A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  The house was unusual in that the front door was seldom used. Though the building had clearly been designed to be approached uphill through the wood, across our paddock and through the garden to the front door, at some time in the past farming convenience had decreed that the back door should serve as the main entrance. This opened inward and took a bit of a push, putting you off-balance as you stumbled down two steps into a dark, dank bootroom floored with red flagstones, with a former wash-house dominated by a grim old copper for boiling laundry, but now used to store coal and firewood in separate bunkers on the left, and the door to the big, bare, brick-floored kitchen, with its old-fashioned, black, cast-iron cooking-range on your right. All through Duff’s boyhood, he had ceremoniously lit this range at dawn on Christmas Day in order to roast the turkey, but I quickly decided this was one tradition ripe for breaking, and stuck to the electric oven. The extra-large, shallow Belfast sink, however, was useful for all sorts of purposes unconnected with the preparation of food. After hunting, you could dump saddlery in it until you felt strong enough to tackle the muddy leather, or scrub boots; you could wash sleeping-bags or a dog that had rolled in something noxious with equal ease – in short, it was an absolute treasure.

  The kitchen was functional although far from cosy, but after this somewhat bleak approach to the house, it was an agreeable surprise to discover the large, well-proportioned rooms that made up the rest of it. Dining-room, library, nursery and sitting-room opened off a wide hall, with the garden door at one end in line with the original back door at the other, an arrangement which guaranteed maximum draughts whatever quarter the wind happened to be. Four big bedrooms plus a sliver of a dressing-room over the porch gave us plenty of space upstairs, and although there was only a single bathroom, two of the bedrooms were provided with basins.

  I already knew the house well, indeed much of our courtship had been conducted in and around it, and when we married and my parents-in-law decided to go their separate ways, we jumped at the chance of taking on the lease of Bromsden Farm, which they had rented since before the war. Luckily for us, much of the large solid furniture with which the house was furnished was unsuited to either of their new homes and remained in situ to augment what we brought from London.

  We moved on Grand National Day 1964, listening to the race as we slogged down the Cromwell Road through heavy rain and heavy traffic with our ten-month-old daughter Alice in the back of the car, under the watchful eye of the first person to be taken on to our own embryo strength, Nannie Barker. She had looked after Duff and his sister as small children, before they were taken to America when the second World War broke out in 1939, and had remained in touch with my mother-in-law throughout two decades and the raising of two other families.

  Now, at the age of 60, she had qualified for and been offered a council flat in Stevenage, but her still-burning spirit of adventure made her reluctant to retire to its claustrophobic comfort, and she readily agreed to my suggestion that she should live with us and look after our children.

  Any suggestion of pay she refused out of hand. ‘I’ve never paid tax in my life, and don’t want to start now,’ she said briskly. ‘I’ve got my pension, and that’s enough for me.’

  She was a trim, neat-figured little person with greying black curls and a round, guileless face, prominent exopthalmic eyes behind large, flamboyant, sparkly spectacles, tilted at the corners, and after a lifetime’s experience she had a powerful rapport with babies and young children. The cooing, soothing, repetitious babble in which she communicated might drive strong men to drink, but it had a magical effect on small fry. Effectively she was a child-whisperer, capable of bringing even the naughtiest to heel without so much as raising her voice.

  Born in 1904, the third girl in a family that eventually numbered twelve children, she had begun looking after her siblings at a tender age, and as soon as she left the village school was engaged to care for the children of the local doctor, whose wife was a byword for parsimony.

  ‘Oh, but she was mean!’ Nannie would recall. ‘She used to scold me for spreading butter over the holes in the bread. When I told Mother about it on my day off, she took the loaf and she spread it with butter so thick you couldn’t hardly see the crust. ‘You eat that,’ she said. ‘I’ll give her butter in the holes!’’

  Though we heard little about her father, her mother was constantly quoted and was clearly a remarkable woman, keeping twelve children clean and fed, making sure they had polished boots and clean pinnies for school and trooping them off to Church every Sunday, all on the meagre wages of a farm labourer during one of the worst periods for British agriculture in the twentieth century.

  Having lived through two World Wars herself, Nannie knew everything there was to know about thrift, make-do-and-mend, and the many ways to recycle leftovers. Any form of profligacy or waste horrified her. She unravelled old jerseys and from the wool created multi-coloured crochet blankets. Her hands were always busy, making clothes for the children, knitting sweaters, or creating new skins for semi-eviscerated soft toys. She was a great believer in getting her charges out of doors in all weathers, and gallantly pushed them in our smart black London pram up and down the muddy lane as happily as if it had been the smooth pavement of Kensington Gardens.

  Although she must have been attractive as a young woman, she had never married and was, I think, repelled by sex in all its manifestations – though whether from some unfortunate personal experience or simply having seen too much of the result was never clear. She had a particular disparaging tone when speaking about men in general and, while acknowledging that they were necessary for the creation of her charges, one had the impression that she regarded most of them as a poor feckless lot. Certainly she much preferred the company and conversation of children.

  After spending so much of her life in other people’s houses, she was extremely good at fitting into different backgrounds and routines, and so few, so firmly held were her prejudices that we were careful to respect them. She would not, for instance, eat in the kitchen, and joined us only for the meals we had in the dining-room. She would not shop for food, had never driven a car, and preferred to sup alone in the nursery with the television. Nor did she like alcohol, which was just as well because the merest sniff of sherry or ginger wine at Christmas went straight to her head.

  We all considered it a happy coincidence that, although she was already drawing a pension, since her birthday fell on the ‘missing day’ – February 29th – when she joined us Nannie was still entitled to no more than 15 candles on her cake. Taking her on the strength was, as I quickly realised, the second-best spur-of-the-minute decision I ever made.

  The farmhouse was surrounded on three sides by a garden, which had been extensively remodelled by my mother-in-law, when she began to live there permanently during the war. Determined to be as self-supporting as possible, she had turned a rectangle of former orchard below the house into a large vegetable patch surrounded by brick paths, skimming off the turf and digging compost into the unforgiving, flint-infested soil until it became productive enough to feed the household nearly all year round.

  There was fruit, too. Two large Blenheim Orange trees with the washing-line strung between them provided all the apples anyone could eat and plenty over; there were, besides, gooseberry, blackcurrant and raspberries, a firmly-established rhubarb plant, and a carefully tended bed of strawberries, while an area of lawn stolen from the little paddock – and which I would have liked to return to it – supported a magnificent walnut tree.

  Then there was also the original farm garden, a traditional long strip of lawn flanked by herbaceous borders full of (to me) unknown plants. Singlehandedly, my mother-in-law had dug and sown and reaped and mown, picked and stored and weeded and pruned for quarter of a century to keep this garden in good order, and the thought of the sheer physical effort it would take to maintain her standards made me feel quite faint.

  Like most children, I had taken practically no interest in my paren
ts’ gardening efforts, and therefore had always been assigned boring, backbreaking jobs that required minimal skill. Weeding the drive just before visitors arrived was my particular bugbear.

  Our England is a garden, and gardens are not made

  By saying, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade,

  While better men than we go out and earn their working lives

  By grubbing weeds from gravel paths with broken dinner knives,

  I was never quite sure why Kipling considered these unfortunates better men than me, nor did I ever quite achieve the poet’s triumphant apotheosis:

  …When your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden

  You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden

  but there was a certain satisfaction in comparing the clean, uniform aspect of the completed stretch with the spotty, uneven look of the unweeded section, and the precise technique – the carefully calibrated pressure – needed to pull up a beastly little tuft of bittercress from its lair in the chippings without breaking off its long fragile root, remains embedded in my fingertips to this day.

  Weeding gravel was, however, a pretty meagre preparation for the reality of managing our own garden, and Duff and I, together with the enthusiastic support of Nannie, embarked on a steep learning curve. Having the kiss of death on machinery, I was never entrusted with the mowing, nor did Duff take much interest in the flowers, but the rest we tackled together, and despite inevitable mistakes – planting a peartree where the east wind shrivelled its blossom year after year, siting an expensive hamamellis mollis within reach of a grazing horse – the garden became, if not exactly a glory, at least a continuing pleasure.

  Returning to the first recruits to our own strength, we fast forward a year to a heatwave the following May, and the former half-naked captives were hard to recognise. Glossy, full-feathered, red-combed and nimble, they scratched and pecked and scavenged like real chickens.

  The great leap forward had followed the introduction of a bantam cock which a school-running neighbour found surplus to establishment. He was a stroppy, bossy, self-important little chap, very handsome; his body and wings a rich dark chestnut, with cape and tail-feathers shading into glossy black with green highlights. Having been chased and bullied by older, stronger birds in his youth, he now revelled in possessing his own little harem, and led the hens a merry dance, rounding them up and pointing out how delightful it was to peck at insects, kitchen scraps, worms, and all the other gourmet treats they had been deprived of in their youth.

  He would hold out his wings, peacock-fashion, and stamp round some chosen belle, or give sudden chase to one he fancied treading. The meek, submissive hens found these bouts of lust very puzzling at first. They would crouch down the moment he began his run, and lie doggo until he had had his way with them, but by degrees I think they began to enjoy his attentions and became much sharper in their responses as they followed him about the run, copying whatever he did.

  They even hopped up to the perches in the little henhouse – no great height, but leaving the ground represented a great advance on their first months with us when they crouched on the floor at night. After a brief lay-off during the moult, eggs were fairly pouring out of them again: supersize eggs with smooth, delicately brown shells and yolks of the purest gold. We all agreed that the long months of TLC were being amply repaid.

  The most tiresome hangover from their early career was their lack of time-sense. They would never retire voluntarily to their secure house at nightfall, but wait for some human to round them up, and as the days lengthened it became more and more difficult to remember to shut them up before predators made their nightly rounds. We knew there was at least one fox in close attendance because of the neat dropping with a cheekily twisted point which was often deposited by the gate to the run, and I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later it would risk a raid.

  When it came, though, it was not at night but in the middle of a hot afternoon, when I was playing with the children in the sandpit and Nannie upstairs having her post-prandial snooze. I had filled a watering-can and was sprinkling it to and fro while the children shrieked and dodged, when suddenly a different sound cut through their squeals – a harsh, squawking screech, cut short abruptly. We all spun round and stared.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Nannie’s head appeared at the bedroom window. ‘Fox!’ she cried, pointing towards the holly hedge. ‘Look – over there!’

  I dropped the water and sprinted towards the chicken-run, where a snowstorm of whitish-brown feathers was drifting idly across the beaten earth and piling up against the wire fence. As I wrenched open the gate not one but two small foxes, probably cubs, each with the limp body of a hen in its mouth, froze where they stood and regarded me coolly. Mounds of feathers marked where other victims had died, and choking rage boiled up in me. After all the months of rehabilitation, it seemed too cruel that these hapless birds should be casually beheaded by a pair of marauding teenagers, their lives snuffed out just when they had become worth living.

  ‘Get out! Shoo!’ I roared, snatching up flints from the path and throwing them as hard as I could.

  Time to go, you could see one fox say to the other, and with unbelievable speed they melted away through the hole they had dug under the chicken-wire. A brief struggle as their feathered loot stuck in the gap, a few quick, expert tugs, and they were gone like shadows into the leafy shelter of the surrounding woods, leaving me to stare bleakly at the devastation they had wrought and brood on revenge.

  It was a bitter end to our first experience of poultry-keeping but, as politicians remark after a catastrophe, lessons had been learnt, the first and most obvious being that foxes are bloody, bold, and resolute and hunt by day as well as by night, and the second that if chickenwire is expected to keep them out of the hen-run, it must be well dug in.

  ‘With an overlap,’ recommended the gamekeeper, who suffered from recurrent break-ins to his pheasant-rearing pens.

  So before buying any more hens, we gave the entire run an upgrade, laying a foot width of chicken-wire flat to the ground along an encircling trench before replacing the turf and stapling it to six-foot uprights. Duff then strengthened the gate, putting solid boards on the bottom and sinking a stout railway sleeper into the ground to act as a fox-proof lintel. He replaced all the shaky tongue-and-groove boards in the hen-house itself, and put thick new rubberised felt over the pitched roof.

  As one often finds when housing animals, the accommodation cost far more than the inmates. Once we began considering possibilities for break-in by fox rather than break-out by hens, all sorts of security deficiencies became apparent. A branch overhanging the wire might provide a handy fox-ladder. It would have to go. The lid of the nesting-box was another vulnerable point. It could be pushed up by a questing nose and needed a strong catch. One by one the problems were identified and dealt with.

  ‘Impregnable,’ we agreed after several days’ concentrated work, looking with satisfaction at the revamped run, and the following week I paid the first of many visits to the Domestic Fowl Trust in search of pure-bred birds.

  So many breeds. So many gorgeous, extravagant feathered beauties. The difficulty was deciding which to choose. Though I knew in my heart that little meagre commercial hybrids ate less but laid far more reliably and far longer than ritzy purebreds, (and also that under my system of management they wouldn’t remain pure-bred for long), I couldn’t resist buying three proud, fluffy-footed, apricot Brahma hens and their tall consort, then adding a couple of slim, svelte Black Sumatra pullets, who looked as if they could outrun any fox, and a ridiculous Polish Chamois with pale grey plumage and the sort of hat worn by Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady’s Ascot scene.

  Proof that the Henwife bug had bitten deep lay in the fact that I hardly blinked at the resulting bill. Even in the ’Sixties, each adult bird cost between £10 and £15 – a very considerable outlay – and it is not surprising that I drove them home with ext
reme care.

  Installed in their new quarters, they began exploring at once, and showed none of the timidity of their predecessors. Indeed, they were thoroughly used to the crowds of humans who visited the Domestic Fowl Trust to peer into their individual runs, so to have the freedom of a large grassy pen with no wire underfoot suited them just fine. Grassy, that is, for about a month. Chickens – no matter how blue-blooded – have a unique propensity for creating squalor in their surroundings, and once they had pecked and scratched the turf to mud, then excavated the driest parts of the run to create dustbaths, the whole area more closely resembled a mini Passchendaele than a gentleman’s lawn. Moles added their mite to the destruction by throwing up heaps of fresh soil, and then – oh horror! – rats started to flock to the bonanza of kitchen scraps.

  The first person to encounter a ‘very big mouse’ in the hen-house was the gently-nurtured three-year-old daughter of London friends, to whom I had offered the thrill of collecting eggs straight from the nesting-box. Though she wasn’t shaken by finding a large, scaly-tailed rodent feasting on spilt yolk, I was. After yet another intensive bout of carpentry, the chicken run was beginning to look like Stalag Luft III, and as winter rain turned the bare soil to mud, the spectacular feathered feet which were the Brahmas’ chief beauty, became sadly bedraggled.

  Nothing for it, we decided, but to let them out completely. No more wire runs. No more clipping of flight-feathers. We would give them the freedom of garden and farmyard by day, shutting them up at night in a secure shed, and let them take their chance with foxes, dogs, heavy machinery, and all the other hazards inseparable from country living. We hoped that, although there would inevitably be accidents and losses, these would come singly rather than in battalions. Given a sporting chance to save themselves, the fittest would survive, adapting and breeding in true Darwinian fashion, and creating a flock of super-hens who could outsmart all their enemies.