In Yorkshire at the Ginger Pig farm.
Clouds glower on the horizon felting up the moors and mist chokes the valleys like exhaust, clinging fearfully to the ghostly shadows of the trees. It's all very Heathcliff and Cathy.
We’re in the kitchen. A long oak table runs down the centre of the room, the planks a crosshatch to the Cadbury’s Flake beams on the ceiling from which hangs a Gothic wrought iron candelabra, dripping sharp edges and soft waxy candles the size of a small child’s thigh. A dog sleeps near the warmth of the Aga. Some cheerfully harmless mugs cluster around a tea pot. Tim sits enthroned in a high-backed carver that is gabled like the Victoria and Albert Museum, instructing Sarah to ring the Abattoir and tell them that if he can’t have his blood back he’ll have to do his killing elsewhere.
Given the atmospherics, it's fitting that Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley both visited the Whitby area while they were dreaming up their horror stories, it's only surprising than neither of them spent any time on a farm. This is Dracula with pigs.
We’ve had ‘the bucket of blood’ conversation before. It’s for black pudding, don’t you know, but I’m trying to wipe it from the white board of my memory only to discover that it’s been written in indelible ink.
In red.
I haven’t had any breakfast yet this morning and even the hot sweet tea isn’t helping the sudden revolt in my stomach.
I know the reality of farming. I can see the pair of pig’s heads nestling like Pinky and Perky masks on the floor of the wagon that delivers the carcasses swinging on their shivering steel hooks to the meat safe at the far end of the yard. I've been inside with the red eyed haunches and the puddles of blood. I’m even, sort of, getting used to the sweet smell of flesh and blood that drifts through from the butchery on the other side of the farmhouse kitchen and which, just like the scent of damp dog in an old Range Rover, nobody else seems to notice.
‘It’s difficult, you see,’ says Tim, trying to explain though in my head I’m singing Christmas Carols, and Blur’s Greatest Hits, trying not to hear him.
Deck the halls wi...‘They tell you all sorts...' Girls that do boys that do... 'that it isn’t allowed, and that it’s against regulations, but...' Away in a manger (nope, that's a bad song choice) '... they just don’t want the bother of it, because, you know, they’ve got to collect it.’
I nod, so give me coffee and tv, peacefully, mentally tapping out the beat, my eyes glazed like a stunned calf.
‘They cut the throat…’
And that’s it. My hand is up and I’m calling time. I’ve had it. Enough already. I give in. I surrender. I have hit my squeamish point.
‘and you have to keep stirring it so it doesn’t congeal,’ he continues.
I can’t listen anymore.
Farming might be 30 percent sex and 70 percent violence, but please, give me the porn movie and not the snuff film.
I swallow.
Hard.
And then Kevin comes in with something wrapped in a paper towel and puts it in a drawer.
Tim looks cross. ‘Why have you taken that?’
‘A youw, just like t'other one – septic pleurisy, we could only use t' back end, and it’s just fit for t’dogs,’
‘So what ‘ave you done with it?’
‘I dressed it,’ says Kevin.
I’m picturing it in a Shepherdesses outfit with a little crook and ribbons in its fleece, but just as ‘work’ is a euphemism for ‘professional shagging’ in male animals from bulls to boars to rams - dressed means something a little different in farming vocabulary from wearing a pair of stilettos and a boob tube in York town centre of a Saturday night. It means the animal has been eviscerated.
‘But what’s the matter?’ I asked, wondering why Tim was so upset, and by way of explanation he reopens the drawer and takes out a machine that looks like a metal icing plunger, except that it doesn’t force royal icing through the nozzle on the end. It’s a bolt gun, and it’s for shooting animals through the brain.
I recoil. It’s getting to be a bit of a habit. Soon I’ll have whiplash.
‘You don’t want an animal to suffer. It’s better to have a humane death that to leave it in pain,’
Quite but I’m still looking at the bolt gun.
In the bottom drawer of the kitchen. Where I keep a rolling pin and a fairy cake baking tray.
‘Isn’t it dangerous to have it just lying around?’
‘No, it can’t harm you unless you hold it against something,’ and Tim demonstrates by pressing it against the table and not firing it.
I have three large antique wing chairs in my bedroom like a stately Old Folk’s Home convention. One of them will being pushed against the door tonight.
