Return to Manor Farm

Snowball had lost count of the years that had passed since he last stood inside the big barn. Hoary and white-whiskered, he was far thinner than he had been on the day he fled from Manor Farm. The years had not been kind to poor Snowball; the skin on his shotgun-scarred back was taught and sun-bleached and his trotters were calloused and cracked.

He peered through the dust-moted air; several sections of the roof had collapsed, and shafts of shrill light penetrated the gloom. At the far end, where once there had been a raised platform, there now sat a pile of rubble and timber, strands of rotten straw clinging on sharp edges.

The place smelled different to how Snowball remembered it. There was a wild taint to the place now: a whiff of mould and excrement. The warm, comforting smells of yesteryear – of living fur and fresh hay – were nowhere to be scented.

Snowball peered up at the wall, his rheumy eyes struggling with the semi-darkness. There had been words here once, more than words: commandments with self-evident truths and deep power. It had been many years since Snowball had needed to read. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that he could anymore; perhaps the letters had long-since lost their meaning and reverted to being non-sensical squiggles, each one meaning no more than the last. Despite this, the commandments that had once adorned the wall in striking white paint remained seared into his memory. He would never forget.

Now though, all that remained was a handful of disconnected letters. Words had been reduced to a meaningless and disparate jumble of vowels and consonants, their message stripped alongside the white paint.

A NI S RE Q L

Beneath the faded letters, the wooden wall of the old, big barn was damaged. It looked as if the writing had continued there as well, finishing the now-forgotten sentence above. Time had not erased those words however, for Snowball could see the imprints of hooves and the serrations of claws that had dashed the painted message to smithereens. Snowball sniffed, trying to imagine what combination of words could have provoked such rage. His snout dripped in the cool air, and when the rotting shell of the big barn offered no answers, he turned and slowly trotted out into the farmyard, half-echoes of speeches and songs struggling to surface in his memory.

Outside, the cold October air nipped at Snowball’s skinny frame. He had been fatter the last time he was here, his belly never empty of windfall apples and milk-infused mash. Had it been wrong of the pigs to lay claim to those things? Snowball asked himself. It had not seemed so at the time, but now that he looked back on it, he wasn’t so sure.

It wasn’t just the autumn air that made Snowball shiver. Everywhere he looked, memories assaulted his senses, each one more vivid that his own failing sight. Off to one side of the yard, the old cowshed had completely fallen in on itself. Once the site of glory and valour, it was now a jumble of rotting timber and rusted corrugated iron. Beside it, a wild hawthorn bush sat, its branches twisted from years of harsh winds and lack of pruning. Snowball stared upon it solemnly, wondering if there was any other animal alive that understood its meaning. Further off there stood a flagpole, a tiny slither of green flapping atop it.

Beyond the ruins of the cowshed loomed the shells of two great windmills. One was little more than a stump, its silhouette appearing like the husk of a mighty tree that had burned from the inside out when struck by lightning. The other had retained much of its original height, but the sails had long since been carried off by the wind, and the harsh sky peered through several gaping holes in the structure. Snowball wrinkled his nose, broken dreams of dynamo-powered electric stalls and hot water generators threatening to twist his heart into a knot. He gave the ruined windmills a final contemptuous look and made his way over to the farmhouse.

The door had fallen off its hinges long ago, and lay rotting in the damp porch. Snowball went to step inside but paused, trotter raised in mid-air, as some invisible force held him in paralysis. It was a threshold that animals were once forbidden to cross and the imagined chains of Jones’s regime still held Snowball in place.

But only for a moment; Snowball shrugged the invisible weight off his scarred back, snorted, and stepped inside.

The farmhouse had a similar smell to the barn, but more concentrated. The corners of each room were black with shadow and rot; any hint of the humans who had once lived here were long since gone. In the kitchen, the weathered table still stood, but the chairs were all overturned. Several had lost legs, others were reduced to little more than kindling piles. Playing cards, with more aces than a pack would normally contain, littered the filthy floor, as did pewter mugs, each one more dented than the last.

Snowball continued to search the shell of the farmhouse, his snout constantly wrinkling and sniffing from the onslaught of bitter and fusty smells. He made his way up the stairs, taking extra care not to put a trotter through the rotting steps. Had he been fatter, as he had been when forced off the farm, he probably would have found himself tumbling through a hole. Having reached the landing without incident, Snowball made his way from one dilapidated bedroom to another. Many of the windows had been broken, and several patches of carpet had turned into bogs. A bird had nested in the shredded guts of an old pillow; all that remained was the mesh of twigs and the long-abandoned shells of five little eggs.

Only the final bedroom remained for inspection. Snowball could not have said why he was making his way around the house. He did not know what he was looking for there, or what force or feeling had dragged him back to the farm in the first place. All he knew was that he had begun to dream of the big barn in recent months, and that he likely did not have another summer left to make the journey here. The bedroom door was ajar; Snowball nuzzled it open and trotted inside.

The room was a spectacle of destruction; clothes and bedding littered the floor, wallpaper peeled from both floor and ceiling, great claw marks had torn up stretches of carpet, and there was the violent stench of blood, defecation, and rot. A heap of clothing sagged on top of the bed. Snowball placed his front trotters on the ancient mattress and peered closer. A desiccated corpse peered back eyelessly. Its throat had been torn out, and the skull leered up at the ceiling from where it had lolled back.

Was it a man or beast? Snowball pondered the question but could not answer it. Even if his eyes had not been failing, it would have been impossible to tell. The body was dressed in clothes: corduroy trousers, plaid shirt, tweed jacket, all stained with mud and gore. The head was so affected by the work of time and the elements that no clue could be found there; all Snowball knew was that it had died a violent and brutal death.

He made his way out of the morgue of a bedroom and back down the stairs. The cold air of the farmyard was a sweet release from the crypt-like atmosphere inside the farmhouse. Snowball stared up at the big barn again, reliving memories long-suppressed. Is this how the dream had ended? He thought bitterly. Is this all that’s left of the paradise we had hoped to build? Had it all been just a childish fantasy? Was a more equal world for animal kind just something left to be imagined?

Ominous clouds had gathered on the horizon, beyond the shattered remains of the windmills. Their silhouettes were already blurring behind a sheet of rainfall that would soon be upon Snowball. He trotted across the muddy yard and, taking a moment to peer up at the sign that bore the name of the farm, cocked his leg to urinate against it. As the first drops of rain began to fall, Snowball left the farm once again, now for the last time and on his own terms.