert was not yet dead. He was hanging by his legs from a beam, and blood was dripping from the thinnest of cuts in his neck into a bucket on the floor, now three quarters full. His eyes were milky, pale and sightless. Otherwise, the cowshed was empty.
Beginning to whimper, George ran back to the farmhouse and found Dorothy in her office, tapping away at a computer keyboard.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘Home already?’
When George didn’t answer, she said: ‘I’m sorry about your little friend, darling, but he was really the leanest and best-looking of the bunch. It had to be him.’
She swung around in her chair, looked at him, sighed, and left the room. A minute or two later she came back, carrying a shotgun.
‘For God’s sake,’ she said, handing him the gun. ‘Finish him off if you want to. He won’t taste as good, but who cares? Anything to spare your feelings.’
George took the gun and left. Dorothy went back to her keyboard, and listened out for the shot. In fact there were two, a few seconds apart.
‘Idiot,’ she muttered. ‘He can’t even hit a calf from three feet away.’
She was never able to establish, with absolute certainty, which of her farmworkers fed the story to the News of the World. She ended up sacking a troublesome middle-aged labourer called Harold, but that was very much by way of killing two birds with one stone, because his lungs were giving out from inhaling too much crop spray and he wasn’t much use to her any more. It was unlikely to have been him, on the whole. In any case it was only a small story, tucked away on page nine: a few lurid, joky paragraphs under the headline KINKY FARMER IN CALF-LOVE SUICIDE PACT. Her PR people assured her that no one would take it very seriously, and indeed the whole incident was all but forgotten after a few months.
