Bolton, Ken

Outdoor Pig-keeping, 1954 & My Other Books on Pigs

1. Pig Farming. Methods Of
2. was a book I wrote in 1945
3. tho what I knew then of
4. pig farming you may wonder. It is
5. a human enough activity.
6. I mean ‘universal’ – did they have
7. pigs on Easter Island, the New Guinea
8. highlands, did the Maori? Virgil
9. knew about pigs, tho I associate him, more,
10. with bees, my Latin education centering
11. on a limited number of texts –
12. bits of Caesar’s Gallic Wars
13. or Punic Wars (“Carthage delenda est”?) –
14. & not much else. Virgil. Ideas of
15. pig farming might be innate. (?)
16. Where do correct ideas come from?
17. “The head, boss.” Pigs pretty much
18. know what they want (isn’t that
19. often thought to be the problem,
20. the thing held against them?),
21. give it to them. “Long pig” was somehow
22. special dark knowledge when I was
23. a schoolboy, I mean the term.
24. A human dish. (No one else ate it,
25. except the odd lion or tiger –
26. as a one-off: humans also
27. protect their own – better probably not
28. to eat them too often.) But, to return
29. to the term, “long pig” implies knowledge
30. of “pig plain” sure enough. It seemed
31. insulting, to me, back then – to the idea
32. of the human & humanity & I didn’t like
33. to utter it. I remember once
34. someone telling me of an abandoned
35. hippy farm where they’d been producing
36. heroin. The pigs were fed
37. on scraps & excrement
38. & were squealing. Addicted.
39. Apparently the noise was horrible. I did,
40. at some time, sleep near where a pig
41. – or pigs – squealed all night. I can’t remember
42. now whether it was simply very affecting
43. or whether it was specifically because it sounded
44. human. It was loud, incessant & frightened.
45. I can’t remember where or when. An
46. abattoir. In 1945
47. I had not read Virgil. I do know that.
48. It seems we’ve passed this way before. In
49. ‘another life’ I may have been a pig farmer:
50. I see me, late at night at a plain kitchen table
51. writing Pig Farming, Methods Of. It’s
52. electric light – tho it could do with a stronger
53. bulb. I write it in a child’s school exercise book.
54. My only daughter has died? It’s hers, hardly used,
55. & I turn it round & start at the back? – or maybe
56. continue right on from where she left off.
57. She had been studying & had written amo, amas,
58. amat etc. The vocabulary list begins with
59. “agricola” – farmer. As I see it the farmer
60. does not become especially sentimental about
61. the exercise book. He may have done, must
62. have done, at some time since his daughter’s death,
63. but now he writes. Perhaps he writes with
64. extra care because it is her book. Perhaps he writes
65. because it is her book. He has not written
66. anything else before. He writes now
67. because she is gone. She was the future
68. & he was content to work to see her through –
69. to her adult life. But now she is gone
70. he must make something else. He is a widower.
71. I was brought up by my own father,
72. alone, me & my sister. We kept dogs & cats
73. & pigeons, a horse. No pigs. Anyway,
74. there it is, & it has my name on it, 1945 – Pig Farming, Methods Of.