One Man and His Pigs

Many of you will already be acquainted with Clarence Threepwood, 9th Earl of Emsworth. You will know that in a life buffeted by bossy and opinionated women the Earl’s greatest consolation is his prizewinning Berkshire sow, the Empress of Blandings. P. G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth is a connoisseur of pigs and his favourite book, possibly the only one he ever reads, is The Care of the Pig by Augustus Whiffle.

I’m partial to pigs myself. As an asthmatic child of the suburbs I was often packed off to stay with country cousins, in the belief that fresh air would cure me. It didn’t. I suspect all that pollen and horsehair made my asthma worse, but on the positive side I enjoyed a freedom to wander that few children are allowed today, and I became familiar with the sights and smells and facts of country life. I was mesmerized by the size and stately pace of the cows we brought in at milking time. I learned to be respectful of the capriciousness of horses and I became gruesomely interested in the myriad ways a sheep can find to meet a tragic and premature end. But it was pigs that really drew me. On one occasion I was invited to visit a maternity sty a couple of weeks after a Large Black had farrowed. She had a litter of eight. ‘If you can catch one,’ said the pigman, ‘you can keep it.’ The prospects for a growing pig in my parents’ small suburban semi didn’t worry him. He knew I’d never hold on to one long enough to claim it. If you’ve never held a piglet let me tell you, it is a warm and velvety, squirmy bag of squeaks. I was smitten. Dog person or cat person? a personality quiz might ask. ‘Pig,’ I would have to reply. I grew up, lived in cities, never kept pigs, but they remained my domesticated animal of choice. According to Chinese astrology I was born in a Year of the Pig so, you know . . . You may therefore imagine my excitement when, about twenty years ago, I found, in a bookshop in Charing Cross Road, a copy of Whiffle’s Care of the Pig edited by James Hogg almost to pocket size and annotated by Lord Emsworth himself. I never scribble in books. I was brought up to regard book defacement as a sin. In our house it was right up there with simony and sorcery. Nevertheless I take vicarious delight in other people’s naughtiness. Indeed, one of the reasons I married my husband was for his marginalia. It seemed to me that a man who had the gumption to write Complete bull and Fallacy of the undistributed middle!! in a book by one over-fêted author was a keeper. So, I had in my hands Whiffle, on pigs, with margin notes by Lord Emsworth. Joy piled upon joy. I coughed up £3.50 and ran home with my treasure. It was a sound investment, destined to become one of my annual go-to books, particularly in the grey days of February when there’s nothing much to smile about. A few years ago I mentioned this fact in a blog post and was astonished to receive a message from the book’s editor. Mr Hogg said he had been astonished (a rare case of mutual and almost synchronous astonishment) to learn that anyone even read his book. I know the feeling, as does any writer apart from, say, J. K. Rowling and Robert Ludlum. But, revenons à nos cochons. What exactly is this book? Who, for instance, was its author, Augustus Whiffle? A good question. You might think that a man who composed more than 700 pages on pig husbandry, leaving no pignut unturned, would have been a celebrity, a legend on the after-dinner speech circuit, but no. Mr Whiffle was a creature of the early twentieth century when tweeting was an activity confined to birds. He remains elusive. He was apparently a member of the Athenaeum Club, but that doesn’t carry us much further forward. His pig credentials, though, were impeccable. His encyclopaedic knowledge of pigs was learned at the knee of his uncle, Sir Craster Whiffle, and Sir Craster loomed like a colossus over the world of late Victorian piggery. He was a breeder of Lincolnshire Curly Coats (sadly now extinct) and a columnist for the Lindsey and Kesteven Pig Breeder for more than sixty years. There are no Whiffles in my family tree but the village where I was exiled, with orders to stop wheezing and buck up, was on the borders of Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, so I feel a certain geographical affinity. Another question: which stage of Lord Emsworth’s long connection with Whiffle on pigs does this annotated edition reveal? A little detective work suggests that most of the marginalia date from Wellbeloved’s second term as head pigman at Blandings. I offer as evidence the following margin notes: Ask Wellbeloved? and Wellbeloved still reluctant to adopt this procedure. The procedure referred to was Whiffle’s recommendation to ascertain a reluctant sow’s true feelings vis-à-vis sexual congress by sitting astride her. I’m with Wellbeloved on this point. It sounds like a manoeuvre fraught with risk. Do not try this at home. Lord Emsworth employed a number of pigmen over the years. George Wellbeloved was undoubtedly his favourite – witness the second chance he was given after an act of unspeakable treachery. Wellbeloved’s downfall was strong drink, though in my opinion that in no way mitigated his disloyalty. After Wellbeloved’s first departure there was a pigman called Pirbright and another called Potts who had a speech impediment and who, if memory serves, won the football pools and was lured away to the fleshpots of Birmingham. The most surprising appointment to the Blandings piggery was that of Monica Simmons, a hearty girl who had played hockey for Roedean – Lord Emsworth was in the vanguard of equal-opportunity employment policy. But Wellbeloved was then given a second bite of the cherry and I believe the Annotated Whiffle dates from his second term. I have learned a lot from this little vade mecum. For instance, that coarse hair on a boar is often indicative of a villainous temper and that skimmed milk tends to make pigs costive. That the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was almost certainly the outcome of a long-festering quarrel between Serbia and Austro-Hungary regarding pork tariffs. And that a bucket of boiled potatoes is guaranteed to mend the broken heart of any young pig when it is time for him to leave his mother. I pass this tip on to any human parents who have a 29-year-old postgraduate weaner still in residence. Authoritative though he is, I do part company with Whiffle occasionally. For instance, on the topic of piebald pigs. He dismisses them as genetic halfway houses. As a writer who counts a Gloucester Old Spot as one of her most devoted readers, I must demur. An orchard pig can be a master of literary discernment, not to mention a progenitor of peerless porkers with good marbling and a perfect amount of back fat. The Gloucester Old Spot has nothing to apologize for. Not all pigs are readers, of course. Lord Emsworth’s beloved Empress ate the manuscript of Galahad Threepwood’s memoirs when she found it tossed into her sty. How it came to be there is an unsolved mystery. Thrown there by someone envious of its literary merit? Or by someone fearful of exposure by an indiscreet anecdote? The prime suspect was Percy Pilbeam but I remain sceptical. Would a man with shiny, finger-waved hair and a phobia of pigs have ventured anywhere near the Blandings piggery? I think not. Always interested in examples of pigs in literature – an excellent topic for a thesis if only I had been clever enough to do a Ph.D. – I was very grateful to the Annotated Whiffle for the following information. Count Leo Tolstoy, a hugely influential pig breeder in the Tula oblast, south of Moscow, was also something of a weekend scribbler and actually lost several pages of a work in progress, his novella War and Peace, when they fell into a grinder and ended up in the swill trough where they were much relished by a herd of Estonian baconers. Count Tolstoy had omitted to keep a back-up copy. There is a lesson there for all would-be writers. I hesitate to speak of my own literary efforts and only do so to mention the three pigs that adorned the pages of The Importance of Being Kennedy. The novel’s protagonist, Nora, a Westmeath girl working as a nursery maid to the Kennedy family, reminisces at one point about a pig her parents kept. In Ireland a cottage pig was often referred to as ‘yer man who’ll help pay the rent’. From Nora’s description of the pig’s escapades I believe I must have had in mind a Tamworth. They are the very Houdinis of the pig nation. Later in the same book, with Nora now living in England and experiencing the privations of Second World War rationing, she speaks of her husband, Walter, and his participation in a Pig Club. In a moment of authorial carelessness I failed to identify the breed of a pig named Hermann Goering but my money would be on a Large Black, not dissimilar to Lord Emsworth’s Empress but without the distinctive white socks of the Berkshire. Goering was so named by me, as was Nora and Walter’s post-war pig, Stalin, in recognition of a need to temper the sadness that inevitably weighs on softer-hearted pig-keepers as the day of doom approaches. Just deserts for Goering and Stalin. Dust to dust, pig to crackling. I commend Mr Hogg’s little book to you on several counts. It contains handy recipes for chitterlings and flead cakes, its modest length belies the wealth of pig lore to be found between its covers, and it includes a useful reference list of characters referred to in Lord Emsworth’s annotations, thereby circumventing any need to reread the Blandings novels. But then, why not do that anyway?

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 62 © Laurie Graham 2019