Everyone starts out with the classic idea that for a farm to be A Proper Farm it needs brown hens scratching about.  Free range chickens are therefore A Good Idea.

At Shap, however, I had had a fine collection of alpine plants, most of which I wanted to take with me.  “You’re a real plantsman,” said elderly Mrs Hall approvingly as I spent more time digging out and bagging alpines than I did packing clothes and furniture.  The solicitors handling the exchange of contracts agreed I could take anything I liked provided I listed what was going with me so the new owner understood the situation.  I gleefully hand wrote a list of my alpine travellers for them to append to our contract.  All in Latin.  Linguistic cowards, they only photocopied it. 

I put all my precious plants into a spare plot in the kitchen garden.  This was huge – the whole ground floor of our house in Shap would have fitted into it along with most of the garden.  The garden was gated and fenced so no sheep could get in, but in my innocence I overlooked the free range hens which the vendor had offered to us to keep.  Big mistake.

As the weeks progressed towards our moving in date, I noticed that some of the plants had vanished.  When I paid more attention I saw that other remaining specimens had odd, arrowhead marks pointing into them, as though a comic artist wished to indicate they were exploding.  Later they too vanished. 

It wasn’t until a week before we moved that I saw the culprit at work, a small game-bred black hen whom we had observed to be fit, active and a tremendous layer, sometimes producing two eggs a day. Peck, scratch, scuffle, scratch, peck.
I had a lovely plant called Primula williamsii.  It was a softly downy-leaved primrose from the high forests of Asia, white flowered, scented, not invasive, a plant of sweetly perfect character and one of which I was immensely proud.  It had cost me quite a lot of money as a small seedling but it had grown to perfection at Shap and moved very happily. 

Black Hen approached it with stealthy determination.  First the arrowhead marks of her scratching round it to find any insect life under its handsome leaves; then the determined pecking at its juicy central buds.  Chicken wire on the gate was no deterrent; she went through the hedge, whose length was fenced against four-legged livestock but not, as yet, against chickens.  Over the week before we moved in, she ate the whole plant.

I forget, now, what else she and her cousins consumed;  I know it was a lot. They certainly cost me a lot of money.  On the value of what she ate, Black Hen alone ought to have been producing half a dozen eggs a day.

Eggs are all very well, but what do you do with them in spring and summer when all your hens are laying? I ran out of egg boxes and trays.  I made sponge cakes; I whisked useful sized groups of eggs into plastic tubs and bags and froze them; I even sold a few, but passing trade was small. There was also the social dilemma that friends and relatives thought our eggs should be free, while looking at what the hens were eating, I knew they shouldn’t. 

The hens officially lived in a couple of huts at the foot of what we still call the Hen Field. The children had the job of rounding them up at night and shutting them in; I let them out and fed them in a morning. That was the only time they spent there; the rest of the day they were raiding the hedges, the fields, the garden and the roadsides, leaving destruction, footprints, feathers and hen shit wherever they went.  I was upset when I saw one hit by a passing car; but as I adjusted to siege by poultry, I began to feel it would be more honest to rejoice.

For a couple of years we reared table poultry. We bought a hundred tiny yellow chickens in the autumn, which were due to grow into big white Ross crosses.  We raised and fattened them in an empty cow-byre, and sold some for the Christmas trade while freezing the remainder for ourselves.  They were superbly big, some over 12 pounds, and because we hung them for a week between killing and freezing, they were wonderful eating.  They themselves ate as though they were designed for nothing else, and put on weight at an incredible speed.  I suspect they were bred to be killed at six weeks old when they would have weighed three or four pounds.  As they grew on past that age, some developed breathing problems and weak legs. In a morning we would find one dead and unmarked, and when I plucked, cleaned and dressed it I would discover that the overworked heart was surrounded by a sac full of fluid - sometimes filling the whole body cavity.  Often the livers of the birds were enlarged, soft and pulpy, like Foie Gras, as a result of their endless eating. They had no social problems, though, and seldom pecked each other; they were too big and idle.

Plucking at Christmas, out in the barn, was miserably cold work; we still had our other stock to tend, and the drawing and dressing operations proved that our little kitchen was not designed to process a hundred birds.  We had to do them in batches and the job took several nights, because Graham was driving the wagon during the day and we both needed to be there to work efficiently with the birds - besides I never really liked doing the killing.  We were in the midst of this chore one year when we heard about the plane crash at Lockerbie, just a few minutes further north on the airways.

When we got more cattle we didn’t have a building to spare, so the chicken job stopped;  I missed the product but not the chores.

One summer we invested in some ducks;  Aylesbury crosses they were supposed to be. We bought six which we brought home in canvas bags. There was a lot of Mallard blood in this first lot and they were not very big. Released at the intended “duck hull” they stayed roughly half an hour and then took flight, disappearing northeastwards over the cowsheds.

The children and I tracked them feverishly, envisaging their total loss down the Lune valley along with our cash investment. We found out, after a long hot slog, that they had gone in a reconnoitring circle and returned to the hull where they, no doubt, were anticipating a scoopful of grain as a refresher after their journey.

I can’t recall what happened to these ducks; maybe we ate them.  We bought fertilised duck-eggs, from someone in the village, and incubated them ourselves in a circular polystyrene incubator. Later we bought six big Aylesburies, two drakes and four ducks, and hatched their eggs too.  It was nice to see the ducklings breaking out of the shell, but the little incubator was unpredictable and sometimes excessive warmth resulted in “July Sprawlers”, ducklings that had no control over their legs and couldn’t stand upright.  Sometimes they got better; more often they didn’t. 

The Aylesbury ducks never sat on their eggs;  they were too busy avoiding the drakes, who harried them endlessly.  The morning release from the hull was like a Viking invasion:  the drakes came out into the open, stretched their wings a few times, and with furious quacking, waddling and flapping the rape and pillage began. All the ducks became bald-headed from the grip of the balancing drakes. In a mad way it was entertaining.  The males’ social behaviour was a complete contrast to that of the cockerel. Yes, he’d come running the moment a hen cackled that she’d laid and was ready for the next egg to be fertilised, but he was also protective and community-minded and called the hens to him if he found anything good to eat.  But Aylesbury drakes are all self.

Luckily the ducks couldn’t negotiate the gate out of the field, but inside there was duck-muck everywhere.   Through the constant activities of the foraging few, the field developed a series of interconnected mud holes where the rain ran through hollows to the beck, which in turn became empty of fish, empty of snails, empty of plants, and so dirty that the other animals wouldn’t drink from it and would only use the trough.  On the plus side, the lack of snails may have severely annoyed the liver fluke, but the sheep knew nothing about that.

One night on our rounds we forgot to shut the poultry in.  The fox, who also obviously made his rounds every night, in the hope that this might happen, took away one drake and two ducks’ heads.  We found the hens next morning perched in strange places, on roofs and in bushes, with even more worried expressions than usual.  
They were right to worry.  Not long afterwards we forgot again and the fox killed the other drake and ducks, plus several hens.  Only two remained, of which one died later of shock.

We stopped buying hen food.  I bought eggs in winter from Joyce.  She too had given up keeping her own hens and now bought in eggs to sell.  Graham talked of getting some more hens but “not until that old one dies, she’ll teach them all to come ratching in the garden.”  As she had been several years old when we got her he didn’t expect her to live long.

He reckoned without hybrid vigour. She just went on. And on. Hens in a group appear daft as brushes, hysterical and silly, but one on its own is noticeably intelligent.  Chucklebuddy, as she became known, was clearly a sharp bird.  Having cheated the fox twice, she developed strategies that were endearing.  She decided the safest roost was among the farm buildings; she never again used the hen huts.  Her preferred places were in hayracks above the sheep pens where she enjoyed the convected warmth from woolly bodies during the night.  She became tame enough to stroke and allowed the children to carry her about.  She laid energetically each summer.

Occasionally she moulted, usually choosing a daft time like midwinter – in severe frost she’d be half naked. This was her only aberration, and despite it, she survived.  She ate almost anything and could pounce on and kill mice, from which she most enjoyed the brain. Her method of stealing dog food was to tempt a dog and its chain to follow her round a tree, then to return to the food bowl, to which the chain would not now reach.  By the time the dog had unwound itself (or, since dogs tend to be unidirectional, wound itself up even tighter) Chucklebuddy had had her pick of the goodies. 

Before long the dogs were resigned to her thefts.  Shep occasionally pounced at her if she thought no-one was watching but since she had been smacked for doing it and knew that it wasn’t allowed, most of the time Chucklebuddy was well in charge.  Unfortunately, one summer day she pushed her luck too far.  Shep caught her and plucked all the feathers off her back. 

We found Chucklebuddy crouched in a corner of the shed. We moved her into the byre with food and water.  She was no more naked than she had been in her midwinter moults, but evidently she was in deep shock. She did not eat or drink and two days later she died.

She was one casualty chicken which I wasn’t in the least tempted to eat.