Welcome to Silver Street Farm

by Nicola Davies

  Gemma says that it started with eating jelly beans on the merry-go-round in the park. Karl says no, it started with Auntie Nat’s poodles. But Meera knows that the real beginning of Silver Street Farm was their very first day of kindergarten in Mrs. Monty’s class.

  On that first day of school, the only children who weren’t screaming, crying, or having a nosebleed were a tall girl with red braids, a quiet, skinny boy with dark hair, and Meera.

  Mrs. Monty led them to the play area in the corner of the classroom.

  “Could you three play nicely with the toy town,” she said, “while I sort everything else out? There are some farm animals, too, in that red box.”

  Meera was lifting the lid off the red box almost before Mrs. Monty had finished speaking; but she wasn’t alone. The two other children were right beside her. Just like her, they weren’t in the least bit interested in the fancy toy town laid out all around them. It was the farm animals they wanted to play with.

  “I’m Meera,” said Meera, smiling shyly.

  “I’m Gemma,” said the tall girl with red braids.

  “I’m Karl,” said the skinny boy very quietly. “Do you want to play farm?”

  For the rest of the day, while Mrs. Monty wrestled with classroom chaos, the three new best friends built their first farm together. They got out all the animals, even the two cows with legs missing, the headless sheep, and the chickens that had been painted pink. They made stables, stalls, and sties from old cereal boxes and new fences from lollipop sticks and yellow yarn. Very soon, fields and farm buildings, flocks of sheep, and herds of cows and pigs had sprung up among the buildings and roads of the toy town.

  The three children worked well together. Gemma liked the sheep and the chickens best; Karl didn’t say much, but you could tell he liked the cows and the horses. Meera was always having ideas about what to do next, but Gemma and Karl didn’t mind because she wasn’t really bossy and she had found the missing piglets at the bottom of the LEGO box.

  When Mrs. Monty asked them to put the farm away because it was time to go home, the children were horrified.

  “But I have to milk the cows in the morning,” said Karl.

  “And the sheep can’t graze if they’re in a box,” said Gemma.

  “But tomorrow the other children will want to play with the toy town,” said Mrs. Monty gently.

  “They can play with the town and the farm together!” said Gemma.

  “You see,” Meera explained kindly, “it’s a city farm. It fits in the city, just like the farm we’re all going to have when we’re older.”

  From that moment on, Meera, Gemma, and Karl planned their real city farm. They read books about farm animals, and they went on every school trip and family outing they could to real farms to see and learn about real animals. All through kindergarten and right through to the last year of elementary school, the three friends planned — but still their city farm was just a dream. Until, that is, the day of the green jelly beans and Auntie Nat’s poodles.

  Gemma and Karl were lying on the old merry-go-round in the park, eating jelly beans and looking up into the blue spring sky over Lonchester.

  “Give us a push, Gem,” said Karl. “We’re stopping.”

  Gemma kicked out lazily at the concrete with one of her superlong legs and started the merry-go-round turning again.

  Karl bit a yellow jelly bean in half and sighed.

  “April vacation at home with nothing to do but watch Auntie Nat read horoscopes. . . .”

  “I’d swap you a year with your auntie’s horoscopes for two weeks with my pimply brother.”

  Gemma gave them another push and the merry-go-round creaked on. “Where is Meera, anyway?” she said through a mouthful of red jelly beans. “She said to meet at three o’clock and it’s twenty after now.”

  “I’m right here!” Meera ran out of the trees and jumped onto the merry-go-round, sending it spinning wildly. “And I’ve got some good news. This could be the year we start our farm!”

  From either side of her, Karl and Gemma both groaned.

  “Meera, we don’t have any animals,” said Karl.

  “And if we did have any animals, where would we keep them?” added Gemma. “My dad’s toolshed?”

  “Or the balcony of Auntie’s apartment?” added Karl.

  “But if we did have somewhere to keep them,” said Meera, sitting bolt upright, “that would be a start, wouldn’t it?”

  “But finding somewhere is the difficult part,” said Karl gloomily. “We’ve always known that.”

  “Well,” said Meera, her eyes starting to sparkle, “I think I have found somewhere! My Auntie Priya works in the city-council offices and she told me about it. There’s an old railway station down by the canal that’s been closed for years. There are buildings to keep animals in and grassy parts for grazing. It sounds perfect.”

  “But the city council would never let us have a place like that,” said Gemma.

  “It’s probably just ruins covered in brambles,” added Karl.

  Meera ignored their objections. “It can’t hurt to go and have a look though, can it?” she said.

  But Gemma and Karl still looked doubtful.

  “I know!” said Meera, leaping off the merry-go-round. “Let the jelly beans decide!” She snatched the bag from Gemma and struck a pose like an actor on a stage.

  “I veel close my eyes. I veel hold out zee magical bag of jelly beans. . . .” Meera paused dramatically. Peeking between her eyelashes, she could see that Karl and Gemma were now both watching her and starting to laugh — she’d gotten them! — “And if zee next jelly bean I pull from zee bag eez green, you veel be bound by jelly-bean magic to accompany me on my quest for our farm!”

  Meera pointed in Karl’s direction.

  “Drumroll please, Karl!”

  Karl drummed his fingers on the old merry-go-round, and Gemma provided a trumpet fanfare with a rolled-up newspaper she had found.

  Meera reached into the bag with her other hand, paused dramatically, and pulled out . . . a green jelly bean!

  “Ta-da!”

  Karl and Gemma clapped and got off the merry-go-round. Sometimes, you just had to do what Meera wanted, even if you knew that the jelly bean had to be green because none of them liked the lime-flavored ones.

  Auntie Nat blinked. She looked at the screen again. It couldn’t be true, could it?

  “Adorable poodles. Two left. Bargain for quick sale.”

  The photo on the advertisement was terribly blurred, but then dogs moved around so much, didn’t they? They’d be hard to photograph. She wrote down the number on the screen and, her heart pounding with excitement, reached for the phone.

  Auntie Nat, or Natalia Konstantinovna Lebedeva, to give her her proper name, had always wanted a pair of white poodles with ribbons tied into their woolly fur.

  “I walk with them to shops,” she would tell Karl in her heavy Russian accent. “And I look elegant, like models in magazine.”

  Then she’d walk across the living room, pretending to be a tall, skinny model with two dogs on leashes. This always made Karl and Auntie Nat laugh, because she was short and very, very round.

  “When I’m rich and famous, Auntie,” Karl always said, “I’ll buy you two perfect little poodles.”

  “Ah, my Karl,” she’d sigh, “you will have to be very rich. Poodles so expensive.”

  Poodles were so expensive, hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Every week, when she was reading her horoscope in the Lonchester Herald and on the Mythic Modes website, she’d check online in case someone, somewhere, was selling a poodle for a price she could afford. But the stars always told her that wasn’t going to happen. Until today.

/>   “A long-held dream is closer than you think!” said her horoscope on the back page of the City Gazette.

  The voice at the end of the phone line was gruff.

  “Yeah, I still got the dogs,” it said. “You got the money?”

  Hmmm, Auntie Nat thought to herself. Not a refined person. Not good enough to own fine poodles.

  “Yes, yes,” she said carefully, “I have money. Cash.”

  “Right. Then meet me at the corner of Milsom Street and Park Row in an hour.”

  He didn’t even wait for her to reply. Perhaps the puppies were stolen. Auntie Nat pushed the worrying thought to the back of her mind and, thinking instead of what Karl would say when he got home and found two little poodle puppies in the apartment, almost skipped down the hall to the creaking, cranking old elevator.

  The man was definitely not a refined person. In fact, he looked as if he could use a bath. What was more, he seemed to be in a great rush to get rid of the puppies. He shoved the box into Auntie Nat’s hands and told her that the puppies were sleeping and that it would be better not to open the box until she got home. This had made her suspicious, but when she’d poked a finger in through an airhole in the box, she’d felt the warm, woolly fur. She handed over the money and hurried home.

  Back in the apartment, Auntie Nat brought the box into the kitchen and sat down gratefully on a chair. She looked at it, but she didn’t open it. Now that her long-held dream was about to come true, as the horoscope had predicted, she realized that she didn’t really know anything about poodles. They were cute and fluffy, but what did they eat? How did you train them? Where, she thought with sudden horror, did they “do their business”?

  Inside the pet carrier, the pups were starting to wake up and move around. She would have to let them out. She opened the top of the box, and two sweet little white woolly faces looked up at her and opened their mouths.

  “Baa!” said the puppies. “Baaaaaaaa!”

  The old station was most definitely not open to visitors: the huge wrought-iron gates were closed with a giant chain and padlock and covered in signs that shouted fiercely, NO ENTRY! and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! and, most worrying of all, DANGER! GUARD DOGS PATROLLING AT ALL TIMES.

  “We can’t go in there!” said Karl.

  “Yes, we can!” said Meera.

  “What about the guard dogs?” asked Gemma.

  “Oh, that’s just for show,” said Meera, waving her hands dismissively.

  Karl, who was still small for his age, looked up at the gate.

  “How will we get in?”

  “Climb, of course. Duh!” said Meera.

  Gemma laughed. “But you’re terrible at climbing, Meera!”

  “That’s where you come in, Daddy Longlegs. Get up there, Gemma!”

  Gemma was the best climber of the three of them, and she could never resist a challenge.

  “OK. I’ll get on top of the gate, then I’ll help you guys up,” she said. “And if we get thrown in jail, at least I won’t have to spend all vacation with my brother.”

  Once they were on top of the gates, it was easy to slide down the other side and start to explore. There were several old brick buildings, some with faded signs still hanging above them: TICKET OFFICE, WAITING ROOM, and STATIONMASTER’S OFFICE. The windows were broken and there was ivy growing up the walls, but the roofs still looked solid and weatherproof. The space around the buildings was big, about half the size of the school soccer field, Karl guessed. It was completely overgrown, but where brambles and nettles would grow, so would grass for animals to graze. As the children wandered around, the dreams they’d had since the first day of kindergarten finally seemed within their reach.

  They pushed through the jungle of plants and at last reached the edge of the canal, where they sat down with their legs dangling over the wall.

  “It’s brilliant!” said Gemma. “I think there could be enough grazing in summer for a couple of sheep.”

  “The ticket office would make a great cowshed,” said Karl.

  “We could have ducks on the canal,” said Gemma, “once we’ve gotten the shopping cart out, of course.”

  That was when they heard the growl and turned around to see a huge black dog with a row of very big teeth showing in an extremely fierce snarl.

  “Just for show, eh?” said Gemma.

  “Nice doggy. Nice, nice, nice doggy,” breathed Meera.

  The “doggy” wasn’t impressed; he snarled and growled some more and began to close in.

  “We’ll have to jump into the canal if he gets any closer,” said Gemma.

  “We’ll be stabbed by a rusty shopping cart!” squealed Meera.

  “Meera, quick!” said Karl. “Give me the jelly beans!”

  Two minutes later, the “fierce” guard dog was wagging his tail and begging for more candy. Karl scratched him behind the ears.

  “There’s a good boy,” said Karl.

  The dog whined and offered his paw.

  “I think he’s lonely,” said Gemma.

  “He won’t be lonely when he’s the Silver Street Farm Dog!” said Meera as she patted the dog’s huge head.

  “The what farm dog?” Gemma and Karl said together.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you! I found this nailed to the back of an old bench. It’s the station name.” Meera reached into her backpack and pulled out an enamel sign that said SILVER STREET in black letters. “It’s perfect for our farm.”

  “Silver Street Farm,” said Karl. “Yeah, I like it.”

  “Silver Street sounds a bit like a shopping center to me,” Gemma said, grinning. “But it’s OK.”

  They fought their way back through the bramble jungle and climbed out over the gate. The dog stuck his nose through the bars and they fed him one last green jelly bean. He wagged his tail at them as they walked away.

  “I think he knows we’re coming back!” said Gemma.

  As soon as Karl opened the door to the apartment, he knew something was wrong. There was a horrible smell, for a start, and he could hear his auntie speaking angrily in Russian in the living room. Then he noticed the newspapers spread all over the floor, decorated with little brown currants and round damp patches. He didn’t have to wonder what had been pooping and peeing all over his home for long though, because just as he closed the front door behind him, two fluffy little lambs ran into the hall.

  “Baaa!” said the lambs. “Baaaaaaaaaaa!”

  Auntie Nat was following close behind, bending over the lambs and offering them food from a bowl with DOG written on the side.

  “Ah, Karl!” Auntie Nat looked at him with a big smile. “At last, I have poodles. Puppies. Bargain from Internet.”

  “Baaaaaa!” said the “puppies” together, more loudly than ever.

  “This one,” said Auntie Nat, pointing to the larger lamb, “is Bitzi, and the other one, little one, is Bobo.”

  Karl nodded. He didn’t know what to say. Auntie Nat waved the dog bowl around.

  “I get puppy food,” she said, “but they don’t like.” Auntie Nat’s beaming smile faded. “If they don’t eat, they die,” she said. Suddenly she looked almost as forlorn as the lambs.

  “Don’t worry, Auntie,” said Karl, finding his voice at last, “I’ll figure it out.”

  The baby bottles were the easy part. Mr. Khan’s corner shop had them hanging up behind the counter, next to the aspirin and Band-Aids. Karl chose two. But what to put in the bottles was much trickier.

  He spent ages looking at the cartons of milk in the cooler. There was skim, low-fat, and organic — but none of them were sheep’s milk. He peered into the freezer, but saw nothing that seemed to have anything to do with sheep apart from a package of frozen lamb chops.

  When he got to the checkout, one of Mr. Khan’s nephews was at the register.

  “Excuse me,” said Karl. “Do you have any other kinds of milk?”

  “What?” said the young man, scowling.

  “Milk from — um — other animal
s.”

  “What d’you mean, other animals?” the boy said, scowling even more. “Are you making fun of me?”

  Just as Karl was wishing that the floor would swallow him up, Mr. Khan himself appeared.

  “Ah!” he said kindly, sweeping his grumpy nephew to one side. “Karl! How is your aunt?”

  “She’s well, thanks, Mr. Khan.”

  “And you were looking for?”

  Karl was aware that now everyone in the line was listening to him.

  “Sheep’s milk, Mr. Khan,” Karl said in a very small voice, expecting the shopkeeper to burst into laughter or throw him out for being rude.

  “Sheep’s milk. Yes,” said Mr. Khan, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “So good for the digestion. Also for complaints of the skin. Your aunt is quite well, I hope?”

  For a split second, Karl thought of explaining about the poodle puppies that were really sheep, but it was much easier to just say, “She’s fine, Mr. Khan. Just a bit of eczema.”

  “Well, we can’t have that. Please come this way.”

  Mr. Khan rummaged around in the freezer and pulled out a bag of frozen whitish stuff about the size of a soccer ball.

  “Mr. Stephanopolis, may he rest in peace, ordered sheep’s milk every week. I hope your aunt finds it beneficial.”

  Back at the apartment, Karl defrosted the milk in the microwave, put some in each of the bottles, and together he and Auntie Nat fed the lambs. Karl showed Auntie how to hold the bottle, just as he’d been taught on a school trip to a farm back in third grade.

  The lambs braced their little legs and sucked hard at the teats, their tiny tails wiggling like demented pipe cleaners. When the bottles had been sucked dry, the lambs became sleepy. Auntie Nat picked up Bobo, and Karl took Bitzi onto his lap; the lamb nibbled at his sleeve and closed its eyes with pleasure as he scratched its nubbly little head.

  “So cute!” said Auntie Nat, smiling. Karl nodded and smiled back. They were cute. They were gorgeous, but in a minute he was going to have to tell Auntie Nat that they weren’t puppies, and he didn’t know how he was going to do it.