GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS EXTRACTS
Beasts of England, by Adam Biles
AUGUST
IT WAS A SUNDAY IN LATE SUMMER. The last of the visitors had left, the floor of the cowshed had been scrubbed, the chicks had been counted and locked in their coop, and the lights in the vivarium had been turned off. Another long week on Manor Farm was over. On any other evening the animals would have taken to their beds as soon as their chores were finished. But this was not any other evening. This evening, there was a fluttering and stirring across the farm as beast and fowl alike converged on the Big Barn. First came the sheep and alpacas, who jostled for the best spot at the beer troughs, while the rabbits bobbed between their hooves hoping to catch any splashed dregs. Then came the cows, among them Clive the Bullock and Marguerite the aged Holstein, who was looking for a bed of straw to settle upon after her long walk up from the large pasture. A dozen hens roosted in the eaves by the door, the pigeons lined up along the edge of the cash desk, and the geckos congregated on the vast east window. Cassie the mule came in, moving carefully so as not to step on a gang of rats. She was closely followed by Flaxen, the roe deer, and a gaggle of geese. One of the geese, known as Haw-Haw, was already deep in conversation with the farm’s stocky Bull Terriers, Dunning and Kruger, whose gold teeth flashed as they quit the dusk of the farmyard for the well-lit barn. A trio of magpies had perched, with characteristic aloofness, atop the postcard carousel, and a family of dormice had settled in the display of plush toys. The animals kept coming, score upon score, until every patch of floor, every inch of rafter, every tabletop, and every book display, was occupied by trotter, hoof, talon, paw and foot. Finally, the pigs swaggered in on their hind trotters, acting like they owned the place. And tonight, in a sense, one of them did.
His name was Buttercup, and he had just begun his sixth term as the Manor Farm’s First Beast. He was a lean boar, with a firm gut, a charming grin and a youthful air, although the strain of running the farm for over five years had carved deep creases around his eyes. Buttercup was a canny steward who’d spent freely from Manor Farm’s coffers to bolster his popularity among every species. The past season alone his Council of Animals had voted to repaint the grain store, fix the thermostat of the vivarium, and hire a dray of squirrels from a nearby wood to collect visitors’ litter and remove it to the quarry, a task formerly shared between the farm’s sheep and alpacas.
And how was all this spending possible? Thanks, in large part, to the money that the dogs, Dunning and Kruger, made selling the windmill’s electricity to neighbouring farms and beyond. The First Beast knew that few on the farm understood how the windmill made so much money. And, in truth, he didn’t really understand it himself. But he also knew that as long as they had sufficient food in their troughs and bodies unbroken by physical toil, most of the animals, pigs included, were happy to leave such details to the dogs.
Buttercup’s most impressive feat, however, and the reason for tonight’s gathering, was the reconstruction of the Big Barn itself, which had fallen into disrepair and disuse many years earlier. In fact, the new Big Barn was no barn at all, but a brick-glass-and-steel building housing a purpose built information centre and gift shop. Since the start of July, visitors to ‘the South of England’s Premium Petting Zoo’ had trooped through the Big Barn’s newly opened doors to pick up maps in a variety of languages, swap cash for ‘Manor Pounds’ and buy detailed scale models of the farm’s famous windmill. Although many of the animals resented the uncouth and handsy behaviour of the farm’s mostly-human sightseers, they only had to think of the plough-pulling, egg-laying, milk-pumping, meat-providing lives of their ancestors, for that resentment to quickly vanish.
Tonight was the Big Barn’s official opening, and Buttercup had let it be known that two surprise finishing touches would be unveiled; one on the western wall, and the other on the vast east window. Both were hidden behind tarpaulins, and had been the subject of much excited speculation among Manor Farm’s animals.
On this Sunday evening in late summer, the animals were pleased with Buttercup, and he was very pleased with himself. When he trotted into the Big Barn, accompanied by Cosmo the owl, his dependable Quartermaster, Buttercup was welcomed with the clatter of hooves and trotters, and the beating of wings. Buttercup quieted the gathering with a swipe of his trotter:
‘Now’s not the time for speeches,’ he said. ‘And yet, as we stand together beneath the beautiful vaulted roof of our new Big Barn, I see not just a building, but a symbol of everything we have achieved. Together. For today, on Manor Farm, rest days are no longer as rare as hens’ teeth. Today, on Manor Farm, our mule gives no more than seven rides a day, and never to a human child over ten years old. Today, on Manor Farm, we have abolished undignified costumes for all animals. Today, on Manor Farm those animals that can work are justly rewarded, and those that cannot are cared for. Today, on Manor Farm we summoned the compassion and solidarity to help the animals of Shore Farm overthrow the tyrant Percy Cox!’ Unsure whether to boo the tyrant or cheer his overthrow, the gathered animals settled for a kind of unruly lowing.
Buttercup might have said this was not the moment for speeches; nevertheless, he continued to deliver a version of the very speech he had given daily in the week preceding the annual Choozin, two months earlier, on the summer solstice. That day, Buttercup’s drove of Animalists had seen off the opposing Jonsesist drove for the sixth time in a row, proving – as Buttercup took much relish in declaring almost every time he opened his mouth – that Manor Farm had ‘turned definitively away from the old-fashioned, nostalgic, penny-pinching, human-lovers of the Jonesists, and towards the nimble, generous, welcoming, embrace of Modern Animalism’.
As Buttercup let the lowing fade, Ribbons, the new leader of the Jonesist pigs, watched from his comfortable armchair in the Big Barn’s gallery with a look of grudging admiration. But Ribbons too had his reasons to be smug. In the recent contest to lead his drove, he had bested Curly, a Baston pig with a squashed face and a thick pelt of fur which, from a distance, often saw him mistaken for a sheep. Curly was Ribbons’s superior in intelligence and experience, but he was his inferior in looks and charm. For Ribbons was a young, handsome boar, tall when on his hind legs, with a daintily curved snout, a muscular chest and a pinched belly. And though Curly’s more traditional Jonesist views (parsimony, deference to humans, and an antagonistic approach to Manor Farm’s old enemies, Foxwood and Pinchfield) were more in line with the rest of the drove, Ribbons had convinced them that, up against Buttercup, it would take looks and charm to win. And, after six consecutive losses, winning was all that counted.
Buttercup went on:
‘Which is why it is an enormous honour for me to be among you this evening to celebrate the reopening of the Big Barn, and to reveal not one, but two monuments which, I believe, go some small way to honouring our collective endeavour.’
Buttercup nodded. The first tarpaulin fell. The animals gasped, cawed and trilled. The bricks of the western wall, bare since the day they had been laid, were now covered, ground to roof, with a splendid mural. The painting was aglow with bright colours and vivid depictions of several dozen episodes from Manor Farm’s long history.
‘That’s Old Major!’ bleated one sheep, pointing with a hoof at a stately looking boar halfway up the painting. ‘The leader of the Great Rebellion.’
‘Don’t you mean Napoleon?’ a magpie asked.
‘Who?’ answered the sheep, with a glare.
‘Look! That’s when the foxes were chased from Manor Farm!’ clucked a hen.
‘And there’s Traviata,’ simpered Clive the Bullock, ‘selling off the last plough.’
‘Is that Siege of Pinchfield?’ a young alpaca asked, indicating a scuffle just above the doorway.
‘Imbecilic longneck,’ snorted Curly. ‘Can’t you see that those are Foxwood colours?’
‘Foxwood. Pinchfield,’ said Balmoral the roe deer patriarch. ‘Surely, dear Baston, those two putrid farms are much of a muchness anyway?’ Curly smiled wryly at this.
In the background stood the familiar silhouette of the old farmhouse, picked out against the bright blue sky of an idyllic summer morning. And above it all, looming over the outbuildings and the animals, its tower soaring so high that it tapered almost to a point near the roof of the barn, was the windmill. A sly optical trick made it seem as if the brilliant white sails were folding the farm and its inhabitants in four caring, maternal arms.
‘It’s magnificent,’ sighed Marguerite the Holstein, her eyes welling with tears.
Buttercup pushed on:
‘In short, brothers and sisters,’ he patted at his forehead with a handkerchief (a strange affectation since, like all his kind, he had no sweat glands). ‘In short, we have truly made sure, for the first time in its history, that our farm lives up to the eternal motto of our heroic founders, that...’
Now he gestured at the east window of the Big Barn. On cue, the second tarpaulin fell. High up on the glass the farm’s old motto had been engraved in blocky bevelled letters. Seen from inside the barn the words read back-to-front – but most of the literate animals recognised them at once. Buttercup read them aloud:
‘ALL ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS!’
A rapturous cheer went up. Buttercup nodded to Cosmo the owl, who lowered the needle of an old record player onto a scuffed disc, and the opening bars of Manor Farm’s sacred hymn echoed around the Big Barn. Even though few of the animals knew more than the first lines of this song, they broke into it now:
Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland,
Beasts of every land and clime,
Dum-de-dum-dum joyful tidings,
Dum-de golden future time!
Now that Buttercup’s speech was over, the Animalist pigs started throwing food at the Jonesists, who fought back with jets of beer spurted straight from the bottle. The sheep and alpacas bleated ‘all animals... are more equal... than others’, and a flock of drunk pigeons sang that one verse of ‘Beasts of England’ over and over. As for Dunning and Kruger, the bull-terriers had climbed to the raised gallery, and were leaning over the railing watching the pandemonium. Their muscles were twitching beneath their fine, bristly pelts, and they were smoking chubby cigars, which twisted their serrated lips into what looked – from below at least – like snarls of immense satisfaction.
*
Martha, the Brent goose, hopped onto one of the display tables (plastic key-rings, giant pencils...) to get a better look at the new mural. She was the youngest of the gaggle of domesticated geese, whose role on the farm had long been to tell the other animals just what the pigs were getting up to – and so, the hope went, restrain their more human instincts. She was the only Brent goose on a farm of greylags, having hatched from a solitary egg found buried in the reeds around the drinking pool. An egg most likely abandoned or forgotten by one of the wild geese who sometimes stopped over on Manor Farm during their migrations. Martha’s outsider status only made her more determined to be of use. The gaggle’s work was noble, Martha felt, and she believed in it; despite the fact she spent most of her time doing odd jobs for the other geese and sitting in on boring and mostly puzzling sessions of the Council of Animals.
One way in which she might be useful, she thought, was in making head and tail of the new mural for any animal who had neither the time nor the learning to do so for themselves. Martha prided herself on having memorised how many years since the Great Rebellion the important events in the farm’s history had taken place. This was something most of the animals seemed to take little interest in, although perhaps that had to do with the vastly different lifespans of the farm’s various species.
Looking at the mural with these dates in mind, it suddenly felt more like a pictorial maze, thought up to befuddle any animal who dared set foot in it than provide a straightforward telling of Manor Farm’s history. There were beautiful depictions of eggs, milk and wool. These were the three famous pillars of Manor Farm’s early fortunes but had not been sold for many a year. And while the Great Rebellion against the humans led by Old Major the boar (Was that even right? Could it have been Old Captain? And was he even a boar?) took pride of place alongside depictions of the founding of the Council of Animals (fifteen years after the Great Rebellion), and the Choozins that selected them, there was no hint of the five brutal and turbulent years the farm had endured between these two events. Then, of course, Traviata, the formidable old Jonesist sow – with her inimitable quiffed hairpiece and pearl necklace – was celebrated in the mural for installing the new dynamo room beneath the windmill (22GR?), and for overseeing the farm’s transformation from a flagging working estate to a popular petting zoo (26GR ... or was it 27?). But where was the turmoil Traviata had inspired by allowing the dogs and pigs to enrich themselves as the rest of the farm fell into ruin? This unrest had been so serious that even all these years later the pigeons and rats still sung songs about it, while the very mention of Traviata’s name raised cries of detestation from the plough field to the spinney. Quarrels with other estates, those that Manor Farm won, at least, took up a lot of the wall, whereas its recent peaceful and fruitful membership of the Wealden Union of Farms (25GR–present day), in brotherhood with many of the very same farms, wasn’t pictured anywhere. Although that may be because a scuffle just makes for better eye-fodder than a trotter on a treaty, Martha thought. A painting of a battle is more satisfying to the eye than the depiction of the painstaking removal of barbed wire from the farm’s boundaries. A revolutionary stampede is more exciting than the representation of the convoluted negotiations to bring an end to the ancient animosity that had existed when all farms in the county were run by human drunkards, who had frequently sought to undercut and bankrupt each other.
Martha was so engrossed that she didn’t notice Cassie standing alongside her until the young mule spoke:
‘Who decided which animals to include, do you think?’
‘The Council of Animals, I imagine,’ Martha said, suddenly finding an answer, or part of one, to her riddle. ‘I’m sure the design was negotiated between the Animalists and Jonesists. A prime spot for Old Major, but only if Traviata is celebrated. That kind of thing. Otherwise, after each Choozin it would just get painted over with a new line-up.’ Martha hopped onto a low stool so that she and Cassie were on the same eye level. What a curious creature she was up close, with her long ears, pendulous head and intelligent eyes, filled with that last-of-her-line melancholia, the fate of all her kind.
‘It’s just there’s someone I would have expected…’ Cassie swallowed, bared her teeth. ‘Someone I would have hoped to see here, that’s all.’
Martha looked back at the mural. There were plenty of episodes she would have expected to see, but she couldn’t think of any particular animal that was missing.
‘Do you mind if I ask who?’
A wistful look settled on Cassie’s face.
‘My father,’ she said. ‘I was always told that there was no history of Manor Farm without him. That when it was sung or...’ She flicked her long nose at the wall. ‘Or painted, I suppose, that he’d be among its heroes.’
‘What did he do?’ Martha asked.
‘That’s what I would like to know,’ Cassie said.
‘Perhaps if you could convince the Council of his importance to our story,’ Martha said, ‘he might be added to the mural.’ She didn’t really believe this, but just then it felt important to her whole idea of Manor Farm that it might, at the very least, be possible. Cassie looked pensive.
‘How would I do that? He vanished before I was born.’
Martha hesitated. What she was about to say felt indiscrete, like lifting the curtain on the secrets of the gaggle. But as a foundling who had never known her parents and never would, she couldn’t bring herself to condemn another animal to the same fate, if there was any way she could help.
‘When us geese can’t find what we’re looking for, we visit the old quarry.’
Manor Farm had been dumping its refuse in the quarry for generations, ever since the supply of stone – the very stone that built the windmill – had depleted. A rocky patch, half an acre in size, on the road between Manor Farm and Pinchfield, it had slowly filled with discarded building materials, fodder barrels and rusting machine parts – but also newspapers, magazines, receipts and records which the Council no longer needed, or for which there was no longer space in the farmhouse cellar. The quarry was legendary among the geese as a trove of information that successive generations of pigs had decided was best forgotten. In truth, it had been a long time since any of the gaggle had spent much time there. Martha, as a young recruit, had only ever heard it spoken of, and was yet to make her first visit.
Still, the idea seemed to please Cassie. She was about to thank Martha when a terrible screech filled the air.
*
It was one of the hens, who had left the festivities to check up on her chicks. She shrieked again. All the animals in the Big Barn looked first at the door, then at Buttercup.
After a moment’s hesitation, the First Beast nodded. He squared his shoulders, set his jaw into a determined jut, and marched across the tiled floor and out of the door. Reassured by Buttercup’s resolve, several of the other animals followed. The sight that awaited them was quite unlike anything they had imagined. The hen hadn’t been warning of a break in by stray animals. Nor were towering storm clouds rolling in from the horizon to devastate Manor Farm’s apple and pear crops. Nor was one or other of the outbuildings aflame. What the animals saw as they left the Big Barn was Buttercup standing stock still in the farmyard, his immaculate snout pointing upwards, his dark, round eyes fixed on the sky above, watching hundreds and hundreds of starlings twisting and gyrating, forming vast abstract shapes against the purple twilit sky. Whistler, the scrawniest of all the tame magpies, who’d got his name on account of the high-pitched timbre of his caw, hopped up onto on a post beside Buttercup.
‘What is it?’ asked Buttercup.
‘I don’t know,’ Whistler wheezed. He looked down at his own clipped wings for a moment then up again at the sky. ‘But it’s beautiful.’ And it was. Like a weightless, pulsating blob of television static.
Suddenly, a flank of a hundred-or-so birds broke off from the main flock, performed a dizzying loop-the-loop, and plunged towards the farmyard, corkscrewing straight into the prize hydrangea bush with the ferocity of a raiding party. The birds tore through the plant with such speed that all that was left once they’d departed was a stripped, twiggy skeleton, and several hundred brightly coloured petals drifting slowly to the ground.
More of the animals had left the Big Barn now, and all were looking to Buttercup for an explanation of what they had just seen. The First Beast snorted several times under his breath.
‘I won’t lie to you, and claim I know where these birds have come from,’ he told the gathering in a very deliberate and measured tone. ‘But I will do everything in my power to make sure they leave as quickly as they arrived.’
*
It soon became clear that, contrary to Buttercup’s assurances, the starlings had no plans to leave and he could do nothing to make them. Morning and night, when the animals rose, and when they retired, they were there; perched on the rooftops, and chimney stacks, and fences and gateposts, rattling and chirruping, sometimes in large groups, sometimes alone. Most of the time they warbled away in a language that none of the animals could understand, but every so often, a recognisable but seemingly random word would be picked up by an alpaca making his way across the farmyard, or a hen basking in the sun on top of the coop. Several times during the day, packs of the starlings took wing and performed the most spectacular aerial dances, designing extraordinary silhouettes in the heavens for several minutes, apparently quite indifferent to the activity on the farm below.
One evening, about a week after the birds arrived, Martha the goose had sat through a particularly excitable Council meeting. The pigs spent several hours arguing over the price of fodder, when Curly the Jonesist had risen to his hind trotters and grunted that the controls imposed on fodder by the WUF were designed ‘purely for the enrichment of Foxwood and Pinchfield. Animals across the rest of England eat better than Manor Farm beasts... and cheaper too,’ he said, before being shouted down by Animalist and Jonesist alike, for peddling, as Ribbons said, ‘cock-and-bull of the very first order’. After which Ribbons was censured by Buttercup for his offensive and outdated turn of phrase.
As Martha the goose made her way across the deserted farmyard, she noticed Whistler standing quite still on a fence post. Since the flock had arrived, he’d not returned to the plush confines of the harness room where the other magpies studied. Instead he’d spent his days hopping from one corner of the farmyard to the other, observing the starlings from every vantage point his clipped wings allowed, eavesdropping on their chattering and, when they took flight, scrutinising their gyrations with an increasingly obsessive gaze.
Martha watched Whistler watching the starlings, almost as intrigued by him as he was by the other birds. Martha had never spoken to Whistler before, and was intimidated by the magpies’ reputation for uncommon intelligence. But after several minutes she summoned up her courage.
‘Which bird is in charge?’ she asked. Whistler started. He’d been so fixated on the starlings that he hadn’t noticed Martha’s approach.
‘None of them,’ Whistler said. ‘As far as I can tell.’
‘And yet their wonderful dances,’ said Martha. ‘Surely they can’t be an accident?’ Whistler didn’t reply. Not because he had nothing to say on the matter, Martha felt, but because he didn’t want to share whatever he knew with her.
‘Where did they come from?’ Martha tried again. This time Whistler answered.
‘It took me a while to understand that,’ he said. ‘They didn’t come from anywhere. They were always here. In the spinney, and the hedgerows, and the eaves of our outbuildings. We just never paid them any mind until now.’