All Creatures Great and Small (14 page)

“Fine, Miss Harbottle, fine.” Siegfried was rubbing his hands harder than ever. “We’ll expect you on Monday morning”

“Nine o’clock sharp, Mr. Farnon.”

After she had gone there was a silence. Tristan had enjoyed her visit and was smiling thoughtfully, but I felt uncertain.

“You know, Siegfried,” I said, “maybe she is a demon of efficiency but isn’t she just a bit tough?”

“Tough?” Siegfried gave a loud, rather cracked laugh. “Not a bit of it. You leave her to me. I can handle her.”

T
HERE WAS LITTLE FURNITURE
in the dining-room but the noble lines and the very size of the place lent grace to the long sideboard and the modest mahogany table where Tristan and I sat at breakfast.

The single large window was patterned with frost and in the street outside, the footsteps of the passers-by crunched in the crisp snow. I looked up from my boiled egg as a car drew up. There was a stamping in the porch, the outer door banged shut and Siegfried burst into the room. Without a word he made for the fire and hung over it, leaning his elbows on the grey marble mantelpiece. He was muffled almost to the eyes in greatcoat and scarf but what you could see of his face was purplish blue.

He turned a pair of streaming eyes to the table. “A milk fever up at old Heseltine’s. One of the high buildings. God, it was cold up there. I could hardly breathe.”

As he pulled off his gloves and shook his numbed fingers in front of the flames, he darted sidelong glances at his brother. Tristan’s chair was nearest the fire and he was enjoying his breakfast as he enjoyed everything, slapping the butter happily on to his toast and whistling as he applied the marmalade. His
Daily Mirror
was balanced against the coffee pot. You could almost see the waves of comfort and contentment coming from him.

Siegfried dragged himself unwillingly from the fire and dropped into a chair. “I’ll just have a cup of coffee, James. Heseltine was very kind—asked me to sit down and have breakfast with him. He gave me a lovely slice of home fed bacon—a bit fat, maybe, but what a flavour! I can taste it now.”

He put down his cup with a clatter. “You know, there’s no reason why we should have to go to the grocer for our bacon and eggs. There’s a perfectly good hen house at the bottom of the garden and a pigsty in the yard with a boiler for the swill. All our household waste could go towards feeding a pig. We’d probably do it quite cheaply.”

He rounded on Tristan who had just lit a Woodbine and was shaking out his
Mirror
with the air of ineffable pleasure which was peculiar to him. “And it would be a useful job for you. You’re not producing much sitting around here on your arse all day. A bit of stock keeping would do you good.”

Tristan put down his paper as though the charm had gone out of it. “Stock keeping? Well, I feed your mare as it is.” He didn’t enjoy looking after Siegfried’s new hunter because every time he turned her out to water in the yard she would take a playful kick at him in passing.

Siegfried jumped up. “I know you do, and it doesn’t take all day, does it? It won’t kill you to take on the hens and pigs.”

“Pigs?” Tristan looked startled. “I thought you said pig.”

“Yes, pigs. I’ve just been thinking. If I buy a litter of weaners we can sell the others and keep one for ourselves. Won’t cost a thing that way.”

“Not with free labour, certainly.”

“Labour? Labour? You don’t know what it means! Look at you lying back there puffing your head off. You smoke too many of those bloody cigarettes!”

“So do you.”

“Never mind me, I’m talking about you!” Siegfried shouted.

I got up from the table with a sigh. Another day had begun.

When Siegfried got an idea he didn’t muck about. Immediate action was his watchword. Within forty-eight hours a litter of ten little pigs had taken up residence in the sty and twelve Light Sussex pullets were pecking about behind the wire of the hen house. He was particularly pleased with the pullets. “Look at them, James; just on point of lay and a very good strain, too. There’ll be just a trickle of eggs at first, but once they get cracking we’ll be snowed under. Nothing like a nice fresh egg warm from the nest.”

It was plain from the first that Tristan didn’t share his brother’s enthusiasm for the hens. I often found him hanging about outside the hen house, looking bored and occasionally throwing bread crusts over the wire. There was no evidence of the regular feeding, the balanced diet recommended by the experts. As egg producers, the hens held no appeal for him, but he did become mildly interested in them as personalities. An odd way of clucking, a peculiarity in gait—these things amused him.

But there were no eggs and as the weeks passed, Siegfried became increasingly irritable. “Wait till I see the chap that sold me those hens. Damned scoundrel. Good laying strain my foot!” It was pathetic to see him anxiously exploring the empty nesting boxes every morning.

One afternoon, I was going down the garden when Tristan called to me. “Come over here, Jim. This is something new. I bet you’ve never seen anything like it before.” He pointed upwards and I saw a group of unusually coloured large birds perched in the branches of the elms. There were more of them in the neighbour’s apple trees.

I stared in astonishment. “You’re right, I’ve never seen anything like them. What are they?”

“Oh, come on,” said Tristan, grinning in delight. “Surely there’s something familiar about them. Take another look.”

I peered upwards again. “No, I’ve never seen birds as big as that and with such exotic plumage. What is it—a freak migration?”

Tristan gave a shout of laughter. “They’re our hens!”

“How the devil did they get up there?”

“They’ve left home. Hopped it.”

“But I can only see seven. Where are the rest of them?”

“God knows. Let’s have a look over the wall.”

The crumbling mortar gave plenty of toe holds between the bricks and we looked down into the next garden. The other five hens were there, pecking contentedly among some cabbages.

It took a long time to get them all back into the hen house and the tedious business had to be repeated several times a day thereafter. For the hens had clearly grown tired of life under Tristan and decided that they would do better living off the country. They became nomads, ranging ever further afield in their search for sustenance.

At first the neighbours chuckled. They phoned to say their children were rounding up the hens and would we come and get them; but with the passage of time their jocularity wore thin. Finally Siegfried was involved in some painful interviews. His hens, he was told, were an unmitigated nuisance.

It was after one particularly unpleasant session that Siegfried decided that the hens must go. It was a bitter blow and as usual he vented his fury on Tristan. “I must have been mad to think that any hens under your care would ever lay eggs. But really, isn’t it just a bit hard? I give you this simple little job and one would have thought that even you would be hard put to it to make a mess of it. But look at the situation after only three weeks. Not one solitary egg have we seen. The bloody hens are flying about the countryside like pigeons. We are permanently estranged from our neighbours. You’ve done a thorough job, haven’t you?” All the frustrated egg producer in Siegfried welled out in his shrill tones.

Tristan’s expression registered only wounded virtue, but he was rash enough to try to defend himself. “You know, I thought there was something queer about those hens from the start,” he muttered.

Siegfried shed the last vestiges of his self-control. “Queer!” he yelled wildly. “You’re the one that’s queer, not the poor bloody hens. You’re the queerest bugger there is. For God’s sake get out—get out of my sight!”

Tristan withdrew with quiet dignity.

It took some time for the last echoes of the poultry venture to die away but after a fortnight, sitting again at the dining-table with Tristan, I felt sure that all was forgotten. So that it was with a strange sense of the workings of fate that I saw Siegfried stride into the room and lean menacingly over his brother. “You remember those hens, I suppose,” he said almost in a whisper. “You’ll recall that I gave them away to Mrs. Dale, that old age pensioner down Brown’s Yard. Well, I’ve just been speaking to her. She’s delighted with them. Gives them a hot mash night and morning and she’s collecting ten eggs a day.” His voice rose almost to a scream. “Ten eggs, do you hear, ten eggs!”

I hurriedly swallowed the last of my tea and excused myself. I trotted along the passage, out the back door and up the garden to my car. On the way I passed the empty hen house. It had a forlorn look. It was a long way to the dining-room but I could still hear Siegfried.

“J
IM!
C
OME OVER HERE
and look at these little beggars.” Tristan laughed excitedly as he leaned over the door of the pigsty.

I walked across the yard. “What is it?”

“I’ve just given them their swill and it’s a bit hot. Just look at them!”

The little pigs were seizing the food, dropping it and walking suspiciously round it. Then they would creep up, touch the hot potatoes with their muzzles and leap back in alarm. There was none of the usual meal time slobbering; just a puzzled grunting.

Right from the start Tristan had found the pigs more interesting than the hens which was a good thing because he had to retrieve himself after the poultry disaster. He spent a lot of time in the yard, sometimes feeding or mucking out but more often resting his elbows on the door watching his charges.

As with the hens, he was more interested in their characters than their ability to produce pork or bacon. After he poured the swill into the long trough he always watched, entranced, while the pigs made their first rush. Soon, in the desperate gobbling there would be signs of uneasiness. The tiny animals would begin to glance sideways till their urge to find out what their mates were enjoying so much became unbearable; they would start to change position frantically, climbing over each other’s backs and falling into the swill.

Old Boardman was a willing collaborator, but mainly in an advisory capacity. Like all countrymen he considered he knew all about the husbandry and diseases of animals and, it turned out, pigs were his speciality. There were long conferences in the dark room under the Bairnsfather cartoons and the old man grew animated over his descriptions of the vast, beautiful animals he had reared in that very sty.

Tristan listened with respect because he had solid proof of Boardman’s expertise in the way he handled the old brick boiler. Tristan could light the thing but it went out if he turned his back on it; but it was docile in Boardman’s hands. I often saw Tristan listening wonderingly to the steady blub-blub while the old man rambled on and the delicious scent of cooking pig potatoes drifted over them both.

But no animal converts food more quickly into flesh than a pig and as the weeks passed the little pink creatures changed with alarming speed into ten solid, no-nonsense porkers. Their characters deteriorated, too. They lost all their charm. Meal times stopped being fun and became a battle with the odds growing heavier against Tristan all the time.

I could see that it brought a lot of colour into old Boardman’s life and he always dropped whatever he was doing when he saw Tristan scooping the swill from the boiler.

He obviously enjoyed watching the daily contest from his seat on the stone trough. Tristan bracing himself, listening to the pigs squealing at the rattle of the bucket; giving a few fearsome shouts to encourage himself then shooting the bolt and plunging among the grunting, jostling animals; broad, greedy snouts forcing into the bucket, sharp feet grinding his toes, heavy bodies thrusting against his legs.

I couldn’t help smiling when I remembered the light-hearted game it used to be. There was no laughter now. Tristan finally took to brandishing a heavy stick at the pigs before he dared to go in. Once inside his only hope of staying on his feet was to clear a little space by beating on the backs.

It was on a market day when the pigs had almost reached bacon weight that I came upon Tristan sprawled in his favourite chair. But there was something unusual about him; he wasn’t asleep, no medicine bottle, no Woodbines, no
Daily Mirror.
His arms hung limply over the sides of the chair, his eyes were half closed and sweat glistened on his forehead.

“Jim,” he whispered. “I’ve had the most hellish afternoon I’ve ever had in my life.”

I was alarmed at his appearance. “What’s happened?”

“The pigs,” he croaked. “They escaped today.”

“Escaped! How the devil could they do that?”

Tristan tugged at his hair. “It was when I was feeding the mare. I gave her her hay and thought I might as well feed the pigs at the same time. You know what they’ve been like lately—well, today they went berserk. Soon as I opened the door they charged out in a solid block. Sent me up in the air, bucket and all, then ran over the top of me.” He shuddered and looked up at me wide-eyed. “I’ll tell you this, Jim, when I was lying there on the cobbles, covered with swill and that lot trampling on me, I thought it was all over. But they didn’t savage me. They belted out through the yard door at full gallop.”

“The yard door was open then?”

“Too true it was. I would just choose this one day to leave it open.”

Tristan sat up and wrung his hands. “Well, you know, I thought it was all right at first. You see, they slowed down when they got into the lane and trotted quietly round into the front street with Boardman and I hard on their heels. They formed a group there. Didn’t seem to know where to go next. I was sure we were going to be able to head them off, but just then one of them caught sight of itself in Robson’s shop window.”

He gave a remarkable impression of a pig staring at its reflection for a few moments then leaping back with a startled grunt.

“Well, that did it, Jim. The bloody animal panicked and shot off into the market place at about fifty miles an hour with the rest after it.”

I gasped. Ten large pigs loose among the packed stalls and market day crowds was difficult even to imagine.