‘FRESH AIR!’ he shouts.
Mum looks terrified by all this.
‘Anyway, it’ll do for a night,’ mutters Uncle Tony. ‘I’ll wake you up early for your eggs.’
Mum is finding whatever bits of old furniture she can to prop up against the door so no one can get in, but the problem is, the door opens outwards.
The caravan smells of old foxes or something, and there’s a leak in the skylight.
It’s cold. I can hear owls.
Me and Teddy are shivering in our sleeping bags on the saggy bed, pretending we can’t hear Mum trying to keep her voice down.
She’s like, ‘What on earth were you thinking?!’
And Dad’s like, ‘We have hardly any petrol and he’ll give us breakfast and a map!’
And she’s like, ‘He might be a lunatic! You let a lunatic called Uncle Tony into our car so we could drive to a farm called Angry Woods in the middle of nowhere at night so we could sleep in a stinking caravan called Bad Bertha’s Resting Place! Who’s Bertha? And is this where she rests? Or is this where she died?’
And Dad’s like, ‘We’ll take turns sleeping!’
And Teddy sits up and says, ‘Why do we have to take turns sleeping?’
And Mum and Dad say, ‘No reason, darling!’ at the exact same time in the exact same everything is fine voice.
They lie down beside us, propped up on thin pillows. Mum seems keen on keeping one eye on the door.
I go to sleep, listening to that massive animal or whatever it is outside, snuffling and shuffling about.
When we wake up, light is just starting to sneak in through the skylight. The first thing I notice after that is the smell. But the second thing I notice is that the whole caravan is moving from side to side.
It’s properly shunting from left to right. Like a seesaw. The whole caravan!
‘Wake up!’ says Mum. ‘WAKE UP!’
Dad has obviously been dreaming and screams, ‘I will PAY for the food, madam!’
We all sit up in bed.
And we cannot quite believe what we are looking at.
It’s in front of us, standing at the edge of our bed, looking VERY confused indeed.
‘A COW!’ yells Dad.
He’s right. A cow. Just there. A cow at the end of our bed. A cow right here in this caravan.
‘Get it out!’ screams Mum.
‘How?!’ shouts Dad.
‘I don’t know!’ screams Mum.
‘Why is that a cow?’ asks Teddy.
The cow has massive eyes and enormous nostrils and it doesn’t seem happy we’re here. It’s got mud all over its ankles and, dare I say it, a very bad attitude.
Dad begins to try and give it a speech.
‘So, cow, here’s the thing—’
The cow suddenly sneezes in Dad’s face.
‘I’ve been SLIMED!’ he wails, blinded by whatever bright-yellow badness just shot out at him.
‘Cow! Out!’ says Mum, in her best Mum voice.
Then she kneels on the bed and puts one hand on her hip and points at its face.
‘Bad cow!’ she says.
It has no effect.
‘BERTHA!’ comes a voice, and then Uncle Tony rocks into the caravan, carrying a massive shotgun.
Mum and Dad scream but I don’t know what they’re worried about. The cow seems the most pressing matter. We can deal with the mad gunman after.
‘This is where Bertha sleeps, normally,’ says Uncle Tony, who I notice is wearing exactly the same clothes as last night. ‘I told you, Bertha – we have guests! You have to use the lower field, like the other cows.’
He looks at us to explain, still waving his shotgun about.
‘She treats this place like a B&B,’ he says. ‘Thinks she’s my wife!’
None of this makes Uncle Tony sound more normal.
‘What time is it?’ I ask.
‘Breakfast time,’ he says. ‘Five thirty a.m.’
Okay, so let’s be clear: that is so not breakfast time.
Dad blinks and wipes his mouth.
‘Uncle Tony,’ he says, politely. ‘Is there anywhere I can wash this excess cow gunk off my face?’
‘Use the tap by the pigs. After that, we get to work.’
We all stare at him.
What does he mean, ‘work’?
I felt sorry for Mum. She’d never milked a cow before, and it didn’t look like she’d turn semi-pro anytime soon.
She looked horrified when we first saw her sitting on that stool near the pond; she couldn’t even look at the cow. She just had to keep squeezing its udders, which she said felt too personal. And the milk was going everywhere except the orange bucket. She had milk on her shoes and milk on her trousers, and I don’t know if I told you, but she’s generally dairy intolerant. Every time she squeezed an udder she made a little ‘ew’ sound.
Ew squirt ew squirt ew squirt.
I’m sure that once upon a time that would have made Dad laugh, but he wasn’t in a particularly jolly mood right now.
He’d been told to clean out the pig houses.
They don’t really look much like houses to me. They look more like pigloos.
Dad was doing his best, although he wasn’t really wearing the right clothes. He was still wearing what he’d been wearing yesterday, which was essentially what he’d been wearing to the office, except with cow pats on. Now he had a shovel, a brush and a scraper and he was removing everything from the floor that had once been in a pig. He kept making that weird face grown-ups make when they’re really disgusted by something. He kept jerking his head back and forward like a chicken and sticking his tongue out because whatever he was doing was turning his stomach. Meanwhile, pigs kept nudging at his legs and grunting. A particularly big one with a bush of black hair seemed to have a real problem with him. I think he saw straight through my dad’s bravado.
But me and Teddy? We’re fine. Our job is to collect the eggs from the chickens, and each of the chickens has a different name.
‘That’s Laura,’ says Uncle Tony,
