It was my father who initiated the keeping of six hens and a rooster because just imagine having a plentiful supply of new-laid eggs not to mention the occasional Chicken Roast? The manner in which he enthused had me hooked very quickly even though I had some doubts with regard to the Roast, infrequent though it was promised to be and this was because when questioned he failed to explain that part of ownership even though I posed a fair few questions. In the end I decided that he could not really mean that we were eventually going to eat the birds because that was an easy enough question to answer and in any case we usually bought our Chicken Roasts already quite deceased and oven prepared from the butcher at Christmas time. It saved a lot of trouble as far as I could see.
My mother was much slower to reach any agreement about the idea because she really did not like roosters and said they could be vicious. The rooster we eventually got was only four weeks old at the time we first owned him and was not vicious at all and she suggested that maybe he wasn’t a rooster in the first place because he was nothing like Spiteful Stanley the bird who had reigned supreme in the house in Maiden Lane, Crayford when she was a girl. My father told her he was most definitely a rooster and pointed out that his comb was already developing and was a healthy pink colour. We called him Cecil because of Cecil Rhodes at least that’s what I called him and that was because of Miss Biggs at school pointing to a pink bit on the globe and talking about Mr Rhodes very enthusiastically. I was told that our batch of fowl were Rhode Island Reds and American in origin, all supposedly Reliable Layers. I did not know if there was any real connection between Rhode Island and Cecil Rhodes but fancied that he may at one stage have owned the island. Cecil’s six wives, and I mean our Cecil of course, were not supposed to have names because it was very difficult to tell one from another although I claimed ownership over the smallest one and named her, unimaginatively, Clucky.
The sad fact was that she did not make an entirely satisfactory pet but I was to grow quite fond of her simply because when you are six or seven years old there is an understanding between you and most of the animal kingdom and although you might infinitely prefer a cocker spaniel as a household pet you can make do with a goldfish if the situation dictates it. We had a rather unfriendly cat at that time called Micky and my father was still negotiating with my mother regarding dog ownership which I felt he did rather better than me though to be fair he wasn’t having much success. There was also Ricky the budgie and once the Rhode Island Reds arrived it amounted to almost a surfeit of pets but only if the seven of them could be included of course. My friend Molly who could be relied upon to know most things I didn’t know because she was several months older than me and her birth date actually placed her into the year above me at school, said they could not be included under any circumstances because hens were not pets. I pointed out that Clucky was most certainly a pet and I had almost been given her for that specific purpose. Molly said well in that case, Jonah, old Mr Bassant’s pig could also count as a family pet and nobody in their right mind would want him on account of the smell. You would never be able to keep him inside the house no matter how much you might want to.
The best thing about the hens was definitely the supply of fresh eggs and even Clucky joined in and did her bit now and again. As time went on Cecil Rhodes became more more self important and more unpleasantly aggressive and most especially when he became father to a clutch of fluffy yellow chicks four or which eventually added to his harem. There had been several rooster chicks in the bunch and they were just as sweetly loveable as their sisters but overnight they disappeared and I was told they had gone to live on a farm owned by Lord Darnley near Cobham village. No matter how loveable the group had been when first hatched though, once they grew out of their fluffy, downy infancy, both Molly and I lost interest in them.
The worst thing about the whole poultry project was the fact that from time to time as had been predicted, a hen that had been pecking corn happily amongst its sisters and aunts one day would somehow find itself served up as a special Sunday dinner. Well it didn’t quite happen like that because there would generally be a degree of discussion between my parents regarding what I could only view as the willful murder of an inoffensive member of our extended family. My mother would invariably justify it by pointing out that the victim had not been such a reliable layer lately as if the bird had almost brought it upon herself.
My father would be sent out into the yard after tea to Ring its Neck as fast as possible and meanwhile I observed him from the kitchen window as he approached the coop that had once been our Anderson Shelter. It must have been the increased determination in his stride that alarmed the hens because they seemed to foresee what was about to happen and a shiver of apprehension would pass amongst them. Their flapping and squawking would grow a little louder and more urgent and Cecil might courageously attack the lower legs encased in scruffy wellington boots that approached. Within the kitchen I held my breath and tried to curb the tears as I contemplated the injustice of the slaughter that was about to take place telling myself that when I grew up and gained status and power no hen of mine would ever meet such a fate. I would only ever order poultry for cooking from the butcher in Dover Road just as we had always done ourselves before we became back street chicken farmers.
By next day the murdered fowl would be plucked and de-gutted and hung above the kitchen sink ready for Sunday roasting. And by Sunday when roasted potatoes, parsnips and carrots had been added and a bread sauce made by my father on the oven top, I would have recovered enough to tentatively eat a little of the white breast meat along with my aunts and cousins and whoever else might be sharing the meal.
At times like this my mother would preside over the vegetables proudly, pretending to be a competent cook and my father would carve the bird listening to her telling the room that there was a lot to be said for owning hens and it wasn’t just the reliability of an egg for breakfast whenever you fancied one. In fact that wasn’t quite true because in recent months she had decided that the majority of the eggs should be sold to my father’s foreman from Bevan’s Cement Works who was willing to pay a very good price as they were freshly laid. This was because he had a family of four children, two slightly hysterical girls called Brenda and Sylvia and two foster children, boys called Kevin and David who replaced a son dead at three from Leukemia. Such a family needed the input of freshly laid eggs in an age of austerity when their regularity was hard to come by.
I was charged with the weekly delivery and carried them carefully wrapped in newspaper and placed in a hessian bag to their house in Vale Road. It was a house that befitted a Bevans foreman, one I greatly admired and for a time desired to live in myself, Edwardian with a small front garden and a narrow entrance hall. A few years later when after my father’s death I became familiar with the more upmarket houses in Darnley Road I was shocked that I had ever hankered after such a place but at eight it was my dream house and the inhabitants were very nearly my dream family. It wasn’t that I modeled myself on either of the girls but the fact that they put a tablecloth on their table at teatime rather than sheets of newspaper was impressive and I couldn’t help noting that their jam was not served directly from the jar it came in, but was put into a little glass bowl instead and you helped yourself with a spoon. When I told Molly about this she said they must be middle class and most likely had packets of real toilet paper in their lavatory, scratchy white stuff called Bronco. We generally used newspaper torn into wipe size pieces.
Over time we were to eat a number of our Reliable Layers and so I slowly became accustomed to the fact that murder lurked in our backyard and very possibly in other corners of York Road also. It did not go unnoticed that a number of neighbours kept rabbits and my cousin Harold jeered at me when I suggested they did so because they loved them. From my own point of view the ownership of rabbits would have been a great improvement on hens even if there was a vague intention to turn them into stews and pies at some stage. I might even have become accustomed to devouring the flesh of something I had cuddled to my breast and loved unconditionally, wept over and named because it had to be admitted that after a slow start I generally did my bit with regard to the consumption of the hens. I could only assume that over time my compassion became jolted and I realized that life was not always fair, especially where animals were concerned. And the shocking habit I knew to be not merely confined to animals because at school Mr Clarke had discussed cannibalism with us and told us that the taste of human flesh was said to resemble lamb a little. There had been sharp intakes of breath among the girls in the class when this was revealed whilst the boys nudged each other in excitement and sat up straighter.
When it was Clucky’s turn to be eaten, sadly I had to draw a line because as an animal lover it was necessary to show the world that I had standards and it simply wasn’t fair to expect children to eat their pets. My mother did a poor job of convincing me that it wasn’t Clucky in the oven sizzling away, that in fact she had been sent to that lovely farm at Cobham to live out her days alongside her relatives. As I tearfully related the details of the hen’s demise to Molly, hanging over the gate on Sunday afternoon whilst two aunts and Old Nan tucked into my pet hen, she said well it had been on the cards for a long time. In her experience that was the way of the world and just imagine being the owner of the pig, Jonah because eventually he would meet the same fate and would take much longer to polish off. You could find yourself eating bacon rashers for weeks. You couldn’t argue with that.
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