Post by richardk on May 24, 2015 9:32:49 GMT
Pet chickens
Henry Hatch came in from the garden after spending the last four hours cutting his lawn. It took so long, not because of its size - it was only a medium sized suburban lawn - but because Henry was very fond of the green stripes that you can impose on an unsuspecting lawn if you have the time and the depth of obsession that Henry had. He was also rather fond of alliteration, just like his wife, Henrietta and their two children, Hazel and Harry. He probably inherited it from his parents, egged on by his older brother, Harold.
Henry had been an accountant. At the instigation of Henrietta, who foresaw marital strife ahead from a bored husband hanging around the house all day interfering with her plans, he decided to take up a hobby. After searching the index of the local public library - he was more of a quill pen rather than a spreadsheet type of accountant - he came across ‘Keeping backyard chickens for dummies.’
This was the start of a new obsession for Henry. Half of the previously immaculate lawn was sacrificed for a chicken run, fenced off from the rest of the garden with poles and chicken wire. A coop was ordered from Ebay, built and placed in a shady corner to prevent over heating. Then came the day of the selection of which chickens on which he was going to lavish his care. He took his grandchildren, Heather, Horatio, Holly, Hubert and Hillary to the local rabbit farm - they also bred chickens - and let the children choose six, which were stuffed into a large cardboard box. It had plenty of air holes around the top, made by the children while Henry was writing out a cheque for Mrs Bunny. This also included some hay for bedding as the rabbit farm advertised that they sold ’50 shades of hay.’
Henry’s neighbours, Stephen Fry and his wife Stephanie, who had kept chickens for some years, looked upon these preparations with some amusement and a tinge of regret that Henry had not bothered to ask them to share their knowledge and experience of keeping Gallus gallus domesticus. Their ego was saved by the fact that their flock was bigger than the Hatch's, in fact they thought six was a poultry number.
*****
Stephen Fry was boiling mad, he had a suspicion that his neighbour had poached one of his chickens. At first he thought his favourite Sussex White had dropped off the perch or flown the coop but then realised that she had scrambled over the newly installed chicken wire barrier, quite easy over unfortunately, tempted by a sneaky sight of Benedict’s meal worms, no doubt. This really ruffled Steve’s feathers. Of course it could also be that the coop door was left partly open one night when he had forgotten to pullet closed.
Benedict Coddle lived next door to Stephen, the other side from the Hatch’s and had said for some time that he wanted to get a flock of his own but Steve had thought he was just yolking as he was always laughing, sunny side up, so keeping white where his skin had never been in the sun. Some of his jokes cracked Steve up, he particularly liked the one about the philosopher who was asked,
‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’
‘I look forward to the day when all creatures on this earth are allowed to make their own decisions without having to justify them to anyone’ answered Dr Bantam Rooster authoritatively.
‘His chickens will come home to roost one day’ thought Stephen darkly. ‘I’ll clip his wings’
Today was the day he had to shell out some cash to get another sack of layer’s pellets. It was only chicken feed to a man of his resources but, as his flock had recently stopped laying the eggs he valued so much for his breakfast – he thought they were probably going through the henopause – he begrudged feeding them with no return so he kept his pets cooped up all day to restrict their exercise and so stop them getting so peckish.
As he waited for some eggs to be laid he worked in the garden, digging up chickweed. He then had a shower and bathed his two grand children, got them settled in bed and read them a story, ‘The little red hen’, then saw Stephanie off to attend her best friend, Hannah’s, hen night at the local KFC. She wasn’t going to chicken out of that.
He walked out to the chicken run with a bucket full of the new pellets and counted his chicks before opening the hatch, he hoped that was in the right order. With the Sussex gone, a new pecking order had to be established with Steve as top dog – where did that dogma come from, he had never had a dog as he much preferred cats? He tried the monkey method of establishing dominance, by grooming them using his newly acquired cock’s comb.
‘This should work with a bit of cluck’ he thought.
He cleaned all the hen’s teeth, which didn’t take long but he liked to keep them up to scratch, he didn’t like the idea of chickens with false teeth as they are very rare and expensive.
Stephen then walked back to his house, made some chickpea soup and then went to bed in a fowl mood.
*****
Steve awoke at cock crow the next morning. He liked the early morning wake-up to the sound of the cockerel but he knew his neighbours weren’t so keen.Today was the day he was determined to find his missing Sussex White, even if it did mean battening down the Hatches and not putting up with any codology from Benedict. When he found the culprit, he was determined to have him up in front of the beak where he hoped he would get a long sentence - just like this one. He’d be toast, French toast.
He had cooked up a cunning plan. He would buy half a dozen eggs from each of his neighbours on the pretence that his flock had gone off lay because they were missing ‘Whitey’. He justified this subterfuge by saying to himself that you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. He opened the boxes and recognised one of Whitey’s immediately - he hadn’t got where he was today without being able to recognise one of his girl’s creations. This particular egg had been nestled in Henry’s box! He carefully transferred the eggs, yes, the whole dozen, to his state of the art incubator, complete with the rocking generator that the salesman had told him was essential for successful hatching.
Steve waited and waited and then waited some more. Eventually the shells cracked and chicks started pecking away at the inside of the shell, keen to get out into this brave new world. He carefully leg ringed each chick with a number so that he had full traceability - right back to the mother hen.
The great day arrived when the twelve chicks were fully fledged - eleven little red hens and one white chicken little. He checked the rings and found that the white one had come from an egg in the box he had bought from Henry. He rushed round to the Hatchery, showed Henry the evidence and demanded his Sussex White back. Henry denied the charge and showed Steve that all his hens were red so he was innocent; whiter than white in fact. Steve saw it was starting to rain and closed the coop door so that the flock could not shelter from the rain. The hens looks rather forlorn as they got increasingly wet, especially one that started to drip redly onto the ground and was eventually exposed as being a Sussex White. She rushed over to Steve where the reunion brought a tear to many an eye that was watching - especially Henry’s.