There was fencing – miles of it to keep people out, and the land behind lay as flat and boring as a huge square of giant’s knitting. When Andrew thought about it, he realised he only knew it was a farm at all because he had been told. You never saw an animal as you passed by. All you saw standing in rows on the far side were six great long brown sheds.
‘The sheds! They’re not at all like the ones in this book.’
He pointed to the page with the picture of the pig. The shed behind stood crooked, with a drooping roof. Some of the tiles had slipped, leaving holes over the slats. The door hung on one hinge. And all around lay stones from a low wall outside that had tumbled down long ago.
And everywhere was green. Green, green, green, green. The shed was drowning in green – strangled with brambles, choked with weeds, surrounded by nettles, crowned with moss.
‘You could muck about in that shed for hours. Days! Weeks! Years!’
‘No wonder the pig looks happy . . .’
She sounded so wistful. Andrew looked up and saw she was gazing out of the window. She couldn’t see the farm from here. But he knew from the look on Gemma’s face that she had it in mind – the locked gate and the endless wire, the rows of huge brown sheds.
Suddenly the blood rushed to her cheeks. She stabbed the brightly coloured book fiercely with her finger.
‘If it’s not true,’ she cried, ‘if it’s not like this, why do people give us these books? Why do they try and trick us into thinking everything’s fine and hunky-dory? This book is as bad as a lie! So why do they do it?’
Andrew prised her stiff, angry finger off the page of On the Farm before she made a hole. Then he turned the next page of the book the chicken gave him.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘they don’t want you to think about it.’
They read on.
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