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PIGS AND PALMS

I was in the pub one evening recently when the talk got around to pigs. The Landlord’s wife produced a copy of the magazine produced by The Rare Breeds Survival Trust and I was amazed to see that the pig of my youth, the Wessex Saddleback is approaching the status of an endangered species. Even with my youth behind me it was still a popular breed despite the ‘seedy cut’ in the carcass. Crossed with a Large White Boar it was Top of The Pigs for many years until the Danish Landrace ousted it. I always thought that the earlier Landrace were comparatively ‘slim’ which is why they ‘took on’ I suppose. However, I once had a much slimmer pig.

I’ve said before that I was for some time at Shaibah on the Persian Gulf. The Adjutant, a FIt. Lt. named Lovatt-Campbell had spent his youth riding the range in South America. In Iraq he spent the hot afternoons (the shade temperatures went up to 136 degrees during the day and most of us lay on our charpoys and sweated), riding the police horses about the local desert.

“I want to see you in my office,” he said one day as he rode past. “Tomorrow morning, six hundred hours.” His voice died away on the hot air as he made for the nearest mirage. It was with some trepidation I presented myself the next day. The sun was not yet at its zenith and the punka was stationary above our heads at the punka-wallah busied himself sweeping the office floor.

“Ah, Poole!” he said as I entered. “You know something about pigs don’t you?” Before I could reply he continued, “I want you to take on the pigs at HQ. The other chap’s been posted.” My mind flashed halfway across the world to a new Danish piggery built in the heart of the Devon countryside, then back again to the three mudwall pigstys’ behind the Guardroom at the gate of HQ. “You can do it, can’t you?” His voice brought me to earth. “Yes, of course,” I said, full of the confidence of youth.

The herd was all Large Whites, one sow with a litter fit to wean, two about three weeks in pig and a Large White Boar.
Thinking about it later there should have been more but that was the situation. I weaned the sucklers and a few days later put the sow to the boar and that was when my troubles began. I noticed that after service the boar showed signs of slight bleeding but pushed it out of my mind and hoped for the best.

Had I met my predecessor I may have had some information about the way the pigs had been managed but I was completely in the dark. I had never fed swill before and this stuff went straight from the back door of the Mess to the sties carried by native labour. Being Moslems to whom the pig is taboo that was as much as they would do and the rest was left to me. Such was their strength of feeling that natives caught in petty theft by the RAF police were made to clean out the stys with their bare hands, to them a fate worse than death.

The pigs were not always appreciative of their diet and I well remember a Sunday morning when the swill bins were full of porridge. The men didn’t like it and neither did the pigs! I had to clean it out of the troughs before I could put the next lot in.

The sow I had had served returned and I tried again with the same result and when it happened the third time I told the Adjutant who got twenty pounds out of Mess funds and sent me to Basra to find the Indian vet. Imagine if you can a fifteen hundredweight truck parked in the middle of an Arabian market surrounded by chattering and curious natives, none of whom wanted anything to do with an unclean pig and yet there was this huge boar looking out over the tailboard with a beady eye whilst I tried to explain to the vet what the trouble was. My Hindustani was limited to about half a dozen words, I certainly didn’t know sheath or penis!, and his English wasn’t much better. Eventually we came to terms and shook hands and moved off to the cheers of the crowd who were probably glad to see the back of us. Penicillin was a new thing then especially to the veterinary world and he took all of my twenty pounds for a small packet, and that was forty years ago!

The noise when I drenched the boar brought a considerable audience, most of whom only knew pig as meat. It was to no avail. The bleeding became worse after each service and we decided to eat the boar and get another one. The sergeant cook borrowed a revolver from the sergeant of the police and we butchered the animal outside the cookhouse.

There was a boar available at RAF Habbania, a good two days journey across desert tracks to Bagdad and beyond. It wouldn’t have stood the gruelling journey and I asked for it to be flown down on the next routine flight. At that time livestock had never been transported by air and my request was refused. The Adjutant then discovered that at Basra there was a firm growing dates for export and that they had pigs running wild among their palms. The original pigs had been abandoned ten year earlier and we could help ourselves if we could catch one. The years of inbreeding had played havoc with their conformation. Long legs, narrow bodies, short heads with half length ears, half lopped. They looked, in the distance, through the palms% more like greyhounds. They could certainly run and it was some time and a lot of breath later that we managed to ensnare one in the camouflage net. Not being able to get near enough to them all for comparison we took the first one possible.

Despite its length of leg it was only young and not high enough to serve the sow and I stood behind it holding it up to do its job. Word went round like wildfire and crowds came to see what Poole was doing in the pigsty.

The boar was very fertile and the result of the mating was something I’d never seen the likes of before or, thank God, since. It’s difficult to describe the piglets but the dozen lying in the corner of the sty seemed to be all legs and little else. Fortunately I too was posted not long after this but I’ve often wondered what happened to the Shaibah pigs. Pig keeping in a Moslem country was full of difficulties and not to be recommended.

During this period an article appeared in a troops’ newspaper about a Professor Edwards of Cambridge who was doing research to find a sunproof pig. I wrote to him and his answer caught me up some eighteen months later in the Western Desert having been all around India by mistake. It told me nothing that I didn’t already know.