Chickens and Eggs

‘What a scatterbrain, what a feckless girl’—so my mother would say of me to a guest, a visiting policeman, a neighbour coming over about some farm problem. ‘What a harum-scarum!’ Did she believe in the evil eye? No. And the Chinese, who, we are told, may say of their own, ‘This is my worthless wife’, ‘This my useless son’. Are they averting the evil eye? ‘She’s such a flibbertigibbet,’ usually said with a fond little laugh. What could she have meant? But the real question came much later, for if you are thirteen, fourteen, what she says has to be taken as true. This knot of wants, needs, angers, attitudes, a confusion of emotions, amounts to being a scatterbrain, the feckless child? Later you had to ask, how could she have used those words on this over-serious, critical bookworm of a girl? A mystery.

Was it in order to cure my flightiness that she said I must look after the sitting hen ‘from start to finish’? Was she curing me of irresponsibility? But I was already bound to the hen, kneeling in front of her cage, an hour, two, most passionately identifying with this incarcerated one, who was as united with those eggs as if tied to them, peering out from the bars as the long hours, and days, went by on our farm in the old Southern Rhodesia.

Before my mother had made the hen my charge, I was gathering up her eggs. A hen, doing what her nature suggests, lays eggs under a bush, returning to add another, and another, but it is unlikely that an unguarded egg could survive more than a day or so. Wild cats, porcupines, hawks, rats, the watchful little mammals of the bush, would see the egg, and eat it on the spot, leaving a telltale smear of yolk, or roll it away to their own nests. If you wanted a hen to sit on a reasonable number of eggs you had to hunt about in the bush, find where she had hidden them, keep them safe, and then, when there were enough, show them to the hen. She might or might not be broody. A sly trick, that, to feed a spoonful of sweet sherry to the hen, who then nearly always went broody, her cluck changing to the deep maternal clucks and calls appropriate to a matron wondering what had happened to those eggs she had left, she thought, in a good place. And here they were, all together, brown and white and fawn-coloured, some at least hers. This hen was a Rhode Island, the big heavy hen that can brood sixteen, seventeen eggs, really big eggs, not the ‘large’ eggs of the supermarket, which are only half their size. A slender white Leghorn, the other kind of hen pecking about over the hill, could sit on only twelve eggs.

These eggs were bound to hatch. A device a long way from the expertise of laboratory, was a sheet of cardboard, and in it were various sizes of cut-out egg shapes. The deep dish of eggs in their nest of straw stood waiting, and, too, the cardboard, and a candle. Each egg was fitted into the relevant size of hole and the contraption held up to the candle. And there could be seen the tiny knot in the fluid emptiness of the egg that meant fertility; from that little blot of blood there would be a chick. The hen approved our makeshift device, for at first she did not refuse any egg, but clucked, trod into the nest, and settled, her wings curving in and close.

But she was not in the bush under a shrub or a fallen tree trunk, where she would last five minutes. She was behind a front of wire netting, confined, caged, for her own good and for the good of the eggs.

Once a day I lifted off the wire frontage and she carefully trod out over the eggs, drank from a newly filled tin, ate a little, not much, stood tall and flapped her wings, and then—and I waited for this—she took a run, flapping her poor probably stiff and aching wings, and ran a few yards as if about to take off into the air, but no, she was a hen and earthbound. She pecked about a little, drank some more and then, after perhaps half an hour, trod carefully back into her nest. Was she thinking, Oh, please don’t put back that wire? But I did, and in the evening, before the light went, I opened the wire again, but often she did not want to go out. She had sat there unmoving all day, through the heat or the cold, dozing a little, but always on the lookout.

The packing case was set deliberately where people passed all day, going from house to storeroom. Probably she would have preferred some dark hidden place, but there she would be too much of a temptation. We saw rats lurking, saw a hawk’s shadow flicker on the earth, and the bird peering down to see the hen. She would be a match for a rat, but the danger was the snakes. They could slither through the mesh of the wire and there was nothing she could do. In the corner of the packing case was a tin of water. The hen could not be expected to sit thirsty all day and all night, but there was a danger that a snake would come up for the water. When we thought of putting out a lure for the snakes, a dish of water some yards away, we were warned by the servants that this water would bring snakes up from the bush. Better rely on the dogs, which roamed free at night. Lying in our beds we would hear barking, and think, Is that a snake? I might go out to peer through dark or moonlight and fancy I saw a snake sneaking away.

Every day when the hen was out for her half-hour’s exercise, I flicked tepid water on to the eggs ‘to soften the shells and help them hatch’. All the farmers’ wives did this. I remember wondering, If the hen had managed to keep her eggs safe under the bush, would those eggs hatch less easily than ours, which were in blood-hot water every day? The hen did not seem to mind the eggs being a bit wet. But at some point in the sitting she deliberately rolled an egg, and then another, from the mass of eggs under her. I put them back, anguished that they would not have a chance to hatch, but she rolled the same eggs away from her warmth. And now it was my job to lift away those condemned eggs and throw them into the bush. They were addled and the hen knew it. They plopped on to a rock, the earth, a tree trunk, with a hollow sound I did not hear again until a long while later when I stood in the Tottenham Court Road and saw a young man come sailing over the handlebars of his great motorcycle, and his head crashed down on to the pavement yards away. The sound as his helmet hit the pavement was the same implosion as that of the addled eggs, in the bush.

Twenty-one days it takes to hatch eggs, twenty-one nights, and there sits the great fierce hen who had accepted me as protector and jailer for that time. Sometimes she pecked me a little as I slid my hand under to feel if the eggs were there, and marvel at the scorch of that brooding warmth. My wrists and hands had her beak marks, but she seemed to know that I meant her well.

Time must pass so slowly for a sitting hen. Does it run a little faster as the three weeks near their end?

Three or four days before the end, holding an egg that was so heavy and portentous to my ear, I imagined I heard the peck-peck of achievement. The egg seemed to pulse, to announce itself. The hen watched me listen to her eggs and pecked me as I slid them back under her. Only three days now, only two... The hen seemed to know her eggs were due to hatch. With her beak she moved them around her great feet that never trod down on egg or chick. Eggs must be moved about or otherwise the chicks might be born lop-sided. So we thought, but did she?

One more day. And I hardly moved from my position crouched before her nest. And at last, when I held an egg to my ear, I heard the faint peck-peck of the chick inside. On the smooth surface of the egg appeared a minute dusting of shell. That is where would appear first a hole and then the beak of the chick that would have on it the tough integument that enabled the beak to tackle the thick shell, peck-peck. The hen didn’t like me lifting out an egg now. She watched me, her eyes full of warnings.

Everyone seemed to be aware and waiting, watching. The dogs sat at a small distance. The servants made excuses to pass close. Then, I lifted the hen slightly, and from under her came the many sounds of the pecking, hatching chicks. At last, when I lifted her, there were eggs that were still whole, and a mass of broken shells, and the first chick, the little dinosaur, so ugly with its great feet, slimy from the birth. Soon, all around the hen were the tiny heads of the chicks, fluffy and yellow, fit to be on postcards and calendars.

The hen sat on until the last egg hatched, then I lifted off the wire, and she stood up, giving the throaty croodling call of the hen with chicks. She stepped out, the chicks with her. One egg remained. It had not hatched. For some reason that chick had died under her. But now, scratching and drinking and showing the chicks what they had to learn, she trod about among them, drinking from the water tins, trying a little grain and scratching it towards them. We watched, the dogs watched that proud hen and her chicks, and we knew how the predators bided their time in the bush.

The hawks were up there too, watching.

The hen wandered over the hill with her chicks, who every day were fewer. At night the hen retreated to her packing case and seemed not to mind being shut in.

Soon those minute chicks became gawky and leggy and they could run fast as a hawk’s shadow dipped towards them over the earth. And then they were cockerels and pullets, and another hen sat in the packing case behind the barrier of wire.

Some people had incubators, but a really good one was an expensive item.