London Pride by Beryl Kingston Page A

him. She and Baby were sent off every day to gather buckets full of acorns for him, which he scrunched up with ridiculous pleasure, dribbling and snuffling and watching them eagerly in case there was more to come, and when they’d fed him they leaned over the side of the sty and scratched his back with a stick and talked to him.
    â€˜He’s a funny sort of pet really,’ Baby observed. ‘I’d rather have one you could keep in the house, like a cat or a puppy.’
    â€˜It’s different in the country,’ Peggy said. The farm cats lived in the barn and the dog was kept in a kennel when she wasn’t working the sheep. ‘He’s jolly useful though, aren’t you, Pig? He eats up all the scraps.’
    The pig snuffed the toes of her shoes, leaving a trail of white slobber across the leather.
    â€˜D’you think we could take him for a walk?’ Baby asked, trying to unwind his tail with her stick.
    â€˜No. I don’t’, Peggy said, sensibly. ‘You don’t take animals for walks in the country. Come on. Time we were off to school.’
    It was half a mile from Grandpa’s cottage to Tillingbourne school and the darker the days became the further it felt. The fields were full of alien creatures, tatty sheep with peculiar eyes, pale blue with a black stripe down the middle, rooks strutting aggressively or sawing the air with malevolent cries, massive cows with grey tongues and eyelashes like brushes, the great concave bones of their haunches as sharp as cleavers under their mud-caked skin.
    All this was bad enough in the daytime, but it was worse when Peggy was lugging her sister back home in the lessening light of a winter dusk, for then the half-seen animals were at their most threatening and the hedges creaked and glittered with little watching eyes. She walked as quickly as she could, half trotting, half afraid, with her senses at full stretch, ready for anything.
    Even so, the sudden noise she heard that evening in November was so awful it made her heart jump with fear. It was a high-pitched terrified squeal, and it went on and on, getting higher and higher and more and more terrible.
    â€˜It’s Pig,’ she said, grabbing Baby’s hand. ‘Run! It’s Pig!’
    They skimmed over the rough earth as quickly as they could, stumbling and panting, and now they could hear shouts and roars, and see the flicker of lanterns behind the hedge, and at that she dropped Baby’s hand and ran on ahead without her, struggling through into the clearing, and there was Pig running madly from side to side as though he was being pulled between two ropes, with Mum and Aunt Maud and all their neighbours chasing him and shouting at him, their long shadows leaping beside them on the trampled grass.
    â€˜I’ll get you some acorns,’ Peggy shouted into the hubbub. ‘You could catch him with acorns as easy as pie.’
    And a strange man rose up behind the pig, tall and black as an avenging angel, and hit the frantic animal on the side of the head with a huge sledge hammer.
    The sickening thud of the blow reverberated in Peggy’sskull as though she’d been struck down herself. She was so shocked she couldn’t move. They’re killing him, she thought. They’re killing our pig. And she knew they wanted to kill the poor thing, that they’d planned it, because they were laughing and cheering as though they’d done something wonderful. And the butcher lifted Pig by his snout and slit his throat. The gush of bright red blood from that awful slit was too much. With a strangled cry of horror and compassion, Peggy ran from the scene into the bushes where she was violently sick.
    When she came back, the poor pink corpse was lying on a trestle table surrounded by women, who were scalding him with boiling water and scraping him with long knives and as little concern as if they were scraping earth from new potatoes. Baby had joined the