Pigs

The view from Church Lane looking towards St John the Baptist Church.

Interviewer: You said there were pig sties, did you keep pigs?

Mr Jarvis: Oh yes, we kept pigs, we always used to go to the monastery to buy the pigs. I always remember going with my dad to the monastery early one morning and buying a couple of pigs, about ten weeks old. We’d feed them and at that time a lot of people kept pigs but ours, being a purpose built pig sty, was very good indeed. We used to help, as lads, we used to help feed them. We would feed them on bran for a start but you had to scold the bran because if you didn’t scold it it scoured the pigs’ inside you see. You fed them on bran for a start and then you went onto thirds, and then you went onto fourths. They were the different grades of flour, thirds and fourths, exactly how it came about I don’t know but that’s what they were called, we used to buy a bag at a time from the Co-op. As they got bigger you really wanted to fatten them because, you know, there was all the competition who could have the heaviest pig in those days, twenty score was the height of achievement. You finished up on barley flour. At times you give them a little bit of fish meal in it but you’d got to be careful if you gave them too much of that, you know, the meat and bacon would really smell of fish. But of course you always had a swill tip at the back. With a large family there were always little bits to spare and boiled potatoes and so forth, used to mash them up, we had a very large big black pot as we used to boil the pig potatoes in on the back stove. At harvest time when you got the main crop up, there was a lot of pig potatoes, well then you’d boil a copper full, and mash them up and put them in with the swill and put so much swill in with the flour.

Interviewer: Are pig potatoes different then?

Mr Jarvis: Pig potatoes were the small potatoes not big enough to peel or scrape. But there again you had to be careful, if you were getting them up new you had to be very careful how many pig potatoes you put in, but if, on the main crop when the potatoes had got by the scraping stage, of course then you could put as many as you like, it didn’t matter.

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