What a Carve Up!

by Jonathan Coe

  Why did George not hate his wife? Was it because she had enriched him (financially) beyond his wildest expectations? Did he even take a certain reluctant pride in the fact that she had built up what used to be a quiet, old-fashioned, modestly run family farm into one of the biggest agrichemical empires in the country? Or had the hate merely been washed away, over the years, by the tides of whisky to which he surrendered daily and with fewer and fewer pretensions to secrecy? He and Dorothy now lived very separate lives, at any rate. Every working day she would drive into town, where a bleak scrub of land in one of the outermost suburbs was dominated by a huge four-storey complex of offices and laboratories: the world headquarters of Brunwin Holdings PLC. George himself had not set foot there for more than fifteen years. With no head for business, no understanding of science and nothing but disdain for the boys’ game of stockmarket snakes and ladders which seemed to preoccupy most of the directors, he chose to retreat, instead, into a fantasy version of happier times. There was a small redbricked cowshed which had somehow managed to survive Dorothy’s expansion programme (she had demolished most of the original buildings and replaced them with row upon row of massive broiler-sheds and controlled environment houses in dull grey steel), and it was here that he spent most of every day, his only companions being his whisky bottle and whichever of the sicker, more enfeebled farm animals he had managed to rescue from their confinement in the hope of restoring them to health: chickens, for instance, whose legs could no longer support their over-developed bodies, or cattle with dipped backs and distorted hips from carelessly prescribed growth hormones. For a long time, the existence of this gloomy haven was unknown to Dorothy, who could rarely be bothered to inspect her own premises: but when, by chance, it was finally discovered, she could not conceal her furious contempt for her husband’s sentimentality.

  ‘His leg was broken,’ said George, blocking the doorway of the cowshed while Herbert shrank in a corner. ‘I couldn’t bear to see him loaded on to a lorry with the others.’

  ‘I’ll break your bloody legs if you don’t leave my stock alone,’ shouted Dorothy. ‘I could report you to the bloody police for what I caught you doing.’

  ‘I was petting him, that’s all.’

  ‘God Almighty! And have you done what I asked you to do: have you spoken to the cook about dinner on Friday night?’

  He stared back blankly. ‘What dinner on Friday night?’

  ‘The dinner we’re giving for Thomas and Henry and the people from Nutrilite.’ Dorothy habitually carried a riding crop: she now whacked it across her own thighs in exasperation. ‘You don’t even remember, do you? You can’t remember a bloody thing about anything. You’re just a useless, dried-out, washed-up old piss artist. God Almighty!’

  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 running of farms. (He got the impression that most of them had joined the council to get away from it.) And when he gave up this position and Dorothy herself took his place, she made it clear that she didn’t trust him, by this stage, to look after the farm in her absence. Without bothering to consult her husband she advertised for a full-time manager, and George found that he had effectively been made redundant.

  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 dinner parties, she would convince civil servants and MPs of the necessity for ever more extravagant subsidies being paid out to farmers who wished to convert to the new intensive methods: it was through her efforts (and the efforts of others like her) that the government began to step up its provision of grants and tax allowances to help with the laying down of concrete, the putting up of buildings, and the purchase of fittings and equipment. Smaller farmers who resisted these incentives soon found themselves unable to match the prices being offered to the consumer by their highly subsidized competitors.

  And as soon as they heard the news that large amounts of public money were being channelled into intensive farming, the financial institutions began to move in. Dorothy had a head start on her rivals in this respect, since Thomas Winshaw was by now well on his way to becoming one of the most powerful members of the banking establishment. When he learned of the direction government policy was taking, he began to invest heavily in agricultural land, and was more than happy to offer Dorothy substantial loans – with land as security – for her various expansion programmes (the size of the debt obliging her, every year, to force higher and higher yields out of her soil and stock). From the outset, her aim was to guarantee profits by controlling every stage of production. She began by buying up all the smaller farms in the county and putting them under contract. Then, once she had established her stranglehold on most of the egg, chicken, bacon and vegetable supplies to the North East of England, she started to expand her sphere of operations. A series of specialist divisions was set up: Easilay Eggs (slogan: ‘The Yolk’s on Us, Folks!’), Porkers, the bacon curers (‘If It’s Porker, It Must Be a Corker’), Green Shoots vegetable products (‘Are you getting enough, Missus?’) and Pluckalot Chickens (‘They Keep on Cluckin’ and We Keep on Pluckin’!’). The Brunwin insignia was reserved for what was, in terms of profits, the jewel in the corporate crown: the frozen dinner and instant pudding division, for which the slogan was simply ‘They’re Brunwin Fantastic!’ Each of these companies was served by hundreds of contracted farmers up and down the country, whose task – if they were to stand any chance of making a livelihood – was to use every growth-inducing antibiotic and every yield-increasing pesticide known to man in order to meet the ever more stringent production quotas laid down by Dorothy from her head office at Brunwin Holdings. These farmers were also obliged to place all their orders for feed with a company called Nutrilite (a division of Brunwin Holdings) and to supplement it with chemical additives obtained from another company called Kemmilite (a division of Brunwin Holdings). In this way, internal costs were kept down to an absolute minimum.

  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 annual turnover of Pluckalot was more than 55 million. That’s chickens, of course: not pounds.

  ∗

  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 fi
rst 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 tunnel, the floor covered with chickens as far as the eye could see. God knows how many birds were in that shed – thousands, or perhaps even tens of thousands. There was no movement at all: they were packed in too tightly to turn or to move around, and I was aware only of a great stillness. This was finally shattered, I don’t know how many minutes later, by the sound of a door opening and the appearance of a little rectangle of light at the far end of the tunnel. Two figures were framed in the doorway, and there was a sudden bustle and flapping of feathers.

  ‘This is it,’ said one of the men.

  ‘Blimey,’ said the other. Their voices travelled boomingly.

  ‘Let’s throw some light on the subject,’ said the first man, and switched on a torch.

  ‘You certainly pack them in here, don’t you?’

  ‘We do our best.’ I took this man to be the owner. It was not Mr Nuttall, but I could remember my mother telling me that the farm had changed hands quite recently.

  ‘Feels warm enough in here to me, I must say.’

  ‘No, we need to keep it much warmer than this.’

  ‘When do you reckon it broke down, then?’

  ‘Some time last night.’

  ‘And your lighting’s gone as well, has it?’

  ‘No, no, it’s supposed to be dark. These birds are six weeks old, you see. They’d fight in these conditions if we gave them any light.’

  ‘Well, all I can do really is to check your circuit. More often than not you’ll find it’s the earthing system that’s at fault.’

  ‘Yes, but I only had a new one put in last year. Had a whole new system put in, you see, because the old one was completely useless. We had an absolute disaster one night. All the ventilators shut down. I came in in the morning and there were nine thousand dead birds on the floor. Nine bloody thousand. Took four of us all morning to clear them out. We were shovelling them out with a spade.’

  ‘Well, where can I get at it, anyway?’

  ‘At the back of the shed, near the big hopper.’

  There was a short silence. Then the second man said: ‘Yes, but how do I get there?’

  ‘You walk it, of course. How do you think?’

  ‘I can’t get through there. There’s no room. Not with all these birds.’

  ‘They won’t hurt you.’

  ‘What about me hurting them?’

  ‘No, that’s all right. I mean, don’t tread on too many if you can help it. But there’s always a few dead ’uns in there anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it.’

  ‘You must be bloody joking, mate.’

  The second man turned and left the doorway. I could see the farmer pursuing him.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘No way am I going to trample through a flock of bloody chickens just to check your circuit.’

  ‘Look, how else are you going to …’

  The voices faded out of earshot. I climbed down from my perch on the canister and dusted off my clothing. As I made my way back to the fence at the edge of the wood I saw a van coming up the driveway and pulling to a halt. On the side of the van was a logo which said PLUCKALOT CHICKENS – A DIVISION OF THE BRUNWIN GROUP. The name at that time was not familiar to me.

  ∗

  Dorothy was a great believer in research and development, and over the years the Brunwin Group built up a reputation for technological innovation, particularly in chicken farming. These were some of the problems she set out to solve:

  I. AGGRESSION: Dorothy's broilers, just before going to the slaughter at seven weeks old (roughly one fiftieth of the way through their natural lifespan) were typically allotted a space of half a square foot per bird. Feather-pecking and cannibalism were common among birds held in such confinement.

  SOLUTION: After experimenting with special red-tinted spectacles clipped on to the beak (so that, by neutralizing the colour, the bird would be prevented from pecking at the red combs of its fellows), Dorothy replaced these with blinkers which simply blocked off the vision to either side. When this also proved too cumbersome, she applied herself to finding the most effective method of de-beaking. At first it was done with a blow-torch, then with a soldering iron. Finally her designers came up with a small guillotine equipped with hot blades. It was reasonably efficient, except that if the blades were too hot they caused blisters in the mouth; also, since it was necessary to de-beak about fifteen birds a minute, perfect accuracy was not always possible and there were many cases of burned nostrils and facial mutilations. The damaged nerves of the beak stumps had a habit of growing back, turning in upon themselves and forming chronic pain-inducing neuromas. As a last resort, Dorothy arranged for soothing music to be piped into the battery cages and broiler-houses. Manuel and His Music of the Mountains was especially popular.

  2. SECOND PERIOD EGG-PRODUCTION: For many years, the battery hens were sent to the slaughterhouse at the end of one laying period, after about fifteen months: but Dorothy believed it ought to be possible to hurry them through into a second year of laying.

  SOLUTION: Force moulting. She discovered that she could hurry chickens through their moulting period, during which they did not lay eggs, by causing them severe shock through abrupt changes in the lighting pattern or a rigorous programme of food and water deprivation.

  3. MALE CHICKS: Males born into an egg-laying flock are not genetically bred to fatten up for human consumption, and have, consequently, no economic value. Clearly they must be destroyed – on the day of birth, if possible – but how?

  SOLUTION: For a while Dorothy experimented with a special mill which was capable of mincing 1,000 chicks to pulp every two minutes. The resulting mush could be used either for feed or manure. However, the mills were expensive to install. Decompression through oxygen withdrawal was one possible alternative, as was gassing with chloroform or carbon dioxide. But nothing could really be cheaper, it was finally decided, than good old-fashioned suffocation. The simplest method was to pack thousands of chicks on top of each other and tie them together in sacks. The birds would either suffocate slowly or be crushed to death.

  4. STUNNING PRIOR TO SLAUGHTER: Before settling for the standard method of a water bath charged with low-level electric current, Dorothy had tried to patent a form of small gas chamber through which the chickens would pass before being hoisted on to the conveyor belt. It was found, however, that the frantic flapping of wings inside the chamber was causing a loss of roughly ½lb of gas per bird, and so the system was rejected on economic grounds.

  Dorothy had always found that cost-effective methods of slaughter were hard to come by. The electrical stunning equipment installed in her abattoirs was both expensive and slow (if used with care,
that is). In this respect, at least, she was something of a traditionalist, and privately believed that there was really nothing to beat a well-aimed blow with a poleaxe for stunning pigs and cattle. She also continued to provide specialist services for ritual slaughter, even though many Jews and Moslems had begun to oppose the practice: the market was still there, she argued, and had to be catered for. It was in the business of slaughter, all the same, that she felt her competitors continued to run at a slight advantage, mainly because this was the area which had been most glaringly neglected by George before she assumed overall management. She was amazed to discover that he had almost no personal experience of killing: she once found him weeping openly as he struggled to finish off a cow which was sick with mastitis. His sledgehammer, aimed at the centre of the skull, had gone wide of the mark and crashed through the animal’s eye. As it thrashed around in agony, George had just stood there, quivering and numb. It was left to Dorothy to fetch a clamp, secure the bloody, squealing creature by the nostrils and knock it dead with one almighty swing of the hammer. ‘Men!’ she had muttered, in a scornful tone of voice, and had gone inside to change her clothes before settling down for a pre-dinner gin and tonic.

  ∗

  One evening when I was about twenty-four, I went to see a programme of French films presented by the university film society. The first to be shown was Le Sang des Bêtes, Georges Franju’s short documentary about a Parisian slaughterhouse. By the time it was over, the theatre was half empty.

  It was the usual film society audience: hardened connoisseurs of the horror film, in many cases, for whom it was fashionable to admire low-budget movies about American teenagers being dismembered by psychopaths, or science-fiction nightmares full of bloodthirsty special effects. What was it about this film, then, so gentle and melancholy in some respects, that caused women to scream with revulsion, and men to rush for the exits?