I am in piggy mode these days. With one sow already farrowed out and 12 little piglets running around her, two more girls due the end of next week and the fourth girl, who almost ended up as bacon and sausage, due to farrow early March, it is definitely pig time on the Triple H. I sometimes wonder where my love of pigs came from. Maybe in a past life I was a true pig farmer although it is a fact that anyone can fall in love with a little pink piglet. I remember the first time I did. 
It was when I was staying for a spell with my aunty Kay Barker in Hoxne, a little village tucked away just a short jaunt from Diss in East Anglia, England. I often spent time at aunty Kay’s even though she was no relation to me at all. She was the mother I never had… but I digress as that is yet another story. Needless to say, I would often spend a great amount of time during the year living at aunty Kay’s house and came to view her two daughters Hillary and Rosalind and son Peter, as my surrogate siblings. Just down the road from aunty Kay’s was uncle Neville’s farm and he raised amongst other things, pigs. At this time my father and I lived in a little village not too far away from Hoxne called Stetchworth where we had the small village shop which just happened to have a pig sty in the back garden although I of course at barely 6 years old had no idea that was what the little shed was.
As happens on many smallholding farms, the tiny runt piglet of a sow’s litter either is stepped on, rolled on by the sow or humanely put down by the farmer as seldom do they survive and the farmer’s often do not have the time to coddle the little weakling. This one particular day when I accompanied Peter to uncle Neville’s farm a sow had farrowed and there was a runty little one. I of course wanted it and apparently persuaded uncle Neville to let me have my way. My dad also acquiesced and so the sty at the bottom of the garden was cleaned out and the piglet subsequently installed there.
Now this piglet and I became fast friends. I do not think he ever had a taste of grain in his life as it seems as if all he got to eat was left over produce from the shop, scraps from the table, odds and ends here and there but he sure did grow! I would spend numerous hours in his sty and pen, playing with him, cuddling up next to him, he was a fine pet. As he grew, he would stand on his hind legs, his front trotters on the half door into his pen waiting for my dad to come and feed him. Naturally in a small village and us owning the one and only shop people soon heard tell of how this little runty pig was growing. My father, being at heart a city raised fellow, even though almost all my life we have lived in tiny out of the way villages deep in the countryside, really had no clue about livestock. So needless to say it was an eye opener for him when one day after bragging about how big this runty piglet had become, one of the local farmers headed down to the sty to see just how much this piglet had actually grown. I was apparently inside cuddled up to my pig when the chap looked into the pen and was aghast that my dad would allow me to go in there and play with what was now a jolly good sized boar pig!
Unbeknownst to me, the farmer put the fear into my dad’s head that a boar pig would turn on me, savage me and that I should definitely not be allowed in there with it, the only thing to do with a pig like that was to send him off to market! So one day I came home from school and pig was not there. Like so many of the dogs and cats, gerbils and Chinese hamsters I have had as pets, they went to “a new home”.
Many years later I heard the story of how my father found a buyer for the pig. A rather stout lady drove up in a little van and bought the pig. When asked if she needed help getting the creature from the sty at the bottom of the garden up through the vegetable patch out the gate and into her little van, she replied “No”. She went into the sty, grabbed the hind legs of the pig, hoisted him up on his front end and “wheeled” him down the garden path and up the ramp into her little van just like he was a wheelbarrow! That had to be some lady!
So that dear friends was my first encounter with the porcine breed. I guess the urge to have pigs never left me and to this day I like nothing better than to go out and cuddle my sows, scratch Casper’s belly so he lies down with little grunts of contentment and comes running like a big dog when I call him. Yes… in a previous life I am sure I must have been a pig farmer…
