Free Chloe by Freya North

labrador sprawled under the huge, scrubbed kitchen table and mumbled in his sleep.
    (
No gingham tablecloth. Never mind
.)
    Another acted as a draught excluder by the doorway and had to be shoved forcibly when entry or exit was required. At either end of the Aga, two identical black cats sat motionless. It soon transpired that they were ever waiting for the emergence of Jip, the Jack Russell, from his lair in the small warming shelf of the Aga. Yap, another Jack Russell but three-legged, sat in the old Windsor chair at the head of the table and woe betide anyone who fancied sitting there themselves. JR, the final Jack Russell, sat at the foot of Yap’s chair looking up imploringly with right foreleg cocked. Whether this was as a gesture of subservience or a snide reminder to Yap of his lack of right foreleg was unclear. A heap of interchangeable kittens snoozed aboard a stack of newspapers near the larder door. A greyhound, long since seen her day, lay in her dead-and-gone pose in the middle of the room, the bones of her hocks and elbows threatening to push right through the meagre pale fawn coat stretched taut over them. A small tabby cat with a shredded ear sat at the greyhound’s head and counted the dog’s vertebrae. Presiding in judgement over all, an immense shabby tortoiseshell with permanently half-closed eyes sat on top of the cookery books.
    Though she had initially believed that all had gathered in a unified welcome, Chloë soon realized that her arrival had made negligible impact on the established ecosystem of The Kitchen. Before long, she bore witness to a bi-daily syndrome whose cause she would never discover. This consisted of a sudden and violent bout of musical chairs (most atonal) in which fur and fury flew around the kitchen. As quickly as it started, it finished and everyone returned to their positions as if nothing had happened. The kittens were asleep, the greyhound dead, JR’s leg was cocked and the tortoiseshell sat irreverently on Delia Smith perusing the scene. Without fail, Gin would look to each of the animals in turn and bellow ‘A hapless reshuffle of very little point.’
    She was pointedly ignored.
    The farmhouse was neither old nor particularly picturesque. It was a sensible structure well suited to its purpose. Its large covered porch provided ample storage for many a pair of muddied or manured boots; the larder was more of a walk-in chamber with wall-to-wall shelving deep enough to carry stock bought in bulk (Chloë gave up the count on reaching the fourteenth bottle of Vimto). Next to the larder was a cold room where the overflow from the fridge could reside quite happily and hygienically (provided the labradors could not gain entry). The kitchen, as we have seen, was vast enough to provide abundant space for all Skirrid End inhabitants other than equine, as well as to house the huge Aga which was the source of all heat and hot water at the farm. The hapless reshuffle of very little point often caused spillage of any liquid foolish enough to be on the kitchen table, and the breakage of any crockery not tucked into the wooden plate rack above the sink. The grand flagstone floor therefore, eminently moppable, was extremely practical too. The bedrooms upstairs were spacious but with windows proportionally small to keep the wind at bay. There was a drawing-room downstairs, bedecked by a regiment of family portraits of questionable lineage, but the room was used only once a year for the Skirrid End Farm Christmas Drinks Extravaganza. Anyone who knew Gin or any of her workforce (two- or four-legged) was invited to leave their boots in the porch and to partake of home-made hot spiced cider and mince pies in the drawing-room. In their socks.
    Gin gave Chloë a guided tour after heartily plying her with home-made bread, slabs of farm butter and wedges of quite pugilistic cheese. Chloë would have been quite happy to remain for evermore in the kitchen, with the