CYRUS THE PIG

By John Watson and Mishal Asher

Poor Cyrus felt he could bring little to the farm but in these 12 stories he proves himself wrong. They are designed to be read by adults to children or by children on their own, and celebrate Cyrus cunning and resourcefulness as he deals with the problems of the farm and his fellow animals,.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AMZ Marketing Hub
• Release date: May 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9781917239189

John Watson

John Watson joined The Conversation in December 2013 as politics & society editor. After two years in that role, he took up the new position of cities & policy editor. John has worked in the news media since he decided in the mid-1980s that a life tracking elephants (in the process of gaining an honours degree in ecology) was less interesting than being a journalist in apartheid-era South Africa. His residence was soon revoked and he returned to Australia. He joined The Conversation after nearly two decades with The Age as an editor, writer and columnist.

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CYRUS THE PIG

By John Watson

With illustrations by Mishal Asher

Copyright ©2024 John Watson

All Rights Reserved

Dedication

To Janis for encouraging me to bring Cyrus to market.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Mishal Asher for the elegant illustrations which light up this collection and to Arthur Burton of Amazon for his patient work in producing it. Also to Janis, Dell and Portia for their encouragement and help and to Carlos Garcia and Lachlan Higgie-Tweeddale for being the first young readers to test out the stories.

Further Copies

To buy further copies of this book please use the QR code below or order on the Amazon website

About the Author

Brought up in a village in rural Essex, John Watson was introduced to farming and animals at an early age. After a career in the law, he pays tribute to that background in these stories about Cyrus the Pig.

Of course he has never encountered a pig as clever as Cyrus; such exceptional animals are rare, if not unique. But, through his writing, Watson invites readers into a world where the extraordinary intelligence of this remarkable animal can be seen against the day to day comedies of rural life.

About the Illustrator

Having specialised in Digital Arts and Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, Mishal now carries on her practice as an illustrator, comic writer, painter, animator and creator of 3D characters from Milton Keynes. 

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgement

About the Author

1    Cyrus’s Contribution

2    Off on holiday

3     The Journey to France

4    A Worried Pig

5     Cyrus and the truffle snuffle

6     A Nasty Envelope

7    A Health and Safety Inspection

8     Great Aunt Magatha visits

9     Cyrus Saves the Animals

10   Cyrus the Spy

11   Cyrus and the Bad Foxes

12   Cyrus and the Sad Bull

1

Cyrus’s Contribution

A pig on a fence

Mr Jones’s farm was on the side of a beautiful hill overlooking a Welsh valley. Like many farms in that part of the world, there were no crops but only animals, and each morning Mr Jones and his wife would go out early to do their farming. The first job was to collect the eggs.

Cluck, Cluck, said Lucy and Annie, the hens, as the eggs were taken away.  They were always sorry to lose their eggs because it was so much work laying them; still, as they got regular meals of feed in return, they put up with it good-humouredly. Anyway they had always lived on the farm and they knew that the eggs were their contribution to it.

The ducks, Agnes and Edith, were much more bad-tempered and often tried to hide their eggs round the pond so that they wouldn’t be found. Often Mr and Mrs Jones had to hunt for a long time before they could find them but they always found them in the end, sometimes with the help of Shep the sheepdog who, being very clever, could always find everything. Woof! would bark Shep when he saw the eggs. Quack, quack, would protest Agnes and Edith, but the eggs would still go into the basket so that Mrs Jones could take them to market.

After Mr and Mrs Jones had had breakfast, there was more work to be done. The cows, Daisie and Meg had to be milked. They liked this because Mr Jones had the smartest sort of milking machine. It was much better than the ones used by the other farmers and made them feel the most important cows in the area. Moo, moo, they would call out when it was time for milking.

There were other animals of course, helping the farm in their different ways. The sheep, Poppy and Pepper, gave Mr and Mrs Jones a beautiful woollen coat when they were sheared. That happened about twice a year. Poppy and Pepper would be rather cold after they had been sheared and would cry Baa, Baa as they skipped away but luckily their wool would soon grow again so that they wouldn’t be cold for long.  The farm had horses too, Peter and Paul, who pulled the cart for Mr and Mrs Jones and who could be lent out to help other farmers. They were a bit grander than the other animals and looked down their noses at them saying Neeiigh, neeiigh in the most annoyingly superior way.

Each animal on the farm had its job. Even Kitty, the farm cat, spent her evenings out catching mice and rats which might otherwise have got into the food. Every animal, that is, with one exception.

Cyrus, the little pig, didn’t really produce anything. Mr Jones had bought him because he had been told that pigs