A Circus in My Backyard. And Pigs Are People Too

I wrote this back in 2009. I still think of those experiences at the Red Lion in Lower Heyford. Animals were such a large part of my life.

And while it was no fun growing up in a pub in some ways, how many kids have circuses in their back yards?  The picture is my sister with Annabelle walking toward me. in the early 1960's.  I still hang washing out when I can, dryers are an environmental disaster and are expensive to run. Some places don't allow it, it's too working class. Middle class people don't hang out washing.  That's not success.

 

Pigs Are People Too

 

Richard Mellor

7-19-09

 

I was sitting around a campfire in Yosemite with my son and daughter-in law recently and, as seems fitting when sitting around a warm fire with a cup of wine in one’s hand, we began to talk of life.

“What was it like living in that pub in that small village, dad?” my son asked.  After my dad left the army he had taken a pub in a small Oxfordshire village.  It was a huge place, an old seventeenth-century inn with lots of rooms, as well as old stables and a garage once used for stagecoaches that passed through the village on their way to London,  Manchester or perhaps York . It sat on an acre and a half of land.

 

The pub was called the Red Lion and had a huge sign outside with a red lion on it, much like the lion on the Welsh flag.

 

“It was an interesting place” I said, buying a little time in order to think about what was interesting about it. Then I remembered one real treat, “There were small traveling circuses that used to stop there as they traveled around the country.”

 

“Real circuses?” my son asked somewhat amazed. “Real circuses with animals and stuff?”

 

Many memories were coming back to me now, “Yes, real circuses.” I replied.

 

I would have been about ten years old and as part of the deal to set up on our land (it wasn’t our land, it was owned by Oxford University)  my sister and I used to get in for free as the circus put on one or two shows for the locals and folks from surrounding villages who would come to see the performers and animals.

 

I remember having elephants in my backyard basically, a performing bear, big cats---although I can’t remember which ones.  There were all sorts of carney folk: trapeze artists, jugglers, acrobats and such. My sister and I used to hang around with them during the day watching handlers work with the animals while jugglers and high wire acts practiced under the big top.

 

The more we talked, the more I remembered about that part of my life and how lucky I was in some ways.  We had lots of animals and injured birds that my mother and I used to feed, or abandoned chicks that would have died without our help.  We used to feed them with a matchstick dipped in a mixture of bread and warm milk. As soon as the matchstick came near they would lift up their heads and open their beaks just like you see on the nature shows when the mother returns to the nest for her offspring.

 

My dad was a bit of a hustler.  He fancied himself one at least.  He had been a moneylender in the army and was always looking for the angle.  The farmer who farmed much of the land around the pub gave us a runt, a small piglet that was too weak to compete for the teat.  We bottle-fed this animal and she grew up in to be a nice healthy sow called Annabelle.

 

Annabelle was a domestic animal.  We kept her in the house for a long time until she got too big.  The first day we put her in the backyard was a bit of a calamity.  Our kitchen table where we ate was at ground level. We would sit around it and look out of the big window in to the yard.  We had ducklings in the yard that we hatched ourselves and they used to follow me around all the time, a long straight line of them like you see in the park or at the lake. They thought I was their mother.

 

I remember my mom, sister and I sitting at the table enjoying a healthy breakfast of eggs bacon and sausage cooked in lard/fat saved from previous meals, when Annabelle appeared at the window.  She was clearly distraught and not too pleased at not being where she thought she belonged, with her family on the other side of the window. Hell, Brutus the bull terrier was there, why wasn’t she?

 

I can see it clear as a bell after all these years.  My mother having this look of desperation on her face as she shouted, “No Annabelle, no.”  But Annabelle wasn’t listening; she came straight through the window and on to the kitchen table.  She was a pet, not a farm animal.

 

We also had two sheep, one named Friday and the other Easter because the farmer gave them to us as lambs on Easter weekend.  My mother and I used to go out at night and feed them with bottles of warm milk; they went berserk when we came with those bottles sucking the teats like crazy.

 

Annabelle and the sheep were domesticated animals.  They would not perform the way farm animals are supposed to.  My father, always after a buck, sold Friday and Easter back to the farmer when they were grown.  They liked good food and Cadbury’s chocolate.  The farmer sent them to the abattoir. Friday and Easter would attack his border collie when it tried to round them up; can’t have sheep not behaving like sheep.

 

Annabelle was worse.  I remember the vet coming over to inject her for something and my mother warning him to keep his eyes on her.

 

“She can’t be pushed around, she’s spoiled” she told him

 

The vet was quite confident, in fact much too cocky; he had been dealing with farm animals for years.  But Annabelle was no ordinary pig.  I can see it now. Annabelle was not in a good mood the way he was grabbing her hind legs and shifting her hind-quarters around as he saw fit.  I think she had arthritis or something similar.   After getting her in the right position he turned his back on her and bent down to reach into his bag.  Annabelle wasn’t about to let that opportunity pass and took a fair chunk out of his ass.

 

After a while we had five or six sows and it was my job to walk about 2 miles and fetch Jumbo.  Jumbo was a boar and he was rented out by another farmer to service sows.  He was easy to handle; I had just a small stick and walked the two miles back to our place as if walking a dog.

 

Jumbo had a delightful time with our sows. I remember him sticking his snout under their bellies and sort of tossing them in the air a bit.  I assume it was some sort of foreplay.  But Annabelle would have none of it.  She refused his advances and took a chunk out of his ear.  Annabelle was determined to remain a virgin.

 

My sister and I used to light bonfires at night and sit around the fires with the pigs, sheep and maybe a duck or chicken for company.  Brutus, our bull terrier never missed out on those evenings either.  We would wrap potatoes in aluminum foil and bake them in the fire. Pigs are very clean animals, and when they are little they are so cute.

 

I am grateful for those experiences. I understood animals in a way that I found urban kids didn’t when I moved to the city.  We also saw sex and reproduction around us all the time with  ewes lambing and piglets being born.

 

The saddest moment for me was when my father decided he couldn’t make any money breeding pigs so he sent them to the abattoir.  I remember when they came for Annabelle.  She went crazy.  “She knows, she knows,” my mother said.  They had a terrible time getting Annabelle into the truck; she literally fought for her life.

 

I never forgave my dad for that.