The award-winning picture book Farmer Duck, written by Martin Waddell 35 years ago as an Animal Farm for five-year-olds, remains ever relevant today. The animals overthrow the human farmer, who had been exploiting the diligent duck, but Waddell’s tale departs from Orwell, as Lucy Hamilton notes: this book “leaves the young audience with hope in the moral that right can prevail”. Through community effort, the duck is rescued from an unsustainable and unfair workload, duties are equally shared, and the farm passes from winter to summer.

While optimistic in tone, the story does not talk down to children. Helen Oxenbury’s watercolour illustrations skilfully capture the shifting atmosphere of the farm and impact on the duck; the toll of the work literally sinks the poor creature into the ground, a few deft strokes reveal bags beneath the eyes, which disappear after the other animals chase away the farmer, and the duck jumps for joy. Oxenbury is a modern-day Beatrix Potter, as Leonard S. Marcus observes; her animals are not humans-in-disguise, but the result of long and meticulous observation and careful consideration of how animals really may behave, should they have to do farmwork.

Farmer Duck is a picturebook, where words and images work in harmony to tell the story of community action, but, importantly, they also leave a gap, room for children to read and ask, when the animals moo, baa, cluck and quack, what do they really say to each other?