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A mumu is a way of cooking food in the ground; and this is a traditional - and still widely practised - form of cooking in P.N.G. My first mumu, days after getting to Enga, was the work of a V.S.O. person in Finance, who’d been out only a few weeks; so although it was lovely, I felt the real thing, by New Guineans, would be different - though, of course, this one had been put together by local people. I’d been to Singsings, too, where they had mumu but so often it was pigmeat, or drenched in fat from the pig, so that I generally passed it up: I was often condemned to picking at bits which had made no obvious contact with the pig; so I was looking forward to our Christmas Day in umu at Agnes & Tony’s. (‘They had a pig, too, but they had lots and lots of other things.) In any case, I warned to see the entire ritual from beginning to end.

Two days before the event, Tony started delivering the stones, piles of whitish, polished river stones, slightly flat. There were some black ones among them: would they hold the heat better?

     The experts - young for experts - disagreed.

     One expert was Samuel, Tony’s counterpart, who seemed more in his element here on the lawn, defending his decision to collect more stones than others thought necessary, than he sometimes seemed in the Policy & Planning Office talking of ‘Internal Evaluator’s Priority Functions’ or ‘Existing Data and Data Collection Activities’.

     The other principal expert turned out to he Mel’s Secretary, Tim, the man who had brought Mel’s keys to the house that first night Stuart and I came in. By now I’d upgraded Tim. Before he put me in mind of the unidentified tearaway who used to bowl me out at cricket. Now he had established his class: he’d come to be identified in my mind; indeed, to resemble, the West Indian and Middlesex fast bowler, Wayne Daniel. He did, however, Inspire the passing sexist thought that Mel, the Boss, wouldn’t necessarily encourage the notion of having his Secretary sit on his knee. An unworthy thought, but then…Tim, too, looked in his element hurling the wood - the logs - from the woodshed on to the lawn, for the fire. Three or four expats promised to turn up at the pig-killing at nine o’clock on Christmas morning, with cameras.

I was up early next morning thinking of the pig-kill, wondering whether I wanted to have breakfast or not; when there was a knock at the door. (Conjeeta had knocked on my door in great distress just a couple of nights before, and we had sat together until morning having endless cups of tea, coffee); I wondered if it was she again, but it turned out to be Katherine, the dentist’s wife, with a lovely home-made cinnamon bun for my Christmas breakfast. Gift-wrapped. It was so special that I decided to put it aside till Josh and Ginette arrived. Eventually I had toast and honey for breakfast, after the pig-kill. Katherine had also returned The Mandarins, which she had borrowed, with another book, only a couple of days previously: had she really read 700-odd pages of Simone de Beauvoir in under two days?

     As I was walking up to Agnes and Tony’s a pig - the pig? - passed me on the way down. It wasn’t in a hurry, particularly, hut seemed to know where it was going. When I mentioned it at the house, everyone laughed. Then someone noticed that the pig had disappeared.

     What sort of pig was it - that I’d seen?

     What sort of pig? Well…a white pig.

     A white pig?

     Then almost immediately Samuel came in with it, a rope round its leg. Already, there were about nine people on the lawn going about their business, making preparations; they were slow-moving, they knew what they were doing. A couple started to lay the logs - a coal-pit-like pyre, only without the pit; then they lit it. That was to heat the stones. Then bundles and bundles of leaves were brought in. Tanget leaves (worn also as skirts, arse-grass); ferns; banana and breadfruit leaves; and cabbages. (The banana and breadfruit leaves emphasized the sense of occasion, as we were a little bit too high, too cold for bananas and breadfruit in Wabag; so these must have been brought in, the banana from Wapenamanda, say, the breadfruit from further afield.) The vegetables were all ready. People had been peeling sweet-potatoes (kaukau), green-bananas and plantains since the day before, apparently. And there were mountains of the stuff in the tin patrol-box and in buckets, all in fresh, clean water. Two women appeared - from where? - and, without ceremony, started stripping the husks off the corn. Later, I saw piles of peas or beans in with the vegetables. The spot for the mumu pit was marked out. The spot for the pig kill was marked out and lots of leaves put down. The fire for the stones was burning briskly. It was a beautiful day, sunny, clear, with a touch of breeze. The white pig, tied to one of the stilts of the house, rooted energetically among Tony and Agnes’s flower beds. The thought that it would be dead in a few minutes occurred to me, and I put it out of my mind.

     Now they were ready: should they wait for those who had wanted to see the kill, but hadn’t turned up? Or should they press on? Tony said we should wait: it wasn’t yet nine o’clock, and if we had told people that the kill was going to be at nine o’clock, then we should wait until nine o’clock. Samuel denied that he had told people it was going to be at nine o’clock; though the impression everyone got (including me) was that the kill was going to be at nine o’clock. Men were sharpening knives (an action, somehow, which put me in mind of French housewives cutting bread). The women had taken up their position a little apart, stripping the corn. Stones started to be put on the pyre: the men were anxious to start.

     The ritual was to be performed by two older men. Really, a man and his assistant. The older men had the authority the boys, Timothy and Samuel, clearly lacked. One wore arse-grass and a v-necked sweater, the other, shorts. They had the air of surgeons preparing for an operation. One man started sharpening a big stick - it looked like a stake (Dracula?); but as he smoothed the whole length of it - thick, several inches - with his razorsharp knife, I realized what it was for. Then we were ready. Tony had his camera, so did his sister, up from Australia, visiting. Agnes turned her face away.

     Samuel grabbed the white pig from behind, lifting its forelegs off the ground, the pig, naturally, protesting. The Surgeon stood well back, club ready. He struck once on the nose, then a second time, and Samuel let the inert (a Ted Hughes poem?) pig fall on a bed of leaves. The man with the club then approached and proceeded to give the pig another five or six blows about the head. They turned it over and repeated the process. The man, with surgeon’s fingers, kept feeling the jaws of the pig, each time applying two or three more hefty blows, all in all well over twenty. (They crushed the bones in the head to make it easier to cut up later, when it was cooked.) Though the pig twitched, it had to be dead.

     The singeing was next. The top half of the pig’s mouth was tied with a small rope. One man held the rope, the other the hind legs, and manoeuvred it to the fire and started singeing it. This was strangely effective, more so than the traditional Caribbean way of pouring on boiling water and ash, and then scraping it clean with a spoon. The only ‘post-contact’ instruments used here so far were the knife and metal axe, for the wood. The bloated pig was now surprisingly clean, its mouth wide open, stiff. It was lifted back on to the leaves near where it was killed, and laid on its back for the knife.

     Ronald (another man, youngish, shadowy) seemed to be taking charge, not of the butchering, but of coordinating the various processes. He decided to interpret for us, visitors, what was going on. Throughout the ritual he referred to the butchering as ‘The Operation’.

     The surgeon knelt, making clean incisions along the belly. Soon, there was a strip of belly, cut out, that was all fat. More incisions; the pelvis bone carefully broken with an axe; the ribs separated from the backbone; the insides taken out without mess, with a minimum of blood. Bundles of leaves are used to clean, to wipe away the blood; the liver separated from the insides; the insides passed to the waiting women. Their job is to clean it (the bigger intestines will be stuffed with strips of fat and leaves and put in the mumu - that, according to Ronald). The butchering continues. The head, neck, backbone and some ribs are separated from the slab. The assistant holds the difficult-to-know-what-to-call-this-dead-weight-now up, and the surgeon carves. Tony remarks, belatedly, that in another society, this man might well be a surgeon. I suspect that in this society, in the hills beyond Wabag, this man is a surgeon.

     The operation is neat. Strips of meat, of fat, begin to be handed out, to be roasted on the fire; everyone must get something: this is a sharing society. Some of us waive our share. The head is finally separated from the neck and backbone; the operation is over.

     The black stones on the pyre start exploding (Samuel, arguing earlier for the white stones, was right). The explosions don’t upset people much. The mumu pit is enlarged, deepened really, but still looks small to me. After it’s been prepared, kunai grass is generously laid on the bottom, then banana leaves, positioned upright from the middle of the hole, so that they can be folded over; then breadfruit leaves are added, and ferns, and heaps of cabbage. Then comes the first layer of hot stones. These are again covered with more green before the first layer of meat is put on - the insides, the neck, the head etc. These are covered with tanget, cabbage etc. and then vegetables, yellow potatoes, green bananas and plantains etc., then covered. Another layer of hot stones. Then leaves as before; then the pig, spread-eagled, so that it looks like a skin with legs on. The corn-on-the-cob, etc. is used to pack it. Then water is sprinkled over, quite a lot, to create steam and keep it moist; again this is covered up with leaves, and all the remaining vegetables, mountains of it, put on. The big banana leaves sticking up are then carefully folded over and kept in place with another - the last - layer of hot stones; then leaves, grass and finally earth. Earth from the hole is used. The cooking is under way.