'OMO': A corkscrewed tail of the unexpected

I became addicted to the smell of creosote when I was very young child.
As early as I can remember, my snotter was assaulted by two very earthy and very distinct pongs: pig shit and coal tar creosote.
Just for the ignorant and unsophisticated out there in blog land – ‘coal tar creosote’ has been used for decades as a wood preservative and always trumpets its presence by that intoxicatingly beautiful, oil-smoke aroma.

Pig shit on the other hand is a grainy ploppy dark gruel, aesthetically akin to a carbonized Yorkshire pudding. It has a slightly fruity whiff, but not as objectionable for example, as cow or sheep pooh.
Actually, I’ve just thought of another ingredient, or smell I should say…damp straw.

If you toss all these ingredients into that big shiny Sherlockian pot of the human intellect, what have you got?

Well you might have come up with some kind of pagan sex oil, but for me it symbolizes and summarizes my father’s small holding, his darkly forbidding, squealing, labyrinthine ‘Piggery’.

The pig factory was situated approximately 100 yards from the family house. In summer our living room was almost blackened by the swarms of flies, who were more than a match for the great god Vapona.

On particularly hot days (thankfully not that many) the stench of porky pooh’s would get you right at the back of your throat. That’s a memory that’s been particularly deeply embedded: flies, the smell of shit, and fried liver, mashed spuds and garden peas (my mum wasn’t that bad a cook - but you know what I mean.)

I was forbidden to go to the piggery on my own. I was always to be chaperoned by my dad or another relatively large and responsible adult. But of course, as it was so close and I was an inquisitive young lad I was sucked magnetically into its black satanic vortex. Far from the paternalistic guided tour itinerary, I sought the belly of the beast – so to speak.

There was an old guy called ‘Jack’ who had worked there on and off over the years, he tolerated my presence in his churlish way, and showed me how to tie fancy knots in the ubiquitous bits of muddy string that littered the concrete floor of that place (I was never able to do them).
Echoing my dad, he told me to walk in the center of the passageways, not to get too close to the open pen’s.

The piggy’s houses were echoing gloomy cubicles, bedded with straw, small-scale planked stable doors sealed them in – although the top section was usually left open unless they got uppity (the ungratefulness), or it was very cold.
That was the reason I had to walk in the center, just in case one of the beast’s took a snap at me as it reared up, its front trotters resting on the door sill, its insane little eye’s scouring my very soul, searching out my deepest fears, guilt… shame...okay I’ll stop.

The noise was creepy in that place too, the sound of warm, contented snorting and oinking, or the truly blood curling high pitched squeal of a spooked or angry boar or sow was deafening in the confined space.
The pig palace has an undeniable echo with human prisons and mental hospitals for me now - a place where everything is a bit broken, noisy, irrational and potentially life threatening.

I guess I didn’t realize it then - that it was an infinitely sad place; sad that those animals were just bred for meat in those grim conditions, and sad that my father spent his young days in that screaming stinking gloomy hell hole (he’d ‘inherited’ it from his father a few years before and didn’t know anything else really).
It just felt a bit scary and forbidding for me at the time, but maybe another part of myself registered the boredom and confinement – both for my dad and the animals – but I couldn’t even begin to articulate it.

The piggery was a sort of u-shape: the entrance corridor was enclosed and lit by low watt bulbs in metal cages, the other two corridors were open on one side, like a balcony, or veranda; to allow the pigs a panoramic view of the marshy, rubbish strewn hinterland. I guess these were the lucky one’s – at least they got to see a bit of greenery before their inevitable and industrially efficient demise.

Empty ICI cobalt blue plastic sacks.
Those blue bags were the only primary colour (accidental or functional) to contrast with the prevailing piggery palette of grey, burnt umber, raw sienna and Van Dyke brown.
Not sure what ICI supplied now, maybe pig feed or something, but I always remember the vivid blue amongst all that brown-black drab.

The piggery was always a serious place. By ‘serious’ I mean it belonged to men, the adult world, beyond my fragile comprehension, full of unspoken rules and dangers.

I felt my innocence and ignorance most keenly in that place. I felt like thin paper amongst the manly banter, intimidated and foolish, wanting to participate, but knowing the work and social skills of grown upness were totally beyond me. They were aliens and I was alienated.
Men at their work were scary and frighteningly preoccupied.

Although, somewhat more terrifying than mono-tasking, sweaty grafting males stinking of pig shit, were the Che Guevara rebel porker’s who made spectacular breaks for freedom every now and again.

My sister became absolutely petrified when there was a pig on the loose – a big old mean sow I mean, or maybe a mean old boar with a chip on his bristly shoulder.
I remember my mum telling me how my sister would just freeze, turn to stone, almost as if she’d had a coronary or a stroke - all at the sight of one of those grunting creatures going AWOL.

A strange urban myth evolved in my school when I was around 8 or 9 years old. It certainly wasn’t fabricated by moi who, ironically of course, had a personal goldmine of imaginative material so close to home so to speak, but never really saw it as anything else but dad and the stinky, slightly scary piggery.

A couple of kids at school in town had started talking of a legendary malevolent entity that had been stalking the Shropshire countryside since time out of mind - which to us kids was like when our parents were actually ‘young’ - I mean really ancient man.

The mysterious creature of dark fable was no less than…a big pig! Or possibly giant pig, its hard to recall now, but whatever, it was an evil predatory bastard by all accounts: a sort of porcine-human hybrid, a genetic aberration, a Darwinian dead end, an undead bacon zombie ‘thing’…anyway, it was pretty horrible and weird.

It was a strange synchronicity though, no doubt about it.
I don’t remember discussing my dad’s piggy collective with any of the other kids, mainly because I think I was a bit embarrassed back then – the other kids dad’s were like policemen, firemen, lawyers, all-in wrestlers or just common or garden brain surgeons.

These kids at school said people had gone missing, vanished into thin air, the old
‘Just went out for a packet of fags’ riff taken to another level.
The vindictive porker even had a name: ‘OMO’.
I think that’s how you spell it, not sure because I never saw it written down anywhere, but that’s what it sounded like: ‘Oh Mow’.
I must have asked why it was called that mysterious, creepy name (the word still spooks me a little even now) but like everything else with the legend, real facts, like evidence, were thin on the ground…or rather, non-existent.

I often wonder if the town kids had heard talk of the piggery breakouts – maybe someone they know witnessed it, or they overheard their parents talking about my dad’s place out in the country over dinner one night – anyway, however it came about it was great yarn for young boys to spin out in the playground or on the school bus as it travelled through the dark lanes in winter.
Nearly forty years later, I still miss the smell of creosote in the morning.