There is only one photograph of me on my fortieth birthday: January, a clear blue midwinter sky, sharp shadows. I’m wearing dark green overalls and wellies. The overalls are new, criss-crossed with pristine white zips, only a dusting of mud around the knees. I’m sitting on a pile of clean, fresh straw. Across the top of the picture, around head height, there’s a long strip of old corrugated metal, some thick weathered tarpaulin and a couple of planks; another piece of metal is propped upright behind my shoulder. Beyond, in bright light, it’s possible to make out the textures of a ragged stone wall and trails of ivy. I’m at the edge of a kind of den which recedes darkly behind me.
Later that day, before the sun drops too low, we have a celebratory barbecue. The front door to our house is on the first floor, approached by a broad flight of cracked stone steps; the top of the steps widens to create a concrete platform, a small square terrace by the door. This faces south: the sun pounds it all summer and even in January, on a fine day, it’s sheltered and warm. We’ve eaten Christmas lunch here once or twice. And this is where I sit now, in a pool of faint warmth, while I open presents. Pork chops cook on the grill and Ed, my husband, pours wine. We talk about the odd construction we built that morning out of bits and pieces unearthed from the shed and garden: the main structure is cobbled together from a large plastic picnic table covered with the sheets of corrugated iron and secured with heavy planks. It has extra support at one end from two wooden pallets set upright and wedged against a tree stump; the other end is blocked off by another, smaller sheet of corrugated iron which is too holey to form any kind of roof but which encloses the space, in the same way a windbreak at the beach marks off a patch of sand. At various points, the slim trunks of young plum trees act as buttresses. Inside, it’s high enough to crawl easily on your hands and knees, or to crouch. You can lie out flat, should you want to, nestling into the straw, with enough space for a friend to lie alongside you, although the end of your legs will poke out into the open.
This is our pig shelter. We’ve built it on a small piece of land about ten minutes’ walk from our house, a disused orchard surrounded by ivied stone walls and accessed through a small wooden door. No one has paid any attention to this land for years. It’s only around twenty paces wide and long – too small a patch to be of agricultural use – and, in addition, cut off from the fields around it by its walls. It’s stuffed full with brambles, nettles and weak trees; the walls are crumbling in places, or completely fallen, the ivy roots pulling the stones apart. The door was once painted white, but now has a blueish-grey tone; the wood is rotten at the edges and along the bottom; you feel it give as you push it open. The first time I did this, fighting to open the door against the foliage beyond, catching my first glimpse of the enclosure within, full of skittering great tits and bramblings, snakes, no doubt, rabbits and mice, hidden things, I felt my heart in my throat; a secret-garden moment of discovery. And just as in The Secret Garden, this land does not belong to me; I have no rights over it. But it feels instantly special, intimate. It feels like my land, my patch, a hidden place. I’m already curious about its histories. Who planted the fruit trees? Why is such a small piece of land enclosed so carefully? Who tended this before me; who was it who came and pushed the little door, who whitewashed it?
In this derelict part of France there are plenty of such unanswered questions, glimpses of forgotten lives seen out of the corner of your eye: in every cluster of houses there are those which are dilapidated, sunken and ruined; between the neatly kept pastures, with fences and gates, there are frequently parcels of overgrown land with old or fallen trees, high, tangled weeds and crumbling walls through which deer and boar and badgers come and go. This is a long-peopled but empty land, a place of ancient dolmens, crumbling medieval villages half-lived-in, a network of old drystone huts, caselles, which once gave shelter to those working the fields or tending the animals – protection from the hot sun or the rain, an overnight bothy – and which are now crammed with bits and pieces of rusting farm equipment, or simply forgotten. The web of walled paths and tracks which divides the meadows one from the other and links each small hamlet with the next is unmarked and unreliable: here and there the tracks have been dug over and the stone taken away; others have been fenced off or blocked by tangles of brilliant-blue agricultural string; many are simply too overgrown to pass. This is the département known as the Aveyron, the rural heart of south-west France, a poor region on the edge of the massive, unforgiving limestone causse, a long way from motorways and TGV connections and urban centres, not well marked on tourist maps: the evidence of many pasts has been left to rot down here.
Our would-be pig enclosure is one of these abandoned remnants, too insignificant a plot for farmers to bother with, not worth the time and money required to salvage it. Our house has a large garden, almost an acre, mostly just a grassy field with a few patches of lavender and roses, hollyhocks and sweet william close to the house, a long wide strip given over to growing vegetables, some fruit and nut trees and a boggy pond that burps with frogs. But it’s not ideal land for pigs: it’s too open, bitty and irregular in shape, difficult to fence, making it almost impossible to keep livestock from encroaching on the house, the flower beds, the washing line. So we’ve borrowed this plot from some friends who have a portfolio of similar scraps of land, and who have agreed to lend us this one for a few months until the pigs outgrow it. It is accessible down a rutted track which turns off the lane which runs to our house; at one side there’s a small barn; across the track a ruined farmhouse with sagging outbuildings and a charming circular tower, a pigeonnier once used to keep doves, a fairy-tale relic. This place, this hamlet, has a name, Mas de Maury, and a deep well which remains full except in the driest of summers; here and there you can see the broken outlines of other walls, buried and scrappy. Mas is the way of naming many of the hamlets here, the lieu-dit, the way a place is called; it’s from Occitan, the local language, which borrows and lends to other languages in the area like Catalan and Provençal. Mas apparently comes from the Latin mansum, ‘the place where one remains’. From the same root, modern French gets manoir and maison. The designation Mas was used through the Middle Ages to mark a farmhouse of stature with dependent workers, a relatively wealthy place, a key player in the feudal system. What we see here are the remains of several families, or several clusters of the same family, a thriving enterprise, a community. There’s a simple stone cross at the end of the track to the Mas de Maury, where it leaves the road; it’s marked at the base with initials: I. B. A whisper of the family that lived and farmed here, nothing more. Now there’s no one, except us.
We’d taken several days to clear the dense nettles and brambles. We had to cut our way through the door; cut our way into the door in the first place, hacking at the thick boughs of ivy that looped across it, and then inching it open, feeling the planks shudder, pushing it in the end just far enough to squeeze through. We borrowed a heavy-duty strimmer and worked painstakingly towards the centre of the land, disturbing all kinds of things with the noise and upheaval: a female kestrel that had settled in the barn and wheeled back and forth over our heads, flicking shadows; cormorants passing the winter in a huge ash tree by the lake a little further on; deer that bolted out of the hedges and bounced away, their white rumps bobbing. For a while, the skies and fields were skittish with anxiety and it felt as though we were intruding.
But the commotion, the disturbance, passes. The land gets cleared. The cormorants hunch again on the high branches, still and slightly sinister, and I trust that the deer return too, invisibly, lightly. Our comings and goings become part of this place. But I never lose the feeling that I’m being granted temporary leave to belong here; I become aware, all around me, of time, as though you can see it, as though it thickens the air, and I see quite clearly my smallness, my briefness, here, on this patch of land which other people, many other people over many centuries, have cleared and tended and abandoned, and which has allowed me to inhabit it for a while.
We’ve set up the shelter close to the highest of the stone walls for protection. Crawling in underneath, we push at the makeshift sides in the way we think a pig might. Nothing gives. We congratulate ourselves on its stability. When we lie in the straw, this feels like a cosy place, a den. I sense the primeval rush that comes from having made a safe shelter, the home-making impulse stripped bare: here among the fields that fold and stretch away on either side, the dense blocks of forest and the old tracks which join them, here is a square of land protected by a high wall, and inside this square is a new three-sided shack that will keep out the rain and wind and could be thought of as a ‘house’.
Ten years earlier, when I turned thirty, I was working as an art gallery curator, indoors, in an immaculate, catalogued, climate-controlled environment. I did not own overalls or even wellies; I walked out at weekends on footpaths, and occasionally, at the end of a summer’s day, I would lie back in the heather on the hills. But mostly I went shopping in my lunch hour, waited for buses and trains, accommodated myself to a townscape. To celebrate my thirtieth birthday, I met a few friends for a drink in Sheffield town centre; we ate burgers and ice cream in an American diner. The evening was drizzly and a bit grey. I don’t remember much about it. It was pleasant enough, ordinary. But this, for my fortieth birthday, this is memorable; this now feels extraordinary. I wriggle in the straw; I lie out flat, staring at the metal roof above, pocked with holes through which the sky burns blue; I smell the rawness of this earth all around, laid newly bare, the freshness of the stalks of weeds that remain standing here and there, the damp dust of the old stone. I hear the silence of a cold winter morning when the air is crisp and pinkish with frost.
This is when the photo is taken: click: happy birthday.
It was Ed’s idea, first, to get pigs. I’m not sure such a thing would ever have crossed my mind. We didn’t move to France with any particular plans for self-sufficiency or a back-to-nature odyssey. We came more or less accidentally, on something of a whim, because we could, because our freelance writing work and the inexorable spread of the Internet made it possible to live anywhere and this seemed as good a place as any, a workaday, inelegant, unhurried place of distant horizons. Neither of us comes from farming or even rural families; neither of us had expressed a secret passion for a smallholding. I was a middle-class, suburban, only child, brought up in the cul-de-sacs of Birmingham and Manchester, in nice family streets where the gardens were taken up with lawns and flower beds and paddling pools, and everyone laughed at Tom and Barbara trying to keep livestock in the potting shed because that was the nature of The Good Life, a comedy, an eccentricity, not something real people did. I’d been taught to value the clean and orderly, the predictable. I didn’t have a pet. But I did love being outside. At this point it couldn’t be called anything as grand as a passion for nature, since I really only glimpsed nature by default in fleeting moments, disconnected from my daily life, but it was bright and auspicious, nonetheless: gathering conkers on a windy day, digging up worms in the garden, kicking through leaves on the way to school, summer picnics in country parks. There was a specialness about the outdoors, I realized that already. It had something to do with freedom and adventure, independence, courage; it also, somehow, touched on my interest in history and archaeology, in how people had lived and the things they left behind. But I didn’t know where the connections were, or how to express them; I didn’t know what it was that drew me to green places of moss and air, old trees, tatty urban fields, a mysterious outdoors where the sky and the land slipped away together in the distance, and layers of me peeled away, too, so that what was left was essential and unequivocal.
One of my clearest childhood memories comes from the summer when I was eleven. I went on holiday with my parents to the Yorkshire Dales. I went from a road in Birmingham, a busy commercial road with shops and petrol stations and traffic lights, to a cottage in Nidderdale. As soon as we arrived, while my parents unpacked, I ran up the hill, a distance of no more than a couple of hundred yards, and threw myself down in the shelter of a stone wall. Below me, the valley opened up, green and rolling and apparently without end; a few cottages here and there, a sweeping sky. I remember this, even now, with absolute clarity. I felt as though I had been tipped out of a box and fallen to this place, this utterly unexpected other world, and the landing had taken my breath away. I remember small things: a bee buzzing near my head, a beetle at my feet, the prickle of grass. I remember the wind, a gusty summer breeze, unlike any wind I’d known, smelling different, feeling different, and I remember the complete and absolute astonishment at such openness, such space, such powerful land.
I kept a secret diary, a tiny notebook with lilac pages, and in it I recorded the succession of marvels I continued to find breathtaking: crows lined up on a wire, flowers in a hedge, mist in the valleys, horizons. This was the first time I had really seen things; this was the moment when the world around me was not just there, like some kind of theatrical backdrop, but was alive and enveloping, irresistible. There are wilder places, of course, than the Dales and in time I discovered some of them. But the passion I felt at that moment, at eleven years old, was elemental and overwhelming; like a young gull launching from a cliff into the endless rise and fall of the thermals, I was sustained in a kind of euphoria until, a week later, we drove back home down the M6.
That emotional, instinctive, intense reaction to the nature of the land was to remain with me, become important to me, help decide who I am and where I should be. But I didn’t think then that it would have anything to do with keeping pigs.
First came a dog, Mo, the summer after Ed and I moved to France, an indefatigable, scatty Dalmatian of imperfect spots. And around the same time, we started growing things. We’d come from a neat little terrace in Sheffield and a tiny garden of pebbles and paving to this old farmhouse with a sprawling piece of land, surrounded by woods and meadows. We hadn’t been desperate to leave Britain; such a migration wasn’t a lifelong dream for us as it is for some. But we already had a suspicion that we might like to stay; we were quickly seduced by the easy, free, sunny days, and we began to put down roots, literally, by making ourselves a garden. There wasn’t a great deal to be done to the house. It’s built to the local pattern: a straightforward construction of two or three living rooms on the first floor, with stores and workrooms below. There’s a small barn to one side and another (mostly ruined) outhouse to the other, enclosing a yard to the front. On all sides, the building is protected by trees so that it’s sheltered from winds and shaded from sun and often seems to hide away, like a rabbit squatting in the undergrowth.
The house had all been knocked into a decent state by the previous owner and didn’t need any real attention from us. But outdoors was a different matter: neglected and overgrown, the grass head-high and slithering with snakes, the trees packed too close, a droughty yellow, the soil jaded and stony. So we waded in to clear the field with strimmer and scythes and shears, dug over the vegetable patch and extended it, cutting out a new piece of growing land. We retrieved the currant bushes from their cloaks of brambles and pruned the cherry trees; we planted a peach tree, too, and some vines. We began to spend more and more time outdoors, working on the flower beds at the front of the house and thinning the mass of plum and beech and oak that shaded them, planting herbs against the barn wall, learning how to germinate and bring on seeds. Tentatively, because they were new to us, we experimented with ‘exotics’ like aubergines and chillies that, to our delight, quickly flourished in the hot, dry conditions. We discovered that tomatoes don’t have to be red, that black and green and white and orange varieties each have their own distinct flavour. A short while later, with great excitement, we brought home four black hens in cardboard boxes from the market, letting them wander freely in the garden and the adjoining fields, becoming accustomed to their friendly repertoire of squawks and discovering the daily tactile delight – and frustration – of searching for eggs among the straw in the woodshed, in leafy corners, alongside walls, in nettle beds – anywhere but in the neat little hen house.
But nearly all the local families dig vegetable gardens and have a few chickens; we were simply keeping up with the neighbours, fitting in. Whereas the raising of pigs was not a visible part of the lives around us. Next door, beyond the field beyond our garden, is a small farm, typical of the area, a muddle of old buildings in a patchwork of land. The old-fashioned farmer used the network of caselles as he walked his cattle about daily, moving them from one small patch of grazing to another, much as shepherds do, to be sure of the best pasture. The cows here are raised for young beef – Le Veau d’Aveyron – a deep-pink meat that has protected status, produced from cattle brought up in large, open spaces, kept alongside their mothers until they’re stocky, muscly young adults. Traditionally, most herds were small – perhaps no more than ten or a dozen animals – and there’s a photograph of our neighbour from twenty years ago driving his handful of buff-coloured cows beneath summer trees, his shoulders covered with an old sack, his smile sheepish beneath his beret. There was a pig at his farmhouse in those days and the days before – habitually, inevitably – just as there were chickens and rabbits in hutches and three large vegetable gardens. But shortly after we moved in, our neighbour was kicked by one of his horses and died in a field, a little over eighty years old. Now, there’s no longer a pig. His widow, Solange, is relieved not to have to keep such an animal in the stall alongside the house; she prefers the smell of cows, she says.
The winter after we arrived here, just over twelve years ago, we walked across the fields to the next hamlet where we knew another farmer who lived in a modest, shabby 1970s bungalow with the old farmhouse abandoned alongside; on previous occasions we’d had a guided tour of the ancient tractor stock and the impressive woodpile. It was a day or so after New Year; it’s good manners to make an effort to wish those around you ‘Bonne Année’, one of those small undertakings which belies the isolation of those who live most of their lives alone with their families; it’s a reinforcement of community which, in turn, means security and knowledge and variety. And so we intended to do the rounds of our neighbours and show that, even though we were odd English interlopers, we had at least some grasp of basic courtesies. We were met outside the garage by Sylvain, the teenage son. He was on edge; he did not greet us with the usual smile but looked up and down the deserted lane behind us, as though we might be trailing a gang of thugs in our wake. Something secret seemed to be happening. Something disreputable. He hesitated, and then anxiously ushered us into the workrooms under the house. ‘Quiet,’ he said, ‘come quickly,’ and he hurried us through a gap in the doors and closed them firmly behind us. Only when we were safely concealed in the basement did he stop and turn to shake our hands in greeting, and smile: Bonne Année.
The itinerant pig-killer had been, a man of brutal but inexpensive methods, who was just clearing away his tools. There were trestle tables covered with bits and pieces of flesh; there was a lot of blood, on the floors, on the tables, on hands and faces; there were buckets filled with a great deal more blood, and entrails; dogs were scavenging from one pile of meat to another. We watched for a while as the butchering progressed. Someone was grinding meat; someone else was doing something slippery with innards. I don’t remember much detail. In the windowless basement, the light was dim and soupy, but that’s not the reason my memory is hazy. It was a struggle to take all this in, the unexpected sight and sounds of dead animal in the winter cold, and the tense, exhausted excitement of the family. What I recall is a sense of the raw, hard, confused nature of what was going on, and shock at the knowledge that these neighbours had a pig at all – we had met them many times herding cattle from one pasture to another; their yard was filled with chickens, and often we came away with a bag of eggs; but I had no idea they kept a pig. This was an animal that had been locked in a small stone pen under an old barn by day and night, a pen without windows, without light, without air, stifling hot in summer, freezing in winter; it had been alone. It had been fattened without fuss and dispatched in secret. For the year or so of its pitiful life, it had been almost entirely invisible; more, it had been as though it did not really exist. I came away with a hearty but flabby roasting joint, and a feeling of having been witness to something shameful.
No one else we knew kept pigs. Even here, in the hidden pockets of La France Profonde, it was no longer a normal thing to do. Apparently, more hamlets and villages in France bear names referring to pigs and pig-keeping than to any other single activity – from the obvious La Porcherie (pig farm) to the more obscure Suin, derived from the root for swine – and yet this commonplace of country living is now not at all common. I couldn’t have picked up the desire to keep pigs by wandering around the neighbourhood watching hearty old sows snuffle idyllically in gardens. Chickens scuffle in the lanes everywhere, ducks too, geese and noisy guineafowl; goats come and go around the houses, there are a few sheep – but no pigs. Animals that not very long ago would have been ubiquitous here have now disappeared. Keeping pigs would be a choice, not a habit.
We juggled the idea of our own pigs for a long time, back and forth between us, nothing much more than a ‘what-if’. We came back to it time and again over months, even years, enjoying the whim. It didn’t seem like it would ever really happen. But the more we talked about the possibility of pigs, the more it nudged its way to the front of our thinking, edging inexorably from a what-if to a must-have. Ed did some research, thorough and cautious. He began to drip-feed the information we needed to know: there was this piece of land we could borrow from neighbours; two pieces, in fact, the small enclosed old orchard for when the pigs were small and a larger field with sloping woodland for when they were older; pigs were ideally suited to forage among the oaks and could mostly fend for themselves; we would have to buy two pigs, because a pig needs company and should not be kept on its own. We looked at what pig-keeping might mean on a practical daily basis. There was, as always, the problem of money: Ed’s journalism only paid essential bills; my novels only haphazardly brought in cash for extras; we were already scraping by, using up our savings to make ends meet. An investment in livestock would mean substantial costs – food, fencing and equipment, not to mention the price of the animals themselves – which would stretch us even further. But there were good things, too, about our situation: we both worked from home, so we could easily accommodate the routines of care and feeding, and we hoped not to have to go anywhere much for the next year or two, so we could guarantee being around to enjoy the pigs and, perhaps more importantly, the meat that followed.
And so, before we’d even really noticed, we had plans. I don’t recall a particular moment of decision, just a momentum of wishing so that somehow it was agreed: we would have pigs. Two pigs. Our pigs. Even now, when I think of this, I feel a jump of excitement at the prospect, but in a sensible, responsible way we spent several more weeks discussing all the possible implications and making sure we had it all straight.
One other thing we discussed only briefly, because it seemed self-evident: our pigs would not be pets. They would be raised for meat. This was the whole point of it. Besides, we did not have the capacity to keep, or the money to feed, fully grown, adult pigs for any length of time – so we would have to kill them after we’d had them for around a year. This would give us two good-sized carcasses: enough to pack the freezer and to offset some of the expense. It would be good meat; we would know exactly its provenance and would be able to guarantee its quality.
That was the deal. Pigs as an investment. Without the final promise of bacon and loin steaks, chops, sausages and pâtés, the experiment was simply not possible. ‘There is no savings bank for a labourer like a pig,’1 observed the agricultural writer Samuel Sidney in 1860: a piglet bought for a sovereign in early summer, fed on household waste and fattened up on grains or fallen acorns and nuts in time for Christmas would not only provide a sumptuous feast but also ‘hams [which] he can sell to buy another pig, and the rest will remain for his own consumption, without seeming to have cost anything.’ The pig-killing, then, was a moment of reckoning, when the long months of nurture were turned to profit and the natural balance of the world properly poised. We were entering into the pig-keeping business with hard noses and clear heads; like nineteenth-century labourers, we needed a return on the expenses of rearing and husbandry.
That was agreed, then: we would kill them. It seemed simple enough. A straightforward calculation of investment and return; pigs as an old-fashioned ‘savings bank’. We didn’t know then, of course, what was to come. How could we? The pigs hadn’t even arrived. There was no way of knowing what it might actually be like to raise a pig or how endearing they might be or how attached to them we might become. That was impossible to know. So we just went along with the basic tried-and-tested smallholding script: animals in, animals grown, animals slaughtered. That was how it would be, we thought. That was what we agreed, from the beginning.
Our pigs would be black. The Gascon Noir, or Noir de Bigorre, is an ancient, hardy breed of pig which can live outside all year round. It looks something like a wild boar, with thick, wiry black hair and a pointed face, but with long loped ears and a much bigger, heavier frame. These pigs have been part of family and farming life in the central Pyrenees and the surrounding regions since the Roman period: the nineteenth-century French veterinarian and zoologist, André Sanson, traced the Noir de Bigorre to a handful of original breeds that he considered ‘pure’, emerging from prehistoric Africa where it was domesticated by Iberian explorers, subsequently becoming widespread in Spain and southern France.
But it’s a pig that takes a long time to mature, and so it’s particularly unsuited to intensive farming methods. Many modern pigs are battery farmed: they are bred to grow quickly and can reach a slaughter weight of 100kg in 24 weeks; often, they are killed sooner – at four or five months – because smaller carcasses are easier for abattoirs to handle. The meat is lean, pale, bland, cheap: popular with shoppers. In France, the recovery from the Second World War was linked to a push towards industrialization and more and more intensive farming practices. No one wanted a pig which took two years to ‘grow’, and which produced dark meat and dense layers of rich fat. The Noir de Bigorre was out of fashion, an anachronism, too expensive to rear and too distinctive for the modern marketplace. Numbers fell so far in the post-war decades that by the 1980s there were only two males and a handful of females remaining, hidden away in small farms scattered around the Upper Pyrenees. A rescue programme was launched to save the breed.
A few miles away from our house, we had bought meat from a farmer called Benoît who had turned over acres and acres of oak woodland to a herd of Gascon Noir pigs; several herds, really, numbering up to 120 animals at a time. We’d seen the pigs at a distance, running into the trees at the sound of our car, and we’d been up close in the enclosures where the sows farrowed and fed their piglets. These were plain, stocky, beautiful animals, nothing frivolous about them, not quite tame, no longer wild, still manipulated by humans, anciently natural, as much a part of the dry, limestone landscape as the prehistoric dolmens and medieval chapels that punctuate the edges of forest paths. These were easy pigs to keep, genuinely and habitually free range – and now famed for the quality of their meat. In an age increasingly valuing slow food – a ‘foodie’ age of farmers’ markets and organic produce and strong flavours – the very characteristics which had once threatened the existence of these animals were, ironically, their strongest assets.
We arranged with Benoît to sell us two weaners, piglets of around twelve weeks of age. I suppose it had crossed my mind that we might choose the ones we wanted, picking them from a litter like puppies. Let’s have that one, the cute one; let’s have the one with the floppy ears; no, that one. But then, then they would be pets, wouldn’t they? And anyway, the idea clearly never occurred to Benoît who, in a businesslike manner, simply took the order and asked whether we wanted him to put rings through their noses, to prevent them from digging the ground. No, we said, no rings, and that was that.
In the days before the weaners are delivered I become obsessed by pigs. I’ve never touched a pig; I’ve only got vague memories of indeterminate piles of pink flesh in the barn at a children’s farm; I’ve never been up close. I have no idea what to expect. What are they like? What do they ‘do’? Do they smell?
I read as much as I can. The first thing I discover is that pigs are bright, capable, seriously intelligent. I have a vague sense that I knew this already, but it was information I’d never paid any attention to, and now I do. I look at studies. I marvel. Pigs, it turns out, are at least as clever and sociable as dogs, with a similar inclination to human company. This is good; I like dogs. I read about an experiment carried out at Cambridge University in 2009 which took four pairs of pigs and put mirrors in their pens with them for five hours.2 They could explore the mirrors in any way they wanted: at first they were cautious, but soon they were happy to press their noses close and watch their reflections; one pig charged at its reflection and broke the mirror; others looked behind, to try to work out what was going on. Each pig was then placed in a pen with an angled mirror and a partition, behind which were treats. (Apparently, pigs are partial to M&Ms; this, too, is a new discovery.) Seven of the eight pigs immediately understood what was happening with the reflections, looked behind the partition and found the food. A control group of pigs that had never seen a mirror before were suitably baffled and mistook the reflection for reality, rooting around behind the mirror in a fruitless attempt to track down the snacks. According to those who ran the experiment, this proves pigs have a high degree of ‘assessment awareness’, which is the ability to use memories and observations to assess a situation and act on it.
It’s not yet clear whether pigs can actually recognize themselves in mirrors, a feat which would rank them alongside apes, dolphins and elephants in terms of intelligence, but they can certainly not be dismissed as dullard farmyard stock. Even though my research is hurried by the fact that there are pigs on the way, any day, I manage to unearth plenty of other cases which seem to prove the brilliance of pig cognition: apparently, pigs are among the quickest of any animals to learn new routines and are capable of jumping hoops, bowing, spinning, rolling out rugs, herding sheep and playing video games with joysticks, should you wish them to. They also have long memories.
Physically, too, there are interesting things about pigs. The pig genome and the human genome are closely related, large sections of both having been maintained in an unaltered state since the ancestors of hogs and humans diverged around 100 million years ago. Pig hearts are very like human hearts, metabolizing drugs in a similar way; pig teeth and human teeth are alike; pigs share a human propensity for laziness and so weight-gain and the diseases of sloth. Apparently, given the chance, they like to lie around, drinking, even smoking and watching TV. I wonder about the efficacy of the shelter we’ve built: no bar, no ashtray, no satellite feed.
Reading pig studies is fine. It gives me a sense of ‘the pig’ in a general way, allowing me to grasp facts and contexts. But it doesn’t really seem to have much to do with my pigs, the pigs. Unexpectedly, it’s shopping that makes it all immediate and authentic and certain; it’s the discovery of a strange and uncharted array of goods and equipment that seems to say, yes, you’ll soon be the owner of animals, livestock; you’ll no longer be the person you were but a different person, one who knows what it is to keep a pig.
We live on the edge of an area known as the Rouergue, an ancient Occitan province bounded to the north by the mountainous Auvergne and to the south by the fruitful Languedoc, a region that was wealthy and powerful during the Middle Ages when wealth and power were largely determined by land and its produce. We briefly discovered the region on holiday but returned in less of a rush a few years later and chose this as a place to stay for good because we were drawn by its warmth and ordinariness, its food and history, and by the expanses of forest and field worked in a small personal way from one-man farms clustered in sparse hamlets. We didn’t know a great deal more than the guidebooks told us but it was immediately evident that families and land here remained interdependent; you can’t help being aware of the annual calendar of rural tasks: hedge-cutting, pollarding, ploughing, sowing, haymaking, harvest. But what has also become clear, as we’ve stayed longer, is how this is a place poised, teetering between one time and another, an old bundle of habits and a new one, a known, steady life and a fragile future. The depopulation of the post-war years has been halted, at least temporarily, by the influx of migrants like us – the British and the Dutch, principally – and the tenacious hold of a few young families, but even in the decade or so that we’ve lived here, our village has begun to loosen its grip on the land, farming giving way to short-term jobs of one kind or another with uncertain contracts: portering at the hospital, driving lorries, handing out publicity for the local radio station, care work. Gifted teenagers move away to university and rarely return; those who fail to pass the precious Baccalauréat struggle to find work of any kind and drift away anyway, barely hopeful. Very few local people here aspire to work from home in the way we do – what they really want is secure government posts with good pensions – and agricultural labour is seen for what it is: brutal and unrewarding. Small farms have been parcelled up and divided over and over again, from generation to generation, until they’re tiny, the fields dotted around the neighbourhood, the scraps of forest unprofitable, the land barely providing a living for a single man, let alone a family.
This is a poor community, its fabric wearing thin, a place of widows. The obituary notices in the local press commonly announce the deaths of old women well over the age of ninety but men routinely die much earlier, and in the decades of widowhood, the picturesque rambling farms of leaking barns and tumbling walls are held together by the toil of women like Solange. Occasionally, they meet for an afternoon of gossip in someone’s front room or, in hot weather, deep in the shade of the farmyard, but on most days they are alone, working their way through tough tedious chores, tending their gardens and bemoaning rising costs. It’s not a life many young women, or men, aspire to these days. It can’t go on. Solange has already rented out most of her land to another local farmer who’s attempting to piece together enough fields to put together a sustainable business with several herds of cattle, but he’s approaching late middle age himself, and when I look across the flowery meadows to Solange’s farmhouse I wonder how this landscape will change, what will become of the old buildings and the old ways, how soon what I see now will become just another sediment of history here, buried and forgotten, hardly visible.
But for now, despite this growing sense of the precarious, our nearest town remains thoroughly and anciently agricultural. There is still a vibrant weekly produce market and a monthly cattle fair; it’s easy enough to browse for what the pigs might need in one of the series of out-of-town suppliers that line the main road. But it’s baffling. There’s a whole new language to be learned which helps define the different stages of animal growth, the technicalities of feeding and watering, dietary nuances and medical needs. What’s more, this stuff is really expensive. We have to spend a serious amount of time picking through the detail to find out what is absolutely necessary and what might be considered optional, or even a frippery. It comes as a surprise to learn that local farmers can be tempted into buying all kinds of apparently unnecessary equipment, from decorated feeding trays to state-of-the-art vehicles, until I remember that the toy shop further along the road, wedged between the supermarket and the timber yard, has aisles and aisles dedicated to toy tractors of all models and colours, harvesters, trailers and livestock pens: children here are taught from an early age that objects of desire are to be found around the farm.
We don’t buy very much: some green plastic poles and some metallic string which we can connect to a battery and make into a basic electric fence; a black bucket, also plastic; overalls and some new wellies. This is the most basic of pig-keeping starter kits, but even this makes me feel as though we’ve properly begun. It heralds a life change; it makes it clear that something is on the way. It’s exciting and memorable, like buying your first record, your first make-up, your first bra. It feels like a rite of passage; it feels as though something astounding is about to happen.
Some things we look at but don’t buy: things for the end, for killing a pig, for managing a carcass. We’ve not yet got the weaners; there’s no hurry to equip ourselves for their last days. But it’s in our minds, nonetheless. I look into the cost of buying an additional freezer so that none of the meat is wasted. And I begin to read about abattoir conventions and what it takes to slaughter a pig. Ed works out carcass weights and processing costs. We make an effort to face up to the details of death and we start to edge towards a significant decision: we don’t want our pigs to be subjected to the trauma of an abattoir slaughter; we want to have some control over the act; we want to do the best by them. We read and we talk and we make a promise: when the time comes to kill the pigs, we will kill them ourselves and we will do it here, at home.
But we don’t really know what such a promise means, of course. How many comfortable, middle-class, western European people like us know, these days, what it means to kill a pig? And even now, at the back of my mind, there are doubts. I don’t mention them to Ed, and mostly I ignore them. But every now and again I wonder if I’m really the person to do this, to slaughter an animal; I wonder if I’ll be able to face up to such a task in the end. In an abstract way it seems a reasonable decision, ensuring the most humane end for the pigs, keeping everything close to home, following tradition. But I’m not a nineteenth-century French farmer. I’m a twenty-first-century writer who spends much of the day in front of a laptop and who gets upset when small birds fly into the windows and break their necks. How, then, will I manage with a fully grown pig at my mercy? Do I grasp – really grasp – what that would be like?
Of course I don’t. Not yet. It’s no more than a landmark in the far distance, just about perceptible but unapproachable, indistinct. It’s true that in my reading there are plenty of warnings about taking on the task of killing a pig at home: ‘To kill a hog nicely is so much of a profession,’3 wrote William Cobbett in Cottage Economy in 1828, for example, ‘that it is better to pay a shilling for having it done, than to stab and hack and tear the carcass about.’ But it’s hard to make such advice from the past matter. It’s easy to think we know better. After all, we don’t mean to stab and hack and tear. We mean to be simple and compassionate. It seems right that we should take responsibility for the end of the pigs, as much as for the cute beginning. We’ll have done all the raising ourselves; we’ll be eating all the meat ourselves. It seems logical to take charge of the slaughter as well.
So then: simple and humane. And perhaps a little adventurous. And perhaps, too, with half an eye on our place here in this land of many people’s pasts. Other families have killed a pig here in this house, in this hamlet; so can we. So should we? We’ve been in France now a good handful of years; we have friends, attachments, habits. But there is no way you can come to a different country to live without viewing things for a long time as an outsider and without being an outsider – and the need to belong is powerful and seductive. Is there something, right at the back of my mind, that tells me killing pigs at home will somehow bind me irrevocably to the past, to the place, root my life here so that it seems less transient? Do I hope that this act of slaughter – this sacrifice? – will somehow appease the grumpy old gods who pester us with bills we can’t pay and threaten us with a return to the drizzle of British cities and proper jobs? Much more than simply a means of stocking the larder, killing a pig is traditionally a landmark, a rite, one of those events which acquire resonance through repetition from one generation to the next. Being present at a pig-killing is a mark of respect: to the animal which provides so much, to the family who own it, and to the customs and practices of the neighbourhood. Killing a pig is an act of belonging. Just at the moment, this seems important.
But I don’t agree on the home slaughter with any of these thoughts clear in my mind. I agree to it because I honestly think it will be best for the animals. And it seems sensible to make the decision now, at the beginning, so that we can make proper preparations and so that we can know, from the start, what the end will be. If we go into the process now with our final intentions clear, then there can be no mistake, no doubt.
And it doesn’t occur to me at all that we might change our minds. I don’t really consider that a decision taken in the cool good faith of planning and preparation might be upended by the plain, tangible reality of the pigs themselves. At this point all the reading and discussion seem to make things perfectly clear; we’ve been thorough and pragmatic. It all appears straightforward. Emotion simply doesn’t seem to come into it.
After all, how difficult can it be to kill a pig?
Here they come. The van is bouncing down the track; the trailer bouncing behind. Standing by the low wooden door into the orchard, I watch Benoît manoeuvre deftly across the ruts and tufts to bring the back of the vehicle close. It’s an open trailer and I can see both of the weaners, side by side, their noses raised. They are stocky, about the size of a smallish Labrador, with wide backs and small bright eyes; their ears flap forward and the underside is a soft, leathery greyish-brown. They look about them, tussle and nudge, look again, curious and eager; they keep up a quiet chorus of grunts and chatters, but don’t seem particularly put out by their journey across the main road.
Benoît leans over the side of the trailer and grabs the first weaner by the hind legs, swings it above the bars, tucks it under his arm and carries it through the door, stepping over the string for the electric fence and placing it inside. It squeals energetically, as you would expect a pig to, and squeals more mournfully when it’s left momentarily alone while the whole operation is repeated with the second weaner. But as soon as they’re together, they become quieter, just chattering together in their low grunts. They stand still on a little patch of soil and ivy between slender tree trunks, puzzled and wary, looking about them. They don’t like to move, that’s clear. They don’t trust this place, this ground.
Benoît, too, looks about. He’s a lean, strong man with deep wrinkles and big hands, a slow smile. He tests the solidity of the electric fence, walks the length of it, pushing at posts and wires. He suggests that we put in some additional posts to strengthen it at the corners. They’ll push, he explains, and test all the boundaries. Coming inside, he smiles at the shelter, slaps the plastic table legs hard and says much the same thing: they’ll have this down, in time. He is methodical, businesslike. There’s no chit-chat or pig pleasantry: he checks the pigs will be secure, fed, warm, that’s all.
Then he leaves. The weaners listen hard to the sound of the van and trailer driving away. Still they move only their heads; their trotters are planted. They don’t risk even a step.
We take a close look at what we’ve got. These are beautiful animals. They have a thick dark hide like an elephant’s, with long black hairs which lie flat on their rump and shoulders but which come together in a kind of bristly mane along the length of their backs; they have a fluffy fringe on their brows which sweeps rakishly between the ears. Their skin seems too big for them; it gathers into loose wrinkles around their necks and shoulders, as though they’re wearing a new jumper a few sizes too big. They have squat soft snouts, wrinkled too, leathery to the touch, knobbly knees and wonderfully smooth tensile tails, strong and active, always on the move; sometimes held straight like a rat’s, sometimes curled. The tails of the two pigs are different: one coils more readily and more tightly than the other.
We put down some grain for them, directly on to the ground among the trails of ivy leaves which have survived the clearing. It’s a couple of yards from where they’re standing, and so now they have to move if they want to eat. They sniff, hesitate. Yes, they want grain, but in this strange place with these strange people the smells in the air are confusing and foreign, new sounds come unexpectedly, there are risks. They look at us, weighing us up, their faces apparently unchan-ging, and yet somehow full of expression. In the slight dip of their