They trusted us... and we turned them into sausages!
ONE of my favourite Bertie wooster quotes is ‘Extraordinarily good bacon, this, Jeeves. Made, no doubt, from contented pigs’. well, in this true account, Jacqueline Yallop portrays the full muddy, snouty, squealing reality behind that quip about contented pigs making good bacon.
Jacqueline and her husband, Ed, two hardup writers who have gone to live in an isolated part of the South of France, decide to keep pigs, just as everyone in rural France used to until about 50 years ago. (More hamlets and villages in France bear names referring to pigs and pig-keeping than any other activity, Yallop tells us.)
The plan is: they’ll keep a pair of male pigs, of the Gascon Noir variety, which they’ll feed and nurture and give a good year of happy life to, before killing them and filling the freezer. ‘ One thing we discussed only briefly,’ Yallop writes, ‘ because it seemed self- evident: our pigs would not be pets. They would be reared for their meat.’ She and Ed are going into this with ‘hard noses and clear heads’.
also, they decide before getting them that they don’t want the pigs to be subjected to the trauma of abattoir slaughter: ‘ we will kill them ourselves, at home. How difficult can it be to kill a pig?’ and the reader thinks: ‘Uh-oh!’
Because, of course, the moment the 12- week- old piglets arrive, they are adorable: as inquisitive and confident as puppies, hilariously sweet with their wiggling tails and their constant rummaging, scuffling and snuffling.
They like being showered with the hose and they love company and empathy. Ed and Jacqueline firmly decide not to give them names, as that would be a dangerous step towards conferring pet status on them, so they call them ‘Big Pig’ and ‘Little Pig’.
and the reader thinks ‘Uh-oh’ again, because those really are (very nearly) names. The pigs have distinctive characters: Little Pig is the ‘ scaredy- cat and also exhibitionist and drama queen’; Big Pig is calmer and braver. They’re intelligent: when the day comes to move them to a larger enclosure, they flatly refuse to cross the bit of grass where the electric fence used to be, associating that place with shock.
But when they are eventually coaxed to their new, larger woody enclosure, they are in bliss: Yallop writes that the expression ‘like a pig in clover’ should really be ‘ like a pig in acorns’. They gorge on acorns, and their favourite game is ‘pear chase’, when Jacqueline throws pears from her bucket into the undergrowth for them to retrieve and devour. By autumn they have become burly, ‘ like portly Victorian gentlemen’.
as the months go by, and the acorn season gives way to a late-autumn glut of chestnuts (perfect for ‘finishing’ pigs, giving the final meat a good
flavour), Jacqueline grows increasingly anxious.
She knows she’s like ‘ an executioner falling in love with someone on Death Row’, and that she must guard against this.
She repeats to herself: ‘ Special pigs, but not pet pigs. Loveable pigs that must not be loved.’ She knows she must go ahead with the killing plan: she doesn’t want to be shown up as ‘just another flimsy, urban foreigner who has no place here’.
She tortures herself by reading descriptions of pig-killings from literature and by watching videos of pig-killings and butchery.
Knives arrive in the post: useful knives for ‘winkling a tenderloin from under the ribs with a deft slide’, but also a terrifying killing knife with a long, heavy blade.
The pigs are blissfully unaware of her inner turmoil, but things get worse for them when they’re brought back to the smaller enclosure in preparation for the end, and it rains and rains for weeks and the whole place becomes a mud-bath.
‘Do they wonder why their luck has changed?’ Yallop asks, and by this time I had got up from the sofa and gone to get a handkerchief. Hard-headed Ed practises in the night with the knife: ‘A long thrust forward, a turn of the blade, a brisk, upward flick.’ And the next morning, Big Pig (all 170kg of him) goes from being pig to pork. No squealing: just a quiet thud.
It’s an appalling moment. ‘Inside my shell,’ Yallop writes, ‘I think I hear part of me screaming.’ Then follow some gruesomely exhausting hours of scraping off the bristles and cutting out the innards.
Jacqueline goes and sings a Christmas solo in the local church choir, and then comes home and sobs her heart out.
I needed another hankie to cope with Little Pig’s fate. Little Pig is so distraught, so bewildered, so lonely without his companion that he repeatedly breaks through the electric fence in search of company. His fate . . . I’ll leave the details of that for the reader of this very affecting book to find out.
‘They have made me appreciate every single morsel of pork I eat,’ Yallop writes. ‘That is their gift to me in the end.’
And having read this, I feel the same.