Spotted Pigs and Green Tomatoes (6 page)

Seven years later, the CPRE went back to see what had happened to Saxmundham in its years without a mega store. They found
that fourteen of the eighty-one shops had closed, but fourteen new ones had opened, including five with post offices. All
the market towns still had their butchers, bakers, fish shops and greengrocers. There were more farm shops and more farmers'
markets. Local and regional food suppliers had increased from 300 to 370. All the butchers had taken on more staff. In
every area the rural food economy had flourished, providing greater choice and diversity. This diversity had attracted tourists
who were fed up with the cloning of our towns, so restaurants, pubs and B&Bs were thriving. A local meat market meant more
cattle and sheep grazing in fields, which also attracted tourists. Additionally, the local food economy had provided a seed
bed for new businesses, and local shops continued to provide a meeting place for the elderly, the infirm and the young who
can't drive.

One of the most significant findings of the survey was the increasing demand for local and regional food. If there's a TV
programme exposing illegal practices in the chicken industry, local butchers are always overwhelmed by demands for local birds.
The more food is identified by its region, the greater confidence it inspires. Knowing that our vegetables and, in time, our
pigs will wind up on tables within a few miles of our farm brings a real sense of responsibility. Supermarkets source only
5 percent of their food locally (though recent surveys suggest that 70 percent of buyers would like to buy locally), and
I can't imagine that the bosses in the southeast of England lose much sleep if there's an outbreak of salmonella in the northwest.

Just as darkness falls, the Ilminster shopping evening gets under way. Up at the Meeting House, Bryan is organising and judging
the children's fancy dress parade. In
the market square, a children's orchestra is playing carols. A brightly lit teacup roundabout is parked outside the Co-op
and hamburgers are cooking on a huge open barbecue. At 6.30, the Dazzling Sapphires, a cheerleader group of local schoolgirls,
brave the cold in tutus and tights to pirouette down the street. They are followed by Santa Claus, who is followed by the
fancy dress brigade. There are Red Riding Hoods and Captain Hooks, Oliver Twists and dashing White Knights. Mr B, dressed
in top hat, grey waistcoat and pinstriped trousers, calls the crowd to order to present the prizes. Local MP David Laws congratulates
the winners of the windows competition and then the vicar, Alistair Wallace, wearing full black robes, a wide-brimmed black
felt hat and wire-framed glasses, and looking as though he has stepped straight out of the pages of Trollope, awards prizes
to the children. The winner is five­year-old Callum Elsworth, splendidly dressed as Asian, with a eat's mask and plenty of
yellow ribbons for his lion's mane. Down below the small stage, his parents, grandparents and an apparently endless stream
of cousins and aunts clap their delight.

It's easy in our current climate to romanticise a town like Ilminster. Locally, it is reckoned to be a 'nice' place, unlike
nearby Chard and Yeovil, which both have problems with binge-drinking and drugs. Certainly in a time when the home news agendas
are dominated by stories of binge-drinking teenagers throwing up in gutters, violence on inner-city estates, failing schools
and fractured communities, the cosiness of a small market town getting together to celebrate Christmas on a Thursday night
is wholly seductive. But it is narve to think that everything in Ilminster conforms to an idealised image of community life,
embedded in families and annual festivals which mark the regular turning of the seasons, connecting us to nature's cycles.
There's unemployment, illness, divorce and every other pitfall that is so much a part of the human lot. For a few short moments
that evening, however, I get a sense of something else which all too often seems to be missing, certainly from my own life
in the hustle of the city: a community which hangs together, bound through geography and common purpose, one which knows how
to celebrate small but pivotal achievements.

But I find myself wondering as I walk up the hill back home towards the Dairy House: if the supermarket came and the shops
started closing, if Lane's Garden Shop went bust and the baker and the chemist, would there be a Christmas shopping evening?
No one's going to bother to come if there aren't any mince pies or glasses of steaming mulled wine being handed out for free
to anyone who asks. Who on earth will be interested in a Tesco Christmas window?

I also realise that, in concentrating on the town, I've been ignoring all the reports I've read on farming, in particular
on small farms. They're closing at a steady rate, right across the country, and why should I assume that somehow we can avoid
becoming yet another statistic, a casualty of the war of the countryside, every bit as much as Bryan might well become a casualty
in the town? It wouldn't bankrupt Charlie and me if our farm collapsed, but I find it hard to contemplate just how much failure
would hurt. For David it would be a disaster. There are so many things that could go wrong: what happens if the chickens carry on
laying only twenty eggs a day? We've already had one sick pig: Guinness's foot got infected and required antibiotics and visits
from the vet. The bills soon topped the amount she had cost us as an eight-week-old weaner. What will happen if chicken flu
strikes? Or if Dil­lington House stops taking our vegetables, because they run out of patience at our inability to supply
all they need on a regular and reliable basis (as happens to small producers who attempt to supply the supermarkets)? Our
friends all too often refer to our farm as a hobby, but I realise that has changed. It's not just a hobby any more, it's something
that matters very much to Charlie and me and our life together. Somehow it has to succeed.

I keep my fingers crossed that the luck of the Tailor of Gloucester won't desert this town - or our farm.

4

Trees Are Excellent Listeners

Bluebell's departure from the north wood changes the balance of power among the females. In her absence, sister Bramble takes
over as top pig, pushing Babe firmly into second place. There's no doubt that Bramble is the biggest pig - she stands about
thirty inches tall and is getting fatter every day. She probably has another three inches to grow in height and many inches
to grow round her girth, but she now seems to have the psychological clout. All the pigs seem calmer, especially Babe. Now
she comes to the fence at a walk, instead of her usual pushy jostle, standing politely beside Bramble to have her head scratched.
In recent weeks, Babe has always thundered up to the gate, hurling herself upwards, feet balanced on the top row of wire,
lungeing forward to grab anything she can - a proffered vegetable or my sleeve. Today the mood is much more restrained, with
all the pigs standing in line, waiting for a stroke. Bramble makes sure she is at the head of the queue, gently sniffing my
hand, reminiscent of a dog ascertaining whether you are friend or foe.

One of the gardeners from Dillington House, Adrian, has been helping out on Mondays with the vegetables. This week, the last
in November, he'd walked into the pig pen while David was putting down fresh straw in the hut. The pigs love this moment:
they kick at the clean dry straw, tossing it into the air with their noses and burying themselves in the soft piles. Bramble
heard Adrian coming and rushed out of the shelter, her head on one side (which for a pig is the position they need to adopt
if they are preparing to bite) and charged up to Adrian, emitting loud squeals. He didn't wait to discover her intent and
beat a quick retreat to the gate. David told me that he reckoned Bramble was defending the house, and possibly him, against
a stranger that she didn't know.

David and Adrian have cleared up much of the wood in the last few days and we light a bonfire with the debris. The pigs cluster
round, sitting incredibly close to the flames, their bottoms almost in the burning embers. Bramble is so close that I think
that her long sandy eyelashes will start to burn. They love the heat and the sight of the flames seems to mesmerise them.
When the fire dies down the pigs lie on the hot ashes, their thick hairy coats starting to singe in the heat. When I tell
Charlie about this later on in the day, he makes a joke about the crackling we're soon going to be eating. He's not as sentimental
as I am about the pigs, but then as a lawyer who has spent so many years of his life working in the field of child abuse,
sentiment is not an emotion he can easily afford.

A few days later, I'm in Hay-on-Wye for the winter book festival and I find myself sitting next to gardening guru Monty Don
at dinner, telling him about the pigs and the bonfire. Monty has recently set up a small farm where people from Hereford with
serious drug problems come for two days a week to learn how to grow vegetables and care for animals. Monty is a great believer
in the therapeutic powers of nature, as a cure for depression and as a way to help restore confidence and a will to live in
anyone prepared to open themselves a little to the process. They'd also had a bonfire and his pigs, four Tamworth siblings,
had behaved in exactly the same way.

While I am in Hay, there is an attempt to steal the pigs. Two things happen over the night of Friday, 2 December 2005. First,
a gate that shuts off the road through Dillington Park is rammed sometime between one and seven o'clock in the morning. Second,
when David arrives to feed the pigs just after eight on Saturday, he finds the male pigs locked into their small shelter.
When he'd left them the night before, they were still outside the corrugated iron structure, rootling around in the incredibly
muddy ground. Who had locked them in? We can only assume that someone had rammed the gate, driven down through the park towards
the walled garden and then, for whatever reason, changed their minds about actually nicking the seven little pigs. David reckons
it is the local gypsies, but Charlie and I are reluctant to buy automatically into the prevalent Somerset belief. Everything,
we are always told, is the fault of the gypsies. Over in Charlton Mackrell, the village where Charlie spent his early childhood,
a dog was recently kidnapped from the rich new owners of the biggest house in the area and a ransom note for £1,000 posted
through their letter-box. Negotiations through intermediaries in the pub reduced the sum by half and the dog came home. Closer
to us, a statue of two Labradors cast in bronze and commissioned as a fiftieth birthday present was stolen from some friends'
locked barn the night it was delivered from London. There had clearly been some inside tip-off. The police had suspicions
but no definite leads. Then a message was received outlining details of a reward for the return of the gambolling dogs. The
ransom was paid and the dogs are now firmly fixed in a concrete base on our friends' lawn.

But would anyone want to kidnap the pigs? They're not fully grown, but they stand two feet high, they're heavy and they wriggle
like mad if you pick them up. Would someone really want to keep seven noisy little pigs hostage, hoping to cash in a ransom
demand? It must have been straight theft with a view to fattening them up for sale or eating. Right now, they'd probably fetch
about £90 a pig. There's not much we can do to make the pig pens safe from thieves. The fence posts have been sunk in concrete
and extra padlocks put on the gates, but if a thief is really determined, then I guess the pigs are history. Geese might be
a good alarm system, but in the middle of the night who is going to hear?

I like Monty Don's idea about healing through nature. Without a doubt it's what helped me through the bleak months after my
car accident in May 2003. My right leg took the force of the collision, shattering the lower inches of my tibia into shards.
My surgeon later said that it was as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to the bottom of my heel. My leg was pinned together
in a metal fixator, known as an X-fix. Two months after the accident, I was back in hospital having a bone graft. They took
the bone out of my left hip, mixed it with red jelly-like cells extracted from my blood and squished it around the broken
bones. The scar went septic and three weeks later I was back in hospital, hooked up to antibiotic drips. The summer of 2003
was mercilessly hot and I fretted from a chair in the garden. In
the autumn, my surgeon at Salisbury Hospital said that the bone graft wasn't working and I was sent home with an electric
gadget that I wrapped round my leg at night, so that pulses might be delivered to the fracture site to encourage growth. To
make it work, I had to leave it on for eight-hour stretches. I slept like that every night until just before Christmas, when
I returned to Salisbury for another x-ray. The doctor was gloomy. It wasn't healing. He wrote me a letter of referral to a
surgeon at St Peter's Hospital, Chertsey, and wished me good luck. I was seriously frightened that I was going to lose my
right leg.

My new doctor wasn't optimistic. In
time, I got to realise that he never was. He always erred on the side of caution. Bob Simonis is something of a genius. His
surgery is the last resort for a generation of young men who've piled their motorbikes into walls, suffering fractures which,
only a decade or two ago, would have resulted in amputation. Like me, their primary doctors had despaired and referred them
to Simonis to see if he could succeed where they had failed. In
the late 1980s, Bob started working with Ilizerof frames, a complex, Meccano-like system of wires, rings, nuts and bolts invented
by a Russian doctor of the same name. Dr Ilizerof founded a huge institution in Russia, which, until the fall of Communism,
no Western doctors were allowed to visit. Bob went out there in the early 1990's, his visit recorded by a BBC crew. Until that
moment, he'd been fitting the frames using his own skills and the information contained in a textbook.

As I sat in the waiting room at our first meeting, I couldn't take my eyes off my fellow patients. The frames were simply
terrible. Mediaeval torture instruments, heavy, clumsy, with wires going straight through the skin and bone and twisted tightly
in place into heavy circular rings. The skin round the entry holes was red, sometimes bleeding, always angry. When he told
me that I was also going to need wires through my foot, four of them, I wanted to scream. Instead I asked him my chances -
'40/60,' he replied, and right up to the moment that he took the frame off he never altered that verdict.

It had been a long autumn, hobbling around on crutches, getting exhausted when I walked any further than a couple of hundred
yards. None of my clothes fitted, partly because I was putting on weight, but also because no trousers would fit over the
X-fix and I looked and felt like a bag lady. I was also in a deep depression which had been living inside me like a malignant
storm for almost two years. After I left the
Express
at the start of 200I, my sense of self seemed to curl up and wither. The paper had been sold to Richard Desmond, multimillionaire
pornographer who made his fortune out of titles like
Asian Babes
and
Big Ones.
His every other word was 'fuck'. From the moment details of the sale were confirmed, I knew my days as the paper's editor
were numbered. Even so, I wasn't remotely prepared for the shock. I'd been going to work every day for the last fifteen years;
for the last ten of them I'd been an editor. Work, I realised, had meant a great deal more to me than simply a way of paying
the bills. It defined the way I spent my time, the structure of my days, the mood of my evenings and weekends. To a large
extent it provided the subjects of conversation. On a deeper level, it defined who I was, to the world at large and, all too
often, to myself. I hated to admit just how much I had become attached to labels to define me, but it was the truth.

There were mornings when I'd wake up in tears, unsure how to get through the day, unsure of who I was. I was furious with
myself for being less than fine. The last few months at the
Express
had been a nightmare and much of it had been played out in a very public arena. I had a terrific husband, a great daughter,
four wonderful stepchildren and a lovely house to enjoy. Plus I'd been given a chunky golden handshake and was able to depart
the
Express
with my head held high. To confess that I was less than fine felt self-indulgent and ridiculous. The inner resources that
had stood me in good stead through difficult years had evaporated and, after twenty years of mostly continual sobriety, I
began to drink again. I knew as I picked up the bottle that it was a form of insanity. I'm an alcoholic and drink is as dangerous
to me as sugar is to a diabetic but, in my gathering depression, the brief oblivion that it offered seemed preferable to the
chilly reality of my life. Inevitably, it only caused more chaos, not just for me, but for Charlie and Daisy and my family
as well. I was drunk when I had my car accident, which was reported in the papers under a picture of me looking wild-eyed
and crazy after a court case in Salisbury. It was as though everywhere I turned there were nails punching holes through my
shattered self-esteem.

The only moments of peace I could find were in the garden, particularly in the wood. In
September 2003, when I could still convince myself that I was going to walk freely again by the end of the year, I'd decided
to create a garden in the overgrown wood which joins our land. The wood had been planted twenty-five years earlier, mainly
with oaks, but it had been neglected over the years and now the trees were growing too close together, slender trunks rising
up to a canopy of leaves. We began by cutting down some fifteen of them, opening up spaces and allowing sunlight on to the
leafy floor. In the centre we carved out a pond which was lined with old carpets, some donated by friends in the village.
Paths were laid and some huge lengths of oak dragged into the wood to create chairs and a sofa, which we positioned by the
fence, overlooking the park in a southwesterly direction. On those autumn weekends I'd balance on my crutches on the leaf
mould, watching Charlie planting bluebell, aconite and snowdrop bulbs and think that when the bulbs started to grow, pushing
their sweet young green leaves up to feel the sunlight, then my leg would be better. It was extraordinarily calming to align
myself with the rhythms of nature, which cannot be hurried. All you can do as a gardener is prepare and feed the soil, provide
the water, see that the light can get in and then wait. For the brief moments that I felt at one with the natural world, the
panic that seemed to beat incessantly inside me would subside.