Julian Schöpflin

The Great Literary Pigsticking Event

In Memoriam of three noted Hungarian exiles:
Arthur Koestler, George Mikes and Emeric Pressburger.

George Mikes was a frequent visitor to our house in the early eighties. He was, in contrast to many humorists I had known (who usually are glum and boring persons), a lively and witty man, who enjoyed every miniute of existence and left no stone unturned where some sort of amusement was to be found.
We lived at that time in a spacious farmhouse on the outskirts of a Norfolk village. We were in comfortable retirement, both my wife and myself, and welcomed George, the well-known jokester, with open arms. Many a cheerful evening was passed in playing Scrabble, of which George was an enthusiast (with one snag: he hated to lose, especially to my eighteen-year-old grandson).
It was Mikes who brought us together with another East Anglian hermit: Emeric Pressburger, the film-maker, author of many famous films in the forties and fifties. He lived in the depths of Suffolk, in a tiny gingerbread house, called Shoemakers Cottage (alluding to his memorable film, The Red Shoes). He fought a losing battle there, trying to protect his goldfish in the garden pond from marauding herons. He was a marvellous storyteller of his days as a down- and-out in Berlin and Paris, and of his triumphs and tribulations in the film business.
Another member of Mikes' network of friends was Arthur Koestler, who had a retreat in the western part of Suffolk. He was an old friend of ours too, but after we had moved from London we saw him less frequently.
We went over one morning to a neighbouring farm, to buy eggs. George came with us and looked round the farm with some interest. It was a genuine farm, with lots of animals: geese, hens, calves and pigs. I noticed that he stood for a while, somewhat pensively, before the pigsty and gazed thoughtfully at the gambolling, screeching piglets. One could virtually see that the cogwheels in his fertile mind started moving. I waited, with expectant amusement, wondering what wily idea he would come up with.
"Do you think one could buy a pig from the farmer?" he asked.
"Why not?" I replied, "let's ask him. But what for?"
"For a traditional pigsticking-like the ones we had in Hungary." I liked the idea, although at that moment I couldn't quite see how we could recreate such an unusual event in the wilds of East Anglia.
We asked the farmer who, of course, was very willing to sell us a pig, then-as he said-have it slaughtered at the abattoir and delivered cut into neat pieces, at the marked price of the day of slaughtering. George, however, wanted none of this; he had different-and more grandiose-ideas.
"In Hungary, in the olden days, a pig-sticking was a very serious event: it was arranged just before Christmas, with elaborate preparations. A household was fully engaged in various preliminaries; arriving at the great day, the whole neighbourhood assembled to witness the killing, the burning off of the pig's bristles in the open, the solemn preparation of the 'first-fruits'-different spicy sausages, partly made with the blood, partly with the liver; a great feast followed, with eating, drinking (lots of it) and general jollity. The housewife, of course, had many other burdensome tasks: curing the bacon, smoking the hams and another sort of sausages. I am sure there were ancestral memories of a pagan sacrifice in this festive ritual"-he explained.

I had serious doubts how on earth we would manage-not so much the prosaic, functional steps, but the time-hallowed ritualistic elements of the procedure. Mikes, however, was in full swing and brushed aside my reservations.
Discussions about the matter started in earnest that evening. Mikes cut short the confused arguments about when, where, what and if at all (my wife was a bit reluctant, having an inkling that the main burden of such an enterprise would fall on her).
"We must proceed in this in an orderly manner, we must set up a proper committee", said Mikes.
"What, a pig committee?" I enquired.
"Yes, good idea, let's call it a Pig Committee! But it must not be just any old committee-it is to be fashioned in the proper manner".
So was the Pig Committee formed on the 29th August, 1982. It was agreed, in the time-hallowed way, after motions, secondments (and much laughter), that Mikes would be appointed Chairman and Pig Captain, myself the Secretary, my wife Economic Director, Emeric Specialist Adviser and-a honorific title-Arthur Koestler Scientific Adviser. Koestler, sadly, was at an advanced stage of Alzheimer's and more and more a recluse; Mikes thought of cheering him up a little by drawing him into the affairs of the porkers.
It was also unanimously agreed that the Aims and Purposes of the Committee should be: "The procurement, purchase, rearing and eventual slaughtering of two pigs, of Welsh origin, Hungarian adoption and English education".
Thus, the ball started rolling and this was unstoppable. Mikes undertook to find a butcher who would perform the final act in the traditional Hungarian manner-no mean task. Mikes, always inventive, turned to the Cultural Attaché of the Hungarian Embassy (who else?) and struck gold. A master butcher, of Hungarian origin, living near London, was recommended; George took the trouble to look him up and secure his services.
Mr Perity, the butcher, was as good as his word; from that day, he was in constant telephone communication with my wife, advising her on the preparations and supplies required. This was no joke: one kilogramme of caraway seeds; three kilogrammes of red onions; half a kilogramme of peppercorns; half a kilogramme of garlic; seven kilogrammes of coarse salt; and a large quantity of straw (the farmer, happily, agreed to supply this). The local healthfood shop sold caraway seeds in milligramme portions; they looked very puzzled when my wife wanted to buy one full kilogramme.
Mr Perity also gave instructions on the feeding of the pigs. Maize was to be recommended, soaked in milk-unfortunately the farmer rejected this out of hand; our pigs would eat the same menu as his pigs, that is, barley and pigswill and no nonsense. This had eventually rather sad consequences.
We gave much thought, in subsequent meetings of the Committee, to all this wherewithal required for the great day. Mikes undertook to get hold of 25 pieces of apfelstrudel; my son George (who had been nominated Corresponding Member) took on the tricky task of preparing twenty kilogrammes of sauerkraut; I myself had the comparatively easy job of getting 6 large and 6 small bottles of genuine Pilsner beer and 12 bottles of Californian red wine. (You may wonder why we did not choose a Hungarian red? Well, we had rather sad experiences with the mistakenly famed Bulls Blood, which, alas, had come down in the world.) Cutlery, crockery and so on would be offered-under suitable indemnity-by my wife.

Many other important matters had to be decided on subsequent sittings of the Pig Committee. For instance, whether to name the pigs, or not. This led to heated arguments: finally, we voted Mikes down, stating that one didn't slaughter close acquaintances. Wasn't there a whiff of hypocrisy?
Another question of debate was a proposed invitation (by Mikes) to various television companies. Pressburger, who, of course, knew the film and TV world, argued very wisely that this would spoil the intimate family ambience we hoped to maintain. We wholeheartedly agreed with him, and duly shot down Mikes' perfid motion.
There was also the important matter of the caraway seeds to be resolved. Namely, whether to put them in all the sausages-Emeric contended, in a learned address, that this was the traditional Hungarian way-or only some of them. The decision was worthy of Salomon: one quarter of the sausages were to be prepared with caraway seeds and three quarters without.
Mikes, who left no subject unexploited, made good use of our hectic preparations: he gave a (mildly funny) talk on the BBC Hungarian Service about the planned pigstickery. A slightly surprising feedback was a letter from a similar fellowship in Frankfurt; it was unanimously decided by the committee to send a fraternal greeting telegram to our soulmates in Germany.
The great day finally arrived, in early December.
Our house resembled Gorky's famous drama, The Nocturnal Dosshouse, the night before the great event. There were not only Mikes and his girlfriend; my son brought down two friends of his, two professors of political science at various American universities, also one of his daughters, with the reluctant agreement of the Pig Committee. So our farmhouse, which slept four people in reasonable comfort, now had to accommodate eight, in reasonable discomfort. Mr Perity-and his two sons (who came as "learners")-were put up in a neighbouring farm.
Mr Perity called me at the crack of dawn. There was some trouble with the farmer: he objected to the slaughtering at his farm, fearing that the screams of the animals would upset his own pigs. Perity assured him that he would anaesthetise the unfortunates; so he came and asked me for a good-sized hammer.
"To hit them on the head", he explained. This gave new meaning to the word "anaesthesia", of great interest to my wife, who had been an anaesthetist in a previous incarnation.
So the two pigs were despatched silently and tactfully, the carcasses transported to our garden, and the great ritual of "burning off the bristles" was performed before the assembled household and curious neighbours. Acrid smoke wafted to the sky; the sizzling flames lit up the gloomy December morning, and woke up ancestral memories in most of us.
It was hectic work all the morning after that. Mr Perity went to it with proper skills and increasing dissatisfaction about the failings in part of the pigs and even more of our household. The pigs were too skinny, not having been fed according to his instructions; there was to be no proper white bacon from them. The hams were too puny, hardly worth the bother. Then he asked for a large wooden trough or tub, for the puny hams.
A wooden trough, of the large variety? "Every decent household used to have one of these, specially for soaking the hams", he grumbled. We produced, somewhat shamefacedly, a plastic wheelbarrow, lined with polythene sheets.
"Better than nothing", commented Perity witheringly. Then he demanded long wooden poles, to hang up the sausages. The two American professors were, luckily, adept at fashioning such poles and did that with great concentration.
We had to admit, Perity did his various jobs with great skill and economy. Everything was ready by midday. Perity gave various instructions to my wife: for example, how to smoke the sausages ("Just lay down some wood chippings- mind you, oak and beach only-and let them burn overnight". This did not seem a good idea to us, considering the thatched roof of the house.) Or how to soak the hams ("Change the water and the salt every day, then, after a fortnight, take them to the smokehouse".)

The festive lunch was a great success. There were about twenty of us, friends, neighbours, countrymen. We ate, with great gusto, the soft sausages and odd cuts of meat, drank the beer and wine, and earned lavish praise for the successful pig-sticking.
Perity, however, declined to take part in all this; he got his fee, packed up and departed-with open disgust at the failings of our poor household.
The aftermath of all these jollifications was somewhat less than jolly. We took the sausages to the local butcher for smoking-then he asked us after one day to remove them, complaining that his whole establishment stank of garlic. We found another smokehouse in a neighbouring village: the hams and sausages were duly smoked, but there was one snag. My wife, religiously following Perity's-malevolent-instructions, added more and more salt to the daily marinade. In consequence, we had to face tha sad fact: the wizened hams were, alas, inedible.
The jury is still out on what followed. Mikes collected his own and the Koestler's ration of the goodies and duly delivered them to the Koestler household. The day following this, Koestler and his wife committed suicide. It was a subject for heated debate amongst us, whether the hams caused this immolation, or only triggered a stylish exit by the Koestlers, this having been planned long before.
Alas, no more debate can take place. The Pig Committee is only a memory. Both George Mikes and Emeric Pressburger passed away, to our eternal sorrow.
So there has been no more pig-sticking, literary or otherwise.

 

Julian Schöpflin
worked in publishing and radio before becoming the Hungarian envoy to Sweden and Norway in 1949. Fearing he might become involved in the political show trials, he left his post and settled in England where he lived until his death, at the age of 94, on 18 June, 2004. He sent this piece to The Hungarian Quarterly shortly before his death as a response to Gábor Miklósi's musings on Hungarian concerns related to EU regulations in HQ 173.