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He stared back blankly. ‘What di
‘The di
She stormed off to the farmhouse; and all at once, as he watched her receding figure, George felt abruptly, overwhelmingly sober.
He asked himself a sudden question: Why did I marry this woman ?
Then he went to the Lake District to think it through.
∗
He had started drinking to combat the loneliness. Not the loneliness he had sometimes felt when he ran the farm by himself, and would often spend whole days in the proud, kingly solitude of the moors, with only sheep and cattle for company. This was the loneliness, rather, of spartan hotel rooms in central London: late in the evening, with the prospect of a sleepless night ahead, and nothing better to occupy the mind than a Gideon bible and the latest issue of Poultry News. George spent many nights like this, shortly after his marriage to Dorothy, because she had persuaded him that it was in his interest to join the council of the National Farmers’ Union. He served on it for little more than a year, and discovered in the process that he had no talent for lobbying or committee work, and that he had nothing in common with the other members, none of whom shared his enthusiasm for the day-to-day ru
Meanwhile, Dorothy got to work. Taking full advantage of her cousin Henry’s parliamentary contacts (on both sides of the House), she soon became a practised winer and diner of all the most influential figures from the Treasury and the Ministry of Agriculture. At exclusive restaurants and lavish di
And as soon as they heard the news that large amounts of public money were being cha
Dorothy’s empire had taken a long time to build. By the time of George’s trip to the Lake District, however, it was enjoying its heyday. For instance, figures for this period show that Easilay were now supplying the nation with more than 22 million eggs a week, while the a
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One afternoon when I was about twenty, Verity and I had a quarrel at my parents’ house, and when it was over I went out for a walk to calm myself down. She had been having fun, as usual, at the expense of my aspirations as a writer, and I was riddled with righteous self-pity as I stormed off down a lane in the direction of the wood which I used to explore on my Sunday walks as a child. No doubt there was a semi-conscious intention behind this. I wanted to revisit the site of those happy occasions (and, of course, the scene of my first literary endeavours) because I felt that it would somehow restore a sense of myself as a uniquely precious and sentient being, a storehouse of aesthetically charged memories. And so I headed for what used to be Mr Nuttall’s farm, which I hadn’t visited for more than ten years.
At first, when I came to the barbed wire fence and the unfamiliar buildings, I thought that my memory was playing tricks, and had brought me to the wrong place. I seemed to be looking at some sort of factory. All I could see was a row of long, utilitarian wooden sheds, each with a giant metal canister at the end, supported on poles and ranged oppressively against the cloudy afternoon sky. Puzzled, I wriggled my way beneath the fence and went to take a closer look. The sheds had no windows: but by climbing up the side of one of the canisters, I could peer in through a gap between the wooden boards.
For a few seconds my eyes met with nothing but blackness, and I was overwhelmed by an atmosphere of dusty humidity, the air heavy with the smell of ammonia. Then, gradually, some shapes began to emerge from the gloom. But what I saw is difficult to explain, because it made no sense, and continues to make no sense, even now. I felt as though I was looking at a scene in a film, sprung from the fantastic imagination of some surrealist director. I was looking at what I can only describe as a sea of chickens. I was looking down what seemed to be a long, wide, dark tu