Gabriel's English Journal

Chapter 8 of Animal Farm

Throughout the year us animals worked even harder than we had worked in the previous year. To rebuild the windmill, with the walls twice as thick, at the right time, was astonishing labour.  We animals worked tremendously long hours and yet fed as badly as when Jones’s day. On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to us lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred percent, three hundred per cent, or five hundred per cent, as Squealer exclaimed. We animals saw no reason to disbelieve him. Especially as we couldn’t remember what conditions had been like before the Rebellion. All the same, there were days when we felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more food in our stomachs.

All orders were now issued through Squealer. Napoleon himself was not seen in public as often as once in a fortnight. When he did appear, he was attended not only by his group of menacing dogs, but by a black cockerel who marched in front of him and acted as a kind of trumpeter, letting out a loud “cock-a-doodle-doo” before Napoleon spoke. Even in the farmhouse, Napoleon owned separate apartments from the others. He took his meals alone, with two dogs to wait upon him, and always ate from the Crown Derby dinner service.