2. From Wales to Portugal Part 1
For the first part of our story, click this link… https://heartbreakandhappiness.medium.com/in-the-beginning-3c0f7b31b54d?sk=96d1b8c796ccd6031bd68217970b62ad
We started to settle in down the fields. Gareth seemed a little strange about the fact that Leon was also going to live there with me, he didn’t say anything I could just tell by his attitude, we offered to give him rent money but he said he didn’t want it and that it was just nice to have people down there with him once again. He would often offer us some meat from one of the pigs he had slaughtered and we would always refuse because his hygiene levels were not the best and we would often find pieces of dead pig hanging up around the place, he would say they were being cured by the wind…..They would be infested with fly eggs and he didn’t seem at all concerned by that. He had hundreds of pigs down there, he had started off with 2 and had just let them breed and breed over the years. Local people were complaining all the time as the pigs would get into their garden and destroy it, Gareth would just advise them to put up a fence and offer them some pork as compensation. He eventually put up a fence and some gates at the entrances to the land but it wasn’t really sufficient and the complaints kept coming.
The shed was evolving nicely and Leon added a compost toilet and shower room to the outside of it. During the winter our log burner kept us warm in the shed but the condensation was awful and we put up some plastic sheets to collect the water that was dripping off the roof and would have to empty the containers every few hours or parts of the shed would get soaked.
Each weekday we would leave early in the morning and drive up to the city, Leon to his job and me to the recycling company with Bizzy always at my side. I would always go to my mams to check on her daily and help her with some tasks, she was becoming more frail by the day and although my brother was living there with her, he didn’t really do much. I would clean her room and put her in the bath, organise her books for her as she had a little bookshop on amazon and her filing system was terrible and she could never find the ones she had sold. She used to love to come down the fields and as it was such a walk from the car I would put her in the wheelbarrow that we used to transport our shopping down in and wheel her down across the muddy paths, she thought it was hysterical and would giggle like a child the entire way. I’d then set her up outside the shed with a coffee and her cigarettes and we’d talk, she loved nature and thought the place was incredible. We asked Leon’s parents many times to come down and see how we were living but they refused. They didn’t like our lifestyle at all and although they were happy Leon was happy they couldn’t accept it and wouldn’t.
One of my friends’ dogs had become pregnant and she asked me if I wanted one of the puppies. I had rehomed the mother with her a few years before and so we agreed as we thought it would be good for Bizzy to have some company. We chose the runt of the litter and little Sunny joined our family when she was 5 weeks old, she was with me and Bizzy all the time and came with me to work at the recycling company. Leon was completely smitten with her and she was a little terror, she would snap and growl at anything she didn’t like but she adored Bizzy and they became very close.
Around this time the council paid Gareth a visit over the pig complaints, he refused to take ownership of them and said they weren’t his pigs, they had just wandered onto the land one day and he had been feeding them. The council told him that if he didn’t take ownership of them they would have to come and kill them all, Gareth shrugged and said do whatever you need to do. Over the next few days we saw Gareth start to construct some temporary holding pens to help the council catch the pigs. A marksman came down and started to shoot them, even the babies, it was one of the worst experiences of my life. The sound of the gunshots and the pigs screaming was something I’ll never forget. We’d walk up to the cars in the morning and there was a river of blood running down the track. I kept opening the gate and trying to let some of the little ones free without being seen but they were rounded up again and the shooting continued. It went on for days and Gareth wasn’t at all upset by it.
We saw the marksman one morning and I could hardly look at him, he asked us if we’d seen two piglets that had escaped his gun and we said that we hadn’t, he asked us to keep a look out for them and he would be back the next morning to try and catch them. He drove off and we went to work, on our return that afternoon as we were walking down to our shed we saw a little pink piglet and a brown one, the brown one was hardly moving and the pink one was very distressed. I went over to them and the pink one ran away but the brown one couldn’t. It had been shot and one side of it was missing, the marksman obviously wasn’t a good shot. I couldn’t believe the state of this poor little piglet, no more than a few days old and I knew there was no chance it would recover, the damage to it was incredible. I knew I had to put her out of her misery, I was hysterically crying and I told her how sorry I was that this had happened to her, I loved her and I held her so tight covering her nose until she stopped crying and went limp in my arms. I’ve never killed an animal before and I knew I had done the right thing but I felt beyond awful and if I had seen the marksman at that point I think I might have killed him. I carried her down into the woods and Leon helped me dig a little grave for her, we put her in it and made a wooden cross to put over it. I told Leon I was going to find the pink one and there was no way I was going to let the marksman kill it. I searched everywhere for it, stumbling around the field, tears streaming down my face but I couldn’t find it anywhere.
The next morning we left for work as normal, I was in a daze after the previous day’s events and just as we were reaching the cars I spotted something pink. I shouted to Leon and he told me to leave it, there was nothing I could do, I just glared at him and he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He told me if it was still there when we got back from work then he’d make a pen for it and we’d keep it. I wasn’t happy about it but set off for the recycling company, I pulled into the carpark, opened up the doors to the unit, told Patrick who was now sharing the unit with me I’d be back in a bit and set straight back off down the fields. I called Leon on the way and said I’d finished work and was on my way back. He laughed and said ok, I’ll come and meet you there. I got there just before Leon and started to look for it, then I spotted it in some bushes. I chased it around for nearly two hours until I tired it out and finally it got stuck in some weeds. It was tiny and squealed like nothing I’d heard before. I kept whispering to it and holding it tight while I walked with it screaming back to the shed. By the time I got back it had calmed down and stopped crying. I found an old bottle and warmed up some milk, I wasn’t sure if it would be ok but it drank it from the bottle without hesitation, the poor thing was starving. I was panicking that the marksman was around but over my dead body was he having this one. The little pink pig was a male and we called him Herbert, no one came looking for him and Gareth said as long as we took responsibility for him he didn’t care if we kept him or not. Herbert lived with us in the shed, he’d play with Sunny and Bizzy just like a dog. Bizzy hadn’t liked the pigs but he seemed to be really good with Herbert and they’d all play in the garden together outside the shed.
We organised a BBQ one day and invited all our friends, my mum and niece down to see how we were living, my niece’s children put up signs along the path down to the fields to show everyone where to go, they would often come to stay with us and loved spending time down there with us and the animals. It was a wonderful day and everyone was surprised at how lovely our little home was and how peaceful it was down there. Gareth brought some of his pig meat around to go on the BBQ and Leon ate it without realising what it was, he said he hated to admit it but it tasted good.
Herbert grew so quickly it was unreal and after a few months he was too big to stay in the shed, he’d scratch himself against the log burner and nearly knock it over so Leon built him a pen outside the door but Herbert wasn’t happy at all. He cried outside the door all night to come in and we felt terrible about it, I rang a friend of mine who also had some pigs, hers had just had babies and she had two males left and agreed we could have them to keep Herbert company so Buddy and Frank also came to join our now growing family. Herbert was horrible to them at first and Leon would be in and out of the shed all night putting the two little ones back into the big bed he’d made for them as Herbert kept kicking them out.
It was coming up to Christmas time and Leon was acting weird, we’d only been together 9 months at this point but we knew each other so well and had completely settled into our alternative lifestyle. It was Christmas eve and I was tense around him because of his odd behaviour and then he got down on his knee in the living room in front of the log burner and asked me to marry him, he produced a ring from his pocket, explained that he’d been working extra to get the money for it and had asked my mam for her permission to marry me already and she had agreed. I was totally shocked as it wasn’t expected and then I understood his weirdness over the last few weeks. I hugged him and agreed to become his wife, I knew it was right, he was an incredibly kind man and worked so hard to fix everything for us, I watched him many times out in the rain, covered in mud and not once did he complain. He was the man I’d been waiting for all my life….to be continued
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