Pigs

Pigs at Larkin farm are both a practical responsibility and a source of food, linking Pop’s daily work to the household’s abundant meals and its way of making a living. They recur in moments of comic domestic life, but the account also gives their care and slaughter concrete weight: Pop feeds them, considers killing one, and later has two processed for the family.

Farm Work and the Tax Visit

When a tax inspector arrives to ask why Pop has made no income return, Pop insists that he has more urgent work. His list includes feeding the pigs, turkeys, hens, and children, as well as the claim that no one in the household has had dinner. The animals are part of his explanation of why the form has been neglected: the farm requires constant attention, while its paperwork feels remote from the work immediately at hand.

Pop later expands that defense into an account of farm expenses and uncertainty. With six children to feed and clothe, he says, he must run the place and buy fodder and wheat, while paying for pig food alongside veterinary fees and coping with livestock disease. He presents those costs against rising living expenses and disputes the assumption that the farm’s activity amounts to income. The pigs therefore appear not only as livestock but also as an expense in Pop’s running argument with the tax system.

Animals in the Household

The pigs belong to a working farm whose animals enter the family’s daily routines. While the tax inspector is being welcomed into a crowded meal, Pop invokes feeding the pigs as one item in his list of obligations; elsewhere, his account of farm costs makes their feed one part of a wider set of recurring demands. These details establish animal care as ordinary work rather than an isolated episode.

The farm’s domestic life also collapses the distance between livestock and the dining table. At one meal, the inspector sits among fish and chips, jam, tea, buns, and other provisions while the geese make noises under the table. The scene is not specifically about pigs, but it clarifies the setting in which the pigs’ presence matters: animals, food, and family labor coexist within the same bustling household world.

From Living Stock to Provisions

In the yard, Pop says that the pigs look well and that he thinks they should kill one. His remark comes as Mariette and the inspector return from the bluebell wood, and Pop immediately turns to the nightingales and the ready tea. The matter-of-fact transition places a consequential farm decision within the same flow as routine conversation and hospitality.

The eventual processing exceeds that first intention. A bacon-factory van delivers the products of both of Pop’s pigs; four sides and two hams are set aside for curing. In the kitchen, Ma trims pork and offal and stores it in the new deep-freeze. Faced with the mountain of meat and other parts, Pop is delighted. The change from two living animals to a large reserve of food makes visible the farm’s conversion of livestock into household provisions.

Significance

Pigs tie together the book’s recurring contrast between formal accounts and practical work. For Pop, their feeding is one of the immediate obligations that competes with tax forms; their later slaughter and preservation, by contrast, produce a tangible store of food. The same animals can thus support his complaint about costs and his satisfaction in the abundance that farm work yields.

Their role is firmly domestic and economic rather than individually characterized. The narrative does not present the pigs as named animals or develop their lives from their own perspective. Instead, it shows them through the human routines around them: feeding, weighing the burden of farm expenses, deciding to slaughter, and preparing the meat for storage. That progression gives the pigs a recurring place in the practical world that Pop invokes whenever official demands meet the everyday business of the farm.