Barstow A Job for all Seasons

My Small Country Living
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-910723-58-6
Verlag: Merlin Unwin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Many smallholders have plunged in at the deep end and learnt the hard way, through experience. But Phyllida Barstow, author of the childhood autobiography My Animals and Other Family, was already involved in animal husbandry when, as a young woman, she embarked on her own smallholding enterprise. Here is her lively, informative and witty account of her first-hand experience throughout her lifetime in Gloucestershire, with chickens, dogs, cats, horses, sheep, peacocks, alpacas and even honey bees. As she points out, smallholding is not a summer idyll but, truly, a job for all seasons, all hours, all weathers. She also has to deal with fallen stock, pest control, disease outbreaks and slaughter. Her tips include those on animal handling, training, breeding and delivery. Her wry and practical attitude towards her animals is imbued with respect and often affection for her charges. This account of the realities of modern smallholding is both entertaining and informative.

Phyllida is the author of My Animals (and Other Family), a Job for All Seasons and It Happened in Gloucestershire. As D.P. Hart-Davis, she has also written a series of highly-acclaimed sporting thrillers: Death of a Dealer, Death of a Selkie, The Stalking Party and Death of a High Flyer all of which are published by Merlin Unwin Books. After a career in magazines and journalism, Phyllida was the fiction-buyer for the Mirror Group. She's also had 16 novels published and was a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, as well as for several country magazines. Married to author and journalist Duff Hart-Davis, she lives on a small farm in Gloucestershire.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barstow, Phyllida

Weitere Mitwirkende

Milne, Lucy

Stewart-Smith, Olivia

Leseproben

On the Strength

LAYERS FOR SALE. 2/6d EACH proclaimed a tatty cardboard notice pinned to a gatepost I passed daily on the school run. Each? Even in the early 1960s this seemed absurdly cheap for a whole live chicken, when a 3lb roaster still cost several pounds. Since moving from London to Oxfordshire the previous year, we had once or twice mentioned keeping hens, but so far done nothing about it.

Half-a-crown each? How could one go wrong? On impulse I turned in the direction of the pointing arrow and drove down a bumpy track between unkempt hedges into a muddy yard flanked by three long, grey, asbestos sheds.

For such a knockdown price, I wasn’t expecting show specimens, but even so I was shocked when I saw what the burly, green-overalled baldie in the little wooden office was selling.

‘How many d’you want?’ he asked, lumbering from his chair.

‘Well… six, I should think.’ Having made no preparations for housing them, I didn’t want to overdo the numbers.

‘Make it eight – that’ll be a quid,’ he said jovially. ‘They’re good birds, mind. Eighteen months old. Plenty of lay in ’em still.’

‘Oh, OK. Thanks.’

I followed him across the yard. When he opened the heavy steel door of the first shed, a blast of thick, hot, ammoniac air assailed my nose, a combination of dust, feathers and chicken-droppings made my eyes stream, and we stepped into a scene to haunt any animal lover’s nightmares. Under the roof of corrugated perspex, a double wall of wire cages as high as you could reach, separated by a narrow aisle, stretched away to the end of the shed like apartment blocks in New York, making you feel as if walking in a canyon. In each cage, whose sloping floor was no bigger than a sheet of typing paper, were crammed five clucking, cackling, jostling, pellet-pecking chickens, their constantly-moving heads pale brown, their staring eyes round and mad, and their bodies almost completely naked.

Working methodically along the line of grille-like shelves that formed an extension to the cage-floor, two lank-haired youths were collecting the eggs that had rolled out through a narrow gap at the bottom and come to rest against a small ledge just out of the birds’ reach. Now and again they would open a door, reach in and remove a sick or dead hen, throwing it into a barrow full of grey-white guano, then quickly relatching the cage door.

The din was incessant, the heat and smell overpowering, and the continually bobbing heads made me feel sick and dizzy, liable to suffocate or vomit. I wished I had never turned off the road. How could people work in a place like this? How could anyone treat living creatures in such a way?

‘This here’s the batch to go,’ said my guide, stopping at the end of the aisle. ‘There’s a new lot coming in Wednesday, so we’ll be wanting to clear this section.’

I felt too zombified to ask what would happen to the birds he didn’t sell. It seemed unlikely that one small notice would attract buyers for several hundred birds before Wednesday.

‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Plenty of choice. Pick what you want.’

‘I’ll leave it to you,’ I gulped, struggling with nausea.

‘Right, then. Ten, wasn’t it?’

‘Eight.’ I would have liked to take the lot and release them into some form of chicken paradise, but just retained enough grip on reality to see that even eight was more than we needed, and some urgent carpentry was going to occupy the next few days if the poor creatures were to be decently housed.

He nodded and ran an expert eye over the cages’ occupants, pulling out a bird here and there, holding them by the legs in one hand until he had enough. It reminded me horribly of a guard at a Nazi concentration camp deciding which prisoners were fit to work and which should go to the gas chambers.

‘Right,’ he said after a couple of minutes. ‘These’ll do you. Got a box in the car? Don’t worry. I’ll find something,’ and preceded me out to the blessed fresh air.

When I got home an hour later and opened the flimsy cardboard carton, the birds looked more of a liability than a bargain. Huddled miserably on top of one another, naked and scrawny, they were obviously feeling the change in temperature and, although it was mid July, I abandoned any plans to put them outside in a shed for the night. Instead we rigged up temporary quarters in an old playpen beside the boiler, but even when I placed them on its floor they continued to crouch while pecking frantically at the pellets in a dish in front of them, having apparently lost the use of their legs.

They had left inside the carton two brown eggs.

Seventy weeks of close confinement had eradicated all normal chicken behaviour apart from the functions of eating and laying, recycling food into eggs as automatically as machines, and voiding the residue. Their feet were lily-white, with soft nails, quite unlike the tough, scaly, yellowish legs and sharp claws of free-rangers, and their beaks had been clipped short to discourage them from pecking out their mates’ feathers – not that that particular mutilation seemed to have had much effect, seeing their semi-naked condition. They had never heard the clucking of their mother or copied her in scratching the soil. They had never been given the opportunity to preen their feathers or scuffle luxuriously in a dustbath. They had never even breathed properly-fresh air. Suspended above the ground in perpetual light, barely able to move, they knew nothing of the changing seasons or the difference between night and day, and whenever they laid an egg, it had rolled out of their reach before they could brood it for even a moment.

For the past seventy weeks, in effect, they had existed rather than lived. Whether they still had the capacity to revert to normality seemed, at that point, far from certain.

By next morning two had keeled over and lay stiffly, necks extended – killed, I imagine, by the sudden change in conditions – but the others had begun to shuffle around the playpen, hoisting themselves along with their wings, rather like babies just before they learn to crawl. The boiler was in the dining-room, which already smelled unacceptably ammoniac, and reluctantly I agreed with Nannie that there was no alternative to putting them in the old hen-house in a sunny corner of the garden, and letting them take their chance.

By evening, two had detached themselves from the huddle, and were staggering about in the sun, falling over and righting themselves, definitely more lively, though still pathetically weak. They made no attempt to escape when I approached to pick them up and shut them inside the house, but simply squatted to await their fate. Fear had been stamped out of them along with all other natural responses, and they would have done just the same had I been a fox.

Rehab was painfully slow, but day by day our little flock made progress towards becoming real hens again. Eight weeks after I brought them home, their missing feathers began to sprout as stubble, making them look even more unappetising than when they were naked. Egg production stopped abruptly after the first week, which was rather a blow, but instead of looking at worms and insects with disgust, and ignoring all the leftover scraps from our table, they started to peck at the grass and make tentative efforts to scratch at loose soil.

We scooped out a shallow pit in their pen and filled it with mixed sand and ash, and a few days later it was a joy to see the most adventurous bird carefully lower herself into the dustbath, scuffling with evident pleasure and afterwards risking a rudimentary preen.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about these intensively reared, selectively bred, artificially housed automata was how quickly they developed individual personalities when living in natural conditions. One was bold and curious, a born leader of hens, and soon claimed her place at the top of the pecking order. As soon as they were let out in the morning, another would make a crazy dash for the wire-netting fence surrounding their run, and flutter against it as if trying to fly. They were quite noisy birds, but their clucking did not seem matched to the laying of eggs, as in normal hens – they just kept it up all the time. Pathetic as they were, they embodied something that had been lacking in our new home.

Their chance arrival reminded me strongly of the way my parents used to add all manner of waifs and strays to what they referred to as ‘the strength’.

Whenever it was suggested that yet another hungry mouth of uncertain value, dubious provenance, and visibly down on its luck should be added to those already thronging their Radnorshire farm, my father and mother would exchange a look and a nod, and one would say. ‘Well, why not? We’ll put him (or her, or them) on the strength,’ and with those words the newcomer or comers would acquire the right to a comfortable billet until death or some change of fortune removed him, her, or them.

I imagined the strength as a sort of infinitely expandable tent-cum-trampoline, impartially supporting and sheltering the motley crew...