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He opens the barn door and they wade into the roiling sea of chickens. The chickens squawk and screech and try to flap out of their way, but there is nowhere for them to go. They try to flutter upwards but their wings are too weak for their overgrown bodies and they just scramble desperately on top of each other, kicking up a terrible stinking dust of feathers and faeces. Tomasz feels something live crunch under his foot, and hears a squawk of pain. He must have stepped on one, but really it is impossible not to.

‘Grab ’em by the legs!’ yells Neil, through the inferno of screeching and feathers and flying faecal matter. ‘Like this!’ He raises his left hand, in which he is holding five chickens, each by one leg. The terrified birds twist and flap, shitting themselves with fear, then they seem to give up, and hang limply.

‘See, it calms ’em down, holding ’em upside down.’

There is a snap, and one of the five flops and sags, its thigh dislocated, its wings still beating. At one end of the barn is a stack of plastic crates. Neil slides one out, thrusts the birds in, and pushes it shut. Then he wades into the melee for another five. Tomasz steels himself and reaches down into the seething mass of chickens, holding his breath and closing his eyes. He grabs and gets hold of something – it must have been a wing – and the bird struggles and squeaks so pitifully in his hands that he lets go. He grabs again, and this time he gets the legs and hoists the poor creature up into the air, and not wanting to risk losing it, stuffs it straight into a cage. Then another. Then he manages to get two at a time, and then three. He can’t hold more than that, because he cannot bring himself to hold them by just one leg. After about half an hour he has filled one cage, and Neil has filled four.

‘You’d better get a move on,’ says Neil, ‘when the catching team gets here.’

As if on cue, the barn door opens and the rest of the team arrives – they are four short dark-haired men, who are speaking in a language that Tomasz can’t understand. They spread out along the length of the barn, and now the screeching and flapping intensify and the whole vast barn is a storm of feathers and dust and stench and din as they work furiously, grabbing the chickens five at a time and bundling them into the cages.

‘Portugeezers,’ shouts Neil to Tomasz above the racket. ‘Or Brazil nuts! Respect!’

And he raises a gauntleted hand. Tomasz does the same. What is the lad talking about? Fired up by the other men’s example, he grabs at the chickens with a renewed energy, and even manages to get four in one hand, holding them each by one leg. And again.

And again. And again. It is exhausting work. Inside the hot nylon shell of his overall, he feels his skin running with sweat. His eyes are burning. His hair is stiff and matted with excreta. Even his nose and mouth seem clogged with the disgusting stuff.

The cages are filling up; the captive chickens, exhausted with terror, tremble and cluck hopelessly, covered in the excrement of the newly captured birds still flapping and struggling above them. After a couple of hours enough of the chickens have been caged that they can begin to see the floor of the barn. It is a reeking wasteland of sawdust, urine and faeces in which injured and ammonia-blind birds are staggering around.

At his feet he sees a bird with a broken leg dragging itself through the muck, squawking piteously, weighed down by its monstrous breast, and he realises with a stab of remorse that it was probably he who broke the creature’s leg by stepping on it.

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