Work Text:
“Tell us a story, Comrade Clover,” cried the piglets. They had gathered around her in the straw, some climbing on her back. With every pig on Animal Farm invited to the farmhouse for the evening, Clover had been left to watch over the piglets whilst their mothers were away.
“I’m no good at telling stories,” she said.
“Please!”
Clover snorted, “Oh, very well, then. What about?”
The piglets thought for a moment, until one spoke up, “You are very old, Comrade Clover. Do you remember what it was like before Father and the other pigs were in charge?”
This, Clover knew, was an extremely consequential question. One wrong statement, and her answer would find its way back to Napoleon. The consequences would, undoubtedly, be dire.
“Very little,” she lied, “Just a few things.”
“What do you remember most?” Asked a female piglet close to her nose.
“Well, before the pigs were in charge, there was a man and his wife who owned the farm. The man was not good to us, and the woman we hardly ever saw. The thing I remember most is one evening, a farmhand -they were other humans who worked for the man- left me stood in the courtyard after ploughing, and forgot about me. It was summer, and I could hear the humans in the garden. Like your father and the other pigs do, the humans liked to have parties. I thought I had better not stay where I was, so I went to find someone. The garden wasn’t far away, so I went and looked over the hedge. Mrs Jones was having a tea party with some comrades of hers, and they had drunk a lot of the strange, fizzing liquid that always seemed to make humans wobbly like lambs. It also makes them very cheerful, and the sight of my head over the hedge caused everyone at the table to laugh a lot. I don’t think it had been going well before that, as Mrs Jones came over and told me I had saved her gathering. She was so pleased, she brought me cake from the table.”
“What is cake?” The piglets were confused.
“Cake is…it is sweet, like apples. It is made with sugar, and eggs from the chickens, and milk from the cows, and other things too. You must mix them all up, put them in the cupboard, and when they come out, they have turned into cake.”
“Do you like cake, Comrade Clover?”
“Very much, though I only had it once.”
“How do humans pick things up, Comrade Clover? They don’t have snouts like us, or a mouth like yours…”
“They use their hands,” said Clover, “they are like your trotters, but with more pieces. To eat, they hold those metal things…”
“Cutlery?” One piglet suggested gleefully, “Mother and Father use cutlery too.”
“Yes, cutlery. That must be it.”
“Is Comrade Benjamin a horse?” Another called out.
“No. He’s a donkey.”
“Is that why he has such funny ears?”
“I suppose so, yes. His tail is different, too.”
“Could you have piglets with him, Comrade Clover?”
Clover tossed her head, bemused, “Piglets?”
“Horse babies aren’t called piglets, Tulip!” A male piglet said pretentiously from his roost on Clover’s back, “They’re foals.”
“You’re quite right, Comrade. A baby horse is called a foal. As for a donkey-horse, well, a long ago comrade of mine, Muriel, told me that would be a mule.”
The piglets, much to Clover’s concern, were excited by this idea.
“Could you not have us a mule, Comrade Clover? We could keep it as a pet.” As if to illustrate the point, some of the piglets nudged her belly.
“Erm…” Clover thought hard. What had Muriel told her a long time ago? A mare and a jack made a mule. As far as she knew, the book in which the goat had found this information was lost to time.
“I don’t think it would work,” she seized the opportunity, “You see, you must have a stallion and a jenny to make a mule.”
The piglets were disappointed. One nipped Clover’s ear, “Why can’t you be a stallion?”
“We must ask Father to get us one.”
“How many foals can fit inside you at once, Comrade Clover?”
“Four, I think. You have four foals, don’t you, Comrade Clover?”
“We could have had four mules, if you were a donkey!”
For several minutes afterwards, the poor mare had to lay still, and tolerate the piglets debating the reproduction of her species.
“I saw a nice horse in Father’s newspaper. He had a national title for running. He was very handsome, Comrade Clover.”
“In the newspaper, hm?” Clover tried not to look so dazed, and pushed her ears forwards again, “Speaking of the newspaper, do they put recipes in them? Perhaps that would tell you how to make a cake!”
“Oh yes, cake! There must be recipes in those. There is everything in the newspaper.”
“You could ask your Father about it,” Clover suggested, in the hopes the piglets would forget about their other request for a mule, “He might help you make one. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
By the time Napoleon and the sows returned to the pigshed, they found their children speaking enthusiastically about every sort of cake flavour they could think of.
“Can we make a cake, Father?” They squealed in unison.
Napoleon’s eyes went to Clover, still half buried beneath the mountain of piglets.
“What is the meaning of this?”
“They asked me what I remembered most about life before Animal Farm, Comrade Napoleon. I said the sole occasion I had cake. Cake which we could, of course, have freely on Animal Farm should we desire.”
“Of course, of course,” Napoleon nodded sagely.
“We want a mule, too!” One piglet cried out from the back.
Napoleon wrinkled his snout. “A mule? What is a mule, Comrade Clover?”
“It’s a type of cake, Comrade Napoleon. With raisins in it.” Clover said as quietly as she could, so the piglets would not hear to correct her.
“Very well. Good evening, Comrade. You may go.”
“Thank you, Comrade Napoleon. Goodbye, children.” Clover got hastily to her hooves, and exited. On the way back to her stall, she passed Benjamin in his own.
“Clover?” He hissed over the door.
“What?”
“Muriel’s daughter Annie just walked past the pigshed. A stallion and a jenny make a mule, don’t they?”
“I think you’ll find,” said Clover, “a mule is a type of cake.”
“With raisins,” added a passing field mouse.
“Of course,” Benjamin gave her a look, “How foolish of me to forget.”
Several weeks later, on the anniversary of the Battle of the Cowshed, each animal received, courtesy of Comrade Napoleon, a small, square piece of “mule cake” with raisins. Any piglet who dared to try and correct Napoleon on the definition of a mule fell at once from his favour.
“Listen to your father,” the sows would say inevitably, until one by one the piglets all but forgot what Clover had first told them.
By then, the story of what she had done spread far and wide to everyone but the pigs, who had proclaimed cake a patriotic item. It was, for the comrades of Animal Farm, an incredibly rare luxury.
“All because you told the piglets Mrs Jones fed you cake!” Annie the nanny goat whispered into her ear, “Manor Farm can’t have had something Animal Farm doesn’t. It just wouldn’t do, according to the pigs!”
As all the animals gathered in the barn that evening, it was hard for any of them to keep a straight face during the pigs’ speeches about a dessert representing the freedoms of beasts.
“Let us give thanks to Comrade Clover for the remarkable idea,” Squealer finished.
“Thank you Comrade Clover,” everyone echoed in unison.
Clover tossed her mane, quite proud of herself. In her own, sweet way, she had sparked a little of the old rebellion once more.