Chapter Fifteen

     A friendly customer, Major Malins, hearing of our dilemma and who was about to rejoin the Army oversees, offered us a cottage and fifteen acres of land at Higher Huish near Barnstaple, if we would keep an eye on his large mansion there. It suited him to have someone he could trust on the scene. We would have a home, a chance to live off the land and no rent to pay.

     Peter, always a countryman, was tempted by the thought. I being a Londoner was more apprehensive but we had no alternative. We accepted and decided to become pedigree pig farmers. Life was tough, the cottage was without mains water, and we had an outside pump. There was no electricity, just Tilley lamps. Our only neighbours would be the farm manager and his family and Clive would have a long trek to his new school. It was half a mile from the cottage to the main road. However, we decided to give it a try. It was a great change for me, brought up in a London suburb with all facilities to hand.

     We had saved a little capital. With this, we built up a herd of pedigree and cross breed pigs with the help of Sammie, our boar, a Red Lynch Field Marshall, Every month we went to market and sold the piglets. It was a hard and not a very financially rewarding life. Peter loved the open air and the country life; I was not so keen but did my best to adapt. I became quite good at selling piglets in the market. But after almost a year, we realised we could not make much of a living doing this and the conditions were pretty primitive. We looked for another option.

      Peter’s father told us one of his cottages near the Riding School was empty and a firm of animal feed, Ful’o’Pep offered Peter a Rep’s job in Hertfordshire and Essex. It was a cold and miserable winter’s day, we had run out of paraffin for the Tilley lamps and the logs for the fire were running low. We had spent a very wet day lifting fodder beet from a very muddy field and our backs ached. The thought of getting back to a more hospitable life was most appealing, we said yes to both, without any hesitation.

     We had to write our army friend explaining we had found life impossible at Higher Huish and hoped he’d understand we had to leave. We sold our pedigree herd of pigs to a rich widowed lady nearby who had acquired a young strong Polish lover, anxious to farm. We packed what possessions we had in our station wagon and returned to Stanmore.

      But our piggy life had not yet ended. Three months later we received a writ from the new owner of our pigs, suing us under the Warranty of Goods Act. One of the pedigree pigs had given birth to thirty-two piglets, none of which had survived and she was saying the mother pig was faulty! In the meanwhile, she still owed us for all the dead-stock, weighing scales and the like. The judge in the Barnstaple Court was reported in the local paper as saying ‘What is a poor Judge to do?’

      What he did was to make them pay us for the dead stock and we had to reimburse her for one in-pig sow! This was blatantly unfair since the pig; a pedigree Dartmouth Baroness, had already had one very successful litter whilst in our ownership so we could not see that she was “faulty goods”. However, we took the blow bravely and settled back into a more civilised life on the outskirts of London. Peter travelled the two counties, visiting farmers and selling his animal feed. Clive went to school in Stanmore and I helped the Captain with his office work. But deep down, we both missed the hotel scene. We had enjoyed our taste of hotel life.

     However, fortune was on our side. Vernon Herbert, our old friend, who had stayed with us at the West Country Inn on several occasions, contacted us. He thought we had the right abilities for the Hotel and Catering trade and asked if we would come and run the Winter Gardens at Ventnor, I.O.W for the company Nuthalls Caterers Ltd., where he was General Manager.

       It was a tempting offer. I had missed the friendly life of the catering trade and Peter was not making a fortune selling chicken and cattle feed. Once more we committed ourselves and jumped into the unknown.

A change of Tack

Bridging the Centuries 

By Eileen Younghusband