Snowball, Buttercup and Snoozer

The directions to the hen lady’s house on Red Fen read like a child’s treasure map. Pass 2 lay-by’s, turn right at the sign for the tip, go 500 yards and turn left, count 4 telegraph poles, turn left again. The houses here were proper fen, inhabited by people who steered well clear of councils and planning permission, erecting low lying barns and bungalows and neighbouring them up nicely with a company of caravans and sheds. I was glad to be arriving in our tiny dented car. It didn’t bat an eyelid at the rutted, muddy lane that twisted and turned round potholes to the hen lady’s hastily erected higgledy-piggledy house. It felt perfectly at home parked amongst the scrap metal in the yard. When the huge toothy dogs had been taken into the house our girls fell out of the car all cheery at the thought of mud and a gate to climb by the horse paddock.
The white-legged hen lady, practical in shorts, pulled on her cigarette and smiled. Four long teeth, whiter than the others and looking like they had had something artificial done to them gleamed across at me. Three large turkeys gobbled noisily behind her.

“Got ‘em all penned up for you.” she said, leading the way towards the hen huts. The girls spied a brood of chicks scratching with their mother in the dirt and were off. We followed the hen lady over a concrete slab, past two mud-pits and a horse manure pile to where a clutch of hutches and runs had congregated in the long grass. One had our three bantam Polands in it waiting. Until yesterday they had never been cooped, had spent their whole little three-month lives running wild with their mother, scratching up biodiverse treats and getting lost in the hedges. Now, behind a makeshift door of board and a brick they sat in a legless rabbit hutch waiting to be tamed.

The hen lady stubbed out her cigarette, reached down and shifted the brick. A wild flap of wings as her hand reached in. Fluttering squawks, a scratch of claw, and the first hen emerged. Then, in her capable hands, a hushed bird sat with its extraordinary puff of a head resting on her wrist, its smooth buff breast laced with white, its eyes just visible beneath the feather crest like small dark worlds unblinking.

I had never seen a crested Poland before. We had decided on them purely on the advice of a gardening friend who said that Polands were the best of all bantams at being held by children. I knew that they were friendly, and had been warned about the hairstyle. In a magazine, even strutting in a farmyard, I would have looked at one and said ‘Ridiculous’. But in my fingers the downy crest felt rather marvelous. And they peeped so charmingly, and sat so softly against the breast. They even traveled well in the car.

Oh dear, looks like I’ve gone and bought the poodle of hens, all fluff and feathers. The girls, of course, adore them. Every morning and every evening we go, all four of us, Mummy, Daddy, girl 8, girl 3, on a leggy procession to the bottom of the garden to let them out and put them up, and in between we visit them several times, poor hens, because we like the stroke and peep of them so very much.One is pure white, the other two are chamois laced with white, one a big-breasted ball of butter, the other a sleepy dozer. They should start to lay about Christmastime. Snowball, Buttercup and Snoozer.