There have been a few times in my life when chickens have featured quite strongly. I wrote on my Blog on 22nd October, 2007, about 'The Day the Cockerel Nearly Got Me', which recounted the tale of a sparring match between me and a cockerel when I lived in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). If you track back in my blog then you'll find that it was a real mismatch. I didn't stand much of a chance, and only just escaped unscathed by the skin of my teeth! At least the whole affair, although not so funny for me at the time, has provided me with a great story to tell against myself..
There are many 'chicken' memories from my time in Africa. For a start, I used to use one of the bedrooms in our rented house at one point, to bring on deliveries of day-old chicks, and I would rear about 250 in the room for the first couple of weeks of their lives prior to moving them on, firstly to the outside rearing shed and then to the free-range enclosures. From there they moved on one more time to a customer's dining table.
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I kept chickens both for eggs and for meat, and the meat birds used to get loaded up into my (employer's!) estate car once they were ready to sell, and taken off to the African market which was about three miles from the house. Early in the morning of Market Day we would make several trips back and forth full up with birds, and each trip there would be a queue waiting to purchase. It would take a few minutes to sell out each time. After that we would make a couple more trips with the estate car loaded with vegetables, all of which would sell out in a matter of minutes. Somehow, looking back, I don't think that my employer would have been best-pleased by my use --- or should I say misuse --- of my company car! However, considering that they eventually laid me off because I was in hospital for a couple of months, i don't really feel too bad about it. Anyway, as the expression goes, 'needs must'!
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The whole chicken thing started way back when I was still a teenager and living in Corsham. At the time I had a pet billy goat and rented a paddock from the Neston Glove Factory who had premises about half-way up on the left-hand side of Pickwick Road. I remember that the rent was the princely sum of £5.00 a Quarter, which was a lot for me to find back then. It was 1958/59 and I was about 15 or 16.
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Because I had to find the rent each Quarter I decided that it might be a good idea to rear chickens and sell the eggs, convinced that before too long I'd be a fairly well-off teenager. Ah, the folly of youth and misguided 'get-rich-quick' schemes and dreams!
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I decided that the best method would be battery hens, which was not thought particularly cruel in those days, and accordingly I purchased the necessary equipment together with a couple of dozen layers from a local source. Well, the first mistake was thinking that battery hens would be less trouble than free range, for they seemed to require an awful lot of attention, certainly more than I was prepared for. I must admit that once the whole thing was assembled and full of chickens I felt a bit like a chicken farmer for a while, although in the end, the 'while' was exceedingly short as I soon discovered my second, and by far biggest, mistake.
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Of course the real problem was that I really knew nothing at all about hens, and I had failed to recognise that the farmer who sold the birds to me had certainly spotted me coming from a mile away. I fed and watered those birds day after day, but all to no avail. Not one solitary egg did they produce between the whole two dozen birds, not the first day or the first week. By the time that the second week was up and rapidly turning into the third, I called my friend Dick Ball in to have a look and give me some advice. Now he did know about chickens, and in fact had a lot of hands-on knowledge about them. That's how he recognised that the 'layers' that I had been sold were well past their laying days and fit only for the pot. Even then they were boilers and not roasting birds. In chicken terms I had been well and truly 'sold a pup!'
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"Never mind," I thought to myself, "I can redeem the situation by selling them for the table." I decided to let my mum be the first to try one out and decided that weekend to wring the neck of one of the birds, pluck and dress it, and present it to my mum who would, I secretly hoped, decide that it was worth 7/6d. Oh dear! The chicken refused to die! I saw all my money now wasting away at a rate of notts, and so together with Dick Ball decided that there was nothing to do but return the birds to the farmer from whom I had bought them. The battery units I hoped to be able to sell after advertising them.
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Unfortunately the farmer, who was glad that I had bought them from him, and was very friendly at the time of purchase, was not so friendly when I went back and threatened to shoot us if we didn't get off his land!!! Well, we got off very quickly after that, I can tell you. It's amazing how persuasive he was able to be!
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What happened to the chickens? Well, somehow they managed to find their way back into one of that farmer's fields, and were quite happy rooting around in amongst the green shoots of his crop, although I don't think they did the crop much good.
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