Boycott's battle to save Ilminster's bacon

ONE week before Easter, our Gloucester Old Spot, Bluebell, gave birth to six piglets. They're now 6in tall, with neat little ears, squashed-in snouts and vivid blue eyes and they squeak and make barking noises as they tumble over each other to get closer to Bluebell's teats.

From the other side of the fence, the rest of the Gloucesters watched the new arrivals with keen curiosity; four are pregnant and they seemed to be studying the new borns' antics with special interest. There is something very human about pigs; Churchill was a pig fan who once memorably said that dogs look up to you, cats look down on you, but pigs look you straight in the eye.

Bluebell has thick sandy eyelashes. Her eyes are the same shape as ours and she stares at you directly, offering both a greeting and a challenge. But perhaps it is the ink nakedness of pigs that make them seem so very human. The pregnant sows contemplating the piglets could have been a gathering of fat aunts having a jolly holiday in a nudist camp.

Our farm is now one year and four months old; we have 300 chickens, six ducks, eight geese and one turkey called George. We did have a lady turkey called Mildred, but she fell in the duck pond and died of pneumonia. She had laid six eggs in the week before she died and they're now in the incubator, along with 65 goose eggs.

We also have rare breed chickens and so far this year we've hatched 47 chicks, who wobbled around on their fragile little legs under heat lamps for three weeks before they were taken outside.

As for the walled vegetable garden, the long cold winter put back the planting schedules, but by Easter we had sown beans, peas, carrots, onions, leeks, cabbages, tomatoes, squashes, aubergines, lettuces, garlic, potatoes, purple sprouting, celeriac and cucumbers.

One hundred and twenty fruit trees apples, pears, plums, apricots and peaches have been planted along the walls and on wires running length-wise across the garden.

We've built and stocked a fruit cage, laid down an asparagus bed, sown some 2,000 herbs for sale in farmers' markets and taken hundreds and hundreds of cuttings from our own and our friends' gardens which now stand in neatly arranged pots in the nursery section of the farm.

There are 200 strawberries planted in boxes standing in rows on bales of straw to prevent slugs climbing up and eating the fruit.

All this feels a huge achievement. But until recently we had very little to sell, apart from the eggs which our chickens lay at a rate of 200 a day.

Then one day the pigs were ready. I took the first four Gloucesters Old Spots to slaughter in the last week of March. It was a bitingly cold day when we turned into the drive of Snells Abattoir, just off main road whicih runs south from Chard towards Axminster.

It was eight in the morning, but there was already a queue of smallholders with one or two pigs apiece. A Spanish vet called Jose, who was wearing a black nylon balaclava and a yellow plastic coat, was checking all was well with the animals, I asked him what he looked for. "I check zee feet" he told me, as he held aside a gate for our four pigs to walk through.

I'd been expecting the place to be riven by the squeals and shrieks of frightened animals, but it was nothing of the sort. Snells is one of the last family-owned abattoirs in the West Country, and great care is taken to make sure that an animal's last moments are both brief and humane.

As I watched our pigs walk into the depth of the building, I noticed three pigs in a pile against the wall of the stun room.

A Pink Gloucester, a black Berkshire and a reddish Tamworth were lying on top of each other like a multi-coloured pig sandwich. They were so still I thought they must be dead, then I saw that they were breathung and realised they were just having a gentle doze, even as their hour of slaughter approached. I left knowing that our pigs had a good life and, as far as is humanely possible, a good death.

Five days later two of them were delivered to Bonner's our local butcher, where Clinton Bonner known to me as Mr B was waiting to chop them up and sell them in his wonderful butcher's shop in Ilminster's high Street, known as Silver Street.

Mr B is a near as you can get to a classic, storybook butcher. He's tall and slightly red-faced, with a broad smile and a booming voice. Saturday morning in his shop isn't just about stocking up on meat for the weekend, it's an experience.

Mr B knows almost every customer and everyone is greeted by name, their health and well-being asked about. There's always a queue, usually so long that it stretches back out on to the pavement. There's always a joke and always a laugh.

On his noticeboard, there's a list of where the meat has come from all of it from local farms within a few miles. You can trust his meat in the same way that you can trust the vegetables on sale at John and Mary Rendall's greengrocers, a few doors down the street.

John and Mary are both in their 70s but they're in the shop, nine hours a day, six days a week. When John was a teenager he used to keep 30 goats which supplied milk for cheese and he'd herd them through the main street when they needed to move fields. But his passion was flower arranging and once a week he'd bicycle the ten miles to Taunton where he could get a lift to Exeter to join Constance Spry's flower class.

In the back room of their shop, John puts together dazzling arrangements of flowers for local weddings and funerals, crafting cats or dogs or names out of brightly coloured blooms.

Last summer, when we had a glut of green beans, we used to sell them to John, driving them into town in the early morning when the shop was just opening up. Hopefully, I'll be doing the same again this summer, as well as selling more pigs to Mr B. But whether I'll still be doing this in a few years time is now uncertain.

There is a dark cloud hanging over Ilminster. Just as it has hung over counties' other market towns like mine over the past few years. Tesco is due to start building a superstore in the town car park just one of the 130 new stores the company announced this week that it is set to build in the year ahead, as part of its drive for expansion that has seen it report a record £2.25 billion in profits.

When my husband, Charlie, and I moved to Ilminster four years ago, we loved the fact that Silver Street provided everything you needed. In addition to Bonner's and Rendell's there's an excellent delicatessen, good baker, a great chemist and health food shop, a brilliant wine store.

We can buy gardening equipment and everything we might need for the kitchen from the Town And Country store, pretty presents from Lane's Garden Shop; and for all those things you have to have, like loo paper and detergent, there's the Co-op.

In the winter at the Christmas Shopping evening, all the shopkeepers deck out their windows in themes from well-known fairy stories and invite people in for mulled wine and mince pies. There's a carnival, a fancy dress parade and floral displays along the old streets in the summer time. On Thursdays, there's a market in the town square.

It was, in other words, a rare exception to most British towns with their parades of bland chain stores, coffee bars, estate agents and their out-of-town supermarkets that have sucked the lifeblood out of local retailers.

I'd seen market towns become ghost towns because of the arrival of a supermarket, but I never dreamed it might happen to my own adopted town. The store that Tesco plan to build is the same size as all the local shops I've mentioned in Ilminster put together, minus the Co-op, I've seen the plans and it's a grim ugly building.

To accommodate the superstore, the town car park has been moved out eastwards which means that reaching Mr Bonner's will now entail a long walk (almost a kilometre) through the car park and round Tesco itself.

The situation has been tipped even more in favour of the supermarket with the planned introduction of a one-way system to cope with the expected excess traffic.

The local taxi company, Allo Allo taxis, has said it will give up its taxi rank in the town square, as the new one-way system will mean an extra £4.00 on the meter for most journeys too much for many of its regular customers.

The bus service will move too, as it is assumed that customers will prefer easy access to Tesco to a bus service operating from the heart of town. The statistics showing what happens to market towns when supermarkets move in make grim reading. Within a year, small shops start closing down.

Local councillors believe that Tesco will improve the economy of the town, yet figures from an independent think tank, the New Economic Foundation, tell another story; every £58,000 spent in local shops helps generate one job in the local economy, as local traders use local services such as accountants, key cutters and electricians.

For supermarkets, the equivalent figure is £250,000, as they use their own suppliers and contractors. They're not interested in the local book-keeper or plumber.

Worse than that, the evidence suggests that supermarkets do not stick to their agreements not to sell certain products. Part of the contract in Ilminster is that Tesco will not provide pharmacy services thereby undercutting the local chemist.

But in nearby Chard, Tesco agreed not to sell potted plants when they opened up there almost a decade ago. But on the Saturday before Mother's Day, pot plants were on sale in the supermarket at prices,which undercut the local florist.

By Monday when someone might have lodged a complaint, they were all gone. No wonder Mr B the butcher and Brian Ferris of Lane's Garden Shop are worried. They know that the arrival of Tesco can only harm them, as it will harm every store along Silver Street.

Writing in this newspaper last summer, Max Hastings lamented that every time a little local watch-mender or bookshop closes, or a saddler moves out of town, something is lost, which cannot be replaced.' It is always the little businesses which are squeezed by the giants, who care not one bit for the livelihoods of the shopkeepers, nor for the enjoyment of the shoppers.

And yet, as I wonder where I'll be selling our pigs and produce in the years to come, I know that we have only ourselves to blame. We have become prisoners of the great Tesco juggernaut because we have given in to it. No one has held a gun to our heads and told us to shop there, but last year one pound in every eight spent in Britain was spent in a Tesco store.

In the meantime, my husband and I have been busy finding other outlets for our produce. We sell our vegetables and some of our eggs to our local adult education centre. We also drive eggs to London on Sunday nights to sell to Kensington Place restaurant, where our friend, Rowley Leigh, is the chef.

We've also been to our first farmers' market which was held nearby in the old stables of Montacute House, arguably Britain's finest Elizabethan manor, once rented by Lord Curzon as a lovenest for his mistress Elinor Glynn.

We had the herb concession and sold our plants from a wobbly table in a corner of the cobbled yard. By the end of the day, we'd made £183.50 hardly a fortune, but then no amount of farmers' markets will ever replace a vibrant local High Street.

There are other compensations of course. By the time they were a week old, Bluebell's piglets were making little exploratory expeditions out of their hut. They'd bend their front legs backwards and wriggle forward on their knees, squeezing under the gate and on to the rhubarb bed and on from there to look at the chickens, pushing their little noses through the wire fence.

Then something would frighten them and their legs would go rigid, their ears would stand up and suddenly they'd be running backwards to the safety of Bluebell's fat stomach.

I know that there is little room for sentimentality in modern farming, but I could spend many happy hours just watching those piglets.

By the end of the year, I'll be taking them up the hill' as we euphematically describe a trip to the abattoir and from there to Mr Bonner's. Mildred the turkey's offspring, assuming they hatch successfully, will be following close behind and our goose eggs are even now on sale for 80p each, on Mr B's glass counter.

All this fills me with a happiness beyond measure.

I know that, in the short term, Ilminster has lost the battle against the planners, but we need not lose the war.

By midsummer, I hope that we will be supplying almost all the vegetables to the adult education centre and next year's we're tendering to supply local schools with seasonal vegetables.

In the long run, I'd like to see smallholders like us band together to create a genuinely competitive food market which can give the supermarkets a run for their money. We can provide the quality, guarantee the provenance and, since we don't incur the costs of transporting our produce halfway around the world, we can be competitive on price.

Is it too much to hope that this year will mark the high water mark in Tesco's dominance of Britain as, little by little, we begin to realise that cheap food carries its own price for our changing townscapes?

There are towns in America where the only shop left is a Wal-mart superstore. Surely that's a vision worth fighting against.

* This article was first published in the Daily Mail on Saturday, April 29, and is reproduced by permission of Rosie Boycott.