The Weathercock That Pointed at the Bakery for Nine Years

Every village has something it looks at without thinking, and in Little Haddon it is the copper cockerel on top of the village hall. He stands on a thin rod above the slate roof, tail spread wide, beak lifted, with the four points of the compass fixed beneath him like a tiny signpost. For most of his life he spun cheerfully with every breeze, and people glanced up at him on their way to the shop the way they might wave to a friend across the street.

Then came the spring of the big storm. The wind roared all night, a branch came down on the bowling green, and in the morning the cockerel was facing east. He was still facing east the next day, and the day after that, when the wind was plainly blowing from the west and the washing on every line was flapping the other way. Something in his spindle had bent. The cockerel was stuck, with his beak pointed straight across the green at Hollis's Bakery.

It was a child who said it first. A boy of seven, waiting with his grandmother for the bus, looked up and announced that the cockerel wanted a currant bun. By the end of the week this had become village wisdom. Before a picnic, people checked the cockerel and bought sandwiches. Before a birthday, they checked the cockerel and ordered a cake. Farmers who had spent forty years reading the sky now read the cockerel, and the cockerel always said the same thing: bakery.

Mr Hollis, who had never paid for an advertisement in his life, watched his queue grow. He started baking a small round loaf with a pastry cockerel on top and called it the Forecast. On windy days it sold out by ten, and on calm days by eleven. The hall committee received two polite letters about it from the butcher, and one in very careful handwriting from the granddaughter of the blacksmith who had made the cockerel. He had been built to tell the truth about the wind, she wrote, and she hoped somebody would let him.

So, in the ninth autumn, a roofer climbed up with a new spindle and a tin of grease, and the whole village came out to watch. When he let go, the cockerel swung slowly, wobbled, and turned his head to the north-west, where a cool breeze was coming over the hill. There was a short silence, then a round of applause, and then most of the crowd walked across to the bakery anyway, out of habit.

The real idea behind it

A weather vane works because its two ends are different shapes. The tail, or the flat shape at the back, is broad and catches plenty of wind, while the head or the arrow at the front is narrow. The wind pushes the broad end away downwind, so the narrow end swings round and points into the wind, towards the direction it is blowing from. A vane can only do this if it turns freely on its spindle, which is why a bent rod or a little rust is enough to freeze one in place.

This is also how winds get their names. A north wind blows from the north, not towards it, and a working weathercock points straight at it. So when the cockerel of Little Haddon faced east for nine years, he was announcing an east wind every single day, and on most of those days he was simply wrong. The bakery, it must be said, never once complained.