Our pig, by Enoch Haskett
An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this extract from his autobiography, published in 1892, a man looks back on his childhood in a farm labourer’s cottage in the 1840s and on the pig his family fattened each year.
Every cottage in our village kept a pig, and a family without one was thought to be either very poor or very wicked. Ours lived in a sty of flints and old boards at the bottom of the garden, and every spring my father walked to Stourford fair and came home with a new one under his arm, squealing like a gate in want of oil. It was my task, from the age of seven, to feed him. I named each pig after somebody important, and the one I remember best I named the Alderman, because he grew so stout and so pleased with himself.
I loved the Alderman as I have loved few creatures since. I scratched his back with a stick until he groaned with pleasure and fell over sideways. I carried him acorns from the squire’s wood in my cap, and once, I am ashamed to say, a whole apple pie that my mother had set to cool on the window sill. He knew my step on the path and would stand up with his trotters on the wall of the sty to greet me, grunting, exactly as a dog will bark. I told him my troubles. He was a very good listener.
Nobody told me that he was being fattened for a purpose, or rather, everybody told me and I would not hear it. The whole year of a labouring family turned on that pig. My father earned nine shillings a week, and the bacon that hung in our chimney was very nearly the only meat we tasted from one winter to the next. When my mother looked at the Alderman over the garden wall, she was not looking at a friend. She was reckoning how many weeks he would carry us through.
He was killed on a frosty morning in November. Old Clutton came up the lane at seven with his knife and his bench, and I was sent to my aunt’s on an errand that I knew perfectly well had been invented. I ran there and back in a quarter of an hour, and came in at the gate in time to hear the end of it. I will not describe that sound. I have heard it in my sleep at sixty.
And yet, I must be honest, by the afternoon I was as busy and as merry as anyone. Half the village came by. There was the lard to be rendered and the hams to be rubbed with salt and brown sugar, and the neighbours who had given us scraps all year were each sent a plate of fry, as they would send one to us when their own pig’s day came. My mother laughed more that day than in a month. That night we had fresh meat for supper, and I ate it, and I cried into it, and I asked for more.
I have kept pigs of my own since then, and I do not think my father was wrong. But I never named another.
“The writer remembers the killing of the pig as a cruel and upsetting event.”
To what extent do you agree with this statement?
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.