I’ve got a confession. I killed a chicken.
Now, I know that millions of people do this every day. Children do it at Indian picnics after lugging the birds along with all the other local, seasonal goodies to a family do in some beauty spot in the Himalayas, but my meat was murdered by a townie in a panic rather than a kid in touch with his food.
I had always wanted to live with chickens. In fact, when we were pondering the pros and cons of moving out of Brighton into a community of 22 families in the middle of nowhere, it was the chicken club that clinched the deal. My mother’s tales of popping out the back to get some eggs from Hetty and Betty for tea had been a soundtrack to my childhood memories of Grandad’s fruit and vegetable garden where runner beans would snake up smart lines of canes beyond the rows of potatoes, lettuce, beetroot, onions and radishes and the bushes of redcurrants and gooseberries with the smell of Felinfoel Ale wafting over the garden wall from the brewery next door.
Years later, as I watched my own kids skip down supermarket aisles of featherless, skinless, soul-less shrink-wrapped fowl, I dreamed of my Grandad’s chickens and of giving my girls a basket of corn to scatter among our own free-range girls and marvelling at the deep gold of the yolks compared to the pale yellows of their battery cousins. Even Ellie, my vegetarian animal activist eats eggs. I couldn’t fail.
The moment when the kids first lifted the lid on that egg box to find Hetty XXXVII looking at us with a mix of pride and suspicion and scooped her up to find a clutch of freshly laid eggs, I felt that my job as a mother was done. I was Barbara Good and this was the life. As the years rolled by, our waste was reduced to virtually nothing as the 20 hens devoured our leftover pasta and peelings, speeding towards us like something out of Looney Tunes to see what was in the pot. Unfortunately we weren’t the only ones to become misty-eyed at the sight of a free-roaming chicken and, in similarly cartoon style, Foxy Loxy ran off with all but two.
So when Poppy, our newly rescued Springer scampered off into woods last Saturday morning and returned with Hetty in her mouth, proudly dropping her at my feet, I was appalled. Hetty had flown the coop, leaving Betty alone behind the electric fence. My mind was spinning. Poppy’s soft retrieving mouth is not designed to kill, but at 7.30 in the morning, someone might see us with a chicken and think the worst. I put her back in the coop, madly thinking that it would look like Foxy-Loxy had decided he was full. She looked at me like someone from Rotherham looks at a London TV researcher and I picked her up again to inspect the flesh wound, furtively scanning the meadow for any witnesses. I would have to put her out of her misery. A quick twist of her neck spun me out about the fragility of life before the next dilemma flooded my hazy brain. Surely I couldn’t eat her? Surely I should eat her? Readers, the shocked expressions of the people to whom I have related the end of this story prevent me from doing it again here.
One of those expressions came from Linda Turvey at Hen Heaven, a rescue farm for end-of-lay hens and a handful of cockerels which well-meaning townies have given to their newly rural mates before checking the packaging, if you know what I mean.
The kids were clucking over Matilda and her chicks, Milly,Tilly and Lily and Peter the shoulder-perching cockerel as Linda showed us around the 500 or so chickens that live out their days with her. “People don’t think” she muttered, as she told us how she had spent the last 40 years clearing up the mess left by shallow consumers and city folk playing farmer. “I got Avril and her husband George after a family moved out of their manor house to go back to the city leaving the elderly cat and the chickens. The estate agent rang me and said that if I couldn’t have them, they’d be put down.”
At Hen Heaven, ex-battery birds, de-beaked and often featherless after stress-pecking by their fellow hens join back-garden and small-holding hens to roam in total freedom around the farm, often laying well into their dotage under the TLC of their devoted Linda. “This old speckled hen was replaced when she stopped laying and was then badly pecked by the new hen”, she told us, picking up the old dear’s still-warm egg. “I gave her some limestone grit as soon as she got here and she’s been laying for the past five years”. Lucky really as apart from donations, eggs provide the only income at Hen Heaven. “I could have given that one to those people who came this morning from Ealing” she chuckled, looking remarkably similar to the Old Speckledy. “I do wish people would ring before they come, especially at this time of year when they don’t lay as much”.
While we were chuckling, I told her the story of Poppy and the chicken. Her face fell and the place became eerily silent. Ellie was standing beside Linda now, their vegetarian solidarity failing to see the funny side. “A bit of arnica on the wound and some rescue remedy would have had her right as rain in no time,” she told me as she showed me to the gate. “Yeah Mum,” sneered Ellie and sulked all the way home.
I thought of Hetty in that wheelie bin and wondered if I could have eaten her. I managed to pluck, roast and eat the roadkill partridge, so what was the difference? As I walked Poppy and the pups that evening past the lonely chicken coop, I sat down and watched Betty casually scratching at the ground and I knew the answer. I can take the girl out of the town and play at self sufficiency, but I’ll be back to get my local, free-range organic chicken from the local butcher. At least until the oil runs out.
