My daughter’s question at Bristol Science Museum, 2018
Have you missed me? I’ve missed you.
Welcome to the return of Wednesday’s Ghost, completely off brand this week because of its coming out on a Monday…but there’s a reason for that! (You have to read to the end to find out what it is.) But from this week, expect a biweekly return of my Wednesday editions. I have some very special sound to accompany the podcast edition of this newsletter, so that WILL come out on Wednesday this week.
On with the story…and then the big news. First, a warning that this post deals with pet loss.
Are you chickening out? Who rules the roost around here? Not him, he’s henpecked. Don’t ruffle her feathers. We’re building up a nest egg, feathering our nest. They’re as rare as hen’s teeth. He’s the cock of the walk. We’re cockahoop about the new arrival. There’s a pecking order at work. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched. Don’t let the fox guard the henhouse. We’re suffering from empty nest syndrome.
Why are there so many phrases associated with chickens? These expressions are legion, which you only realise once you start thinking about it — and it makes sense. Despite their strangeness, their dinosaur qualities, chickens are surprisingly relatable. In their social and family lives, in their growth and nurturing and parenting, in both their flocking together and their petty fall-outs and squabbles, we see ourselves. They lend themselves easily to metaphor. Besides, they’ve been domesticated for thousands of years and are a feature of daily life in many places, a double provider of protein in the form of eggs and meat.
But it was never about that for us.
Before my daughter was born, we painted the nursery yellow and affixed a vinyl decal to the wall, a tree that sprouted from the floor and reached its branches upwards towards the ceiling, festooned with dozens of individually applied leaves. I tacked silk butterflies to the wall to flutter amongst the tree’s foliage. And I folded birds from beautifully printed Japanese paper and suspended them from the central light pendant.
Every morning, I took my baby on a tour around the room to greet the day.
Hello, tree,
Hello, leaves.
Hello, butterflies.
Hello, birds.
Her first word, uttered as she stretched her tiny arm towards the light, was bird.
At four months old I gave her a toy set for Easter, one toy of many, not realising then what longevity and significance it would have. The set was recommended for children one year and over, but of course I considered my child particularly advanced. She could barely sit up when she received it, much less match the bright, satisfyingly plump little chicks to their correctly-coloured corduroy eggs. The hen house also featured a soft chicken coop with a ramp, a mother hen that crinkled when you squeezed her, and rather disconcertingly, a smiling fox licking its lips. According to my research, you can’t find them anymore. ‘All Gone,’ the listing reads.
Ophelie’s Hen House from Lilliputien
The chicks became my daughter’s constant companions, a tiny mobile society that accompanied her everywhere. They came along on every holiday. This is Big Brother Blue in the Virgin Islands, for example.
We lived in constant fear of one of them going missing on one of these adventures. When one did disappear, it wasn’t an airline’s mistake or indeed the hungry fox’s fault - my daughter had long since locked him away in a safe location, for she couldn’t bear to look at him and his lolling, eager, embroidered tongue. In the end, Orange Chicky went missing at preschool, allegedly stolen by a mean boy and put into the rubbish bin.
After this incident, my little girl never spoke to anyone at the nursery again.
I tried to make up for his loss by buying another hen house set. Someone else gave us a similar version, finger-puppet chicks with numbers emblazoned on their chests. Still, one of the chicks had no buddy, and this was intolerable. I found her ongoing discomfiture over the uneven number too difficult to bear. I felt it myself, couldn’t stand to think of Orange Chicky in landfill.
Finally I appealed to the toy company, and they found a fresh chick in a back room. He arrived in a brown envelope marked ‘confidential’. In the dead of night I staged the triumphant ‘return’ of the supposedly original Orange Chicky: he was encircled by his friends, had a tiny Fisher Price piece of plastic luggage with him, and smelled new. I told her he must have gone to the spa, and if she was cynical, she hid it well. It was chick life perfected, an even dozen.
Orange Chicky’s Homecoming
Perhaps it was only natural that she began asking about the Real Thing as she grew older. By London standards, our garden was a reasonable size, certainly large enough for chickens in miniature, small-breed bantam hens. My partner and I had grown up in the suburbs and had no experience with poultry beyond the plate, and as with all things utterly novel, at first the project seemed impossible, filled with mystery and incomprehension around the necessary steps. But a Facebook Sell & Swap site provided a coop and run, and we found a farmer in Kent. We intended to get two and came home with a mixed lot of four. It was 2016, the beginning of our chicken era.
We had just the long green run and a bright orange chicken coop at first. Foxes sat on the nearby shed roof in broad daylight, sunning themselves and staring down at our birds. They were safe, though, at least from outside predators. When hormone surges hit, often in springtime, Layla would start bullying her run-mates, pecking them bloody. She was the ultimate frenemy, seemingly companionable with the others and then turning on them in an instant. Clara turned up one morning with a plucked neck and a flesh wound, and it was clear who was responsible. Feather by feather, Layla removed Mia’s glorious white head plumage, leaving her with a knobby bald pink pate dotted with gouges from a beak, and this was too much.
So we researched folk remedies, on one occasion applying a coal-black tar to the heads of the victims to deter pecking, a substance that reeked so intensely that you could smell it through the thick plastic packaging. We sprayed the wounds and gave Layla a stern talking to. Those are your friends, we said. We’re not mean to our friends. She looked at us with her beady uncomprehending eye, a creature so unlike any of the domesticated mammals we’d known, animals like dogs who were capable of guilt and shame. Eventually, I bought another run on CraigsList to contain the bully until the moment passed and the flock were peaceful again. Gradually, they took over more and more of the garden and our lives.
Matilda died a mysterious death early on, within the run but near its edge, stripped of her feathers and flesh, just an initially unidentifiable pink object lying on the frozen ground on Christmas Eve. In the coop that same morning, we found two eggs - the first we’d had, odd little miracles, wintertime eggs that shouldn’t have been there, at a time of year supposedly too dark to produce the hormone necessary for laying. We struggled to find our way through the tangle of emotions produced by these colliding events, this strange combination of death and birth.
People called them ‘just chickens,’ but we couldn’t manage to be dispassionate about them.
When Clara went broody, and we purchased fertilised eggs from the farmer for her to sit on, we did so in the awareness that our council would charge us £1000 for having cockerels in central London. What could we do if some were born male, which seemed almost certain? The farmer explained that if we couldn’t dispatch, we shouldn’t hatch. My daughter, then 7, didn’t understand what this meant, but I knew, and I purchased the eggs in full knowledge we could never do it.
When ten little bundles of yellow, yellow-and-white and brown fluff emerged, their numbers dropped to nine almost immediately. One chick drowned in the drinking water because we’d failed to make it safe by filling it with pebbles. We felt responsible for letting it drown and grieved for many days. I still think about it sometimes.
We made ramps to help them get into the henhouse, and I worried about the chicks constantly, losing sleep and dreaming about them. We went away to a family wedding, and our friends looking after them rang to report that one chick had been found cold on the ground with his tiny legs in the air. Miraculously, some hand-warming and a stint under a heat lamp brought him back from the brink of the grave. We could have called him Jesus, but we called him John.
And the resurrected chick was indeed a ‘him,’ in the end. We started suspecting their sex early on from observations of their behaviour. Seven of the hatchlings turned out to be contraband cockerels. All doubt vanished when they matured over the course of one particular week into crowing, pugilistic fighting cocks who staged battles in the garden, flapping their wings and flying at one another talons first.
The stress of working out what to do was excruciating; I was reduced to asking even slight acquaintances if they had any chicken-killing experience. In the end we took them to the proverbial home in the country, where it seemed as though their new owner might be genuinely planning to keep them alive. His was a no-kill sanctuary, he said, and indeed, his property was covered in chicken houses and enclosures with no shortage of cockerels.
He said he’d send photos, but he never did.
The chickens were my daughter’s first experience of death. Matilda’s bizarre Christmas demise was hard, even though we’d hardly got to know her. We are an agnostic family, but still my daughter would light candles for Matilda and the drowned chick whenever we went into a cathedral or chapel as tourists. She would put the appropriate coin of the realm into the little box, get my help with lighting the taper, bow her head and close her eyes. At a museum in Bristol, at an installation where people could write their curious questions on slips of paper to attach to a frame, she wrote, ‘How can I make chickens live forever?’
We never found out the answer. Clara was harder — a darling black-and-white mottled cochin chicken, she expired when we were away in America, in a scorchingly hot August. My neighbours messaged us. I told my daughter right away, not wanting her to only find out about it when she came home, but to process the news in the presence of her loving extended family. She went to an art exhibit about death that day with her cousins, and they drew memorial portraits of Clara on a big sheet of paper on the wall.
Not so long ago, Ella died. She was a white Sussex, one of the two surviving hens we’d hatched. We don’t know what happened. My daughter came into the house to tell me she was gone. We wrapped her in a chicken-print tea towel, put her in a lovely box with some dried corn and flowers, and paid the vet £65 for cremation. We sat in the waiting area at the vet’s with the box on our laps and cried.
Yes, people sometimes call them ‘just chickens,’ but it wasn’t that way for us.
Mia was a good girl, a Poland chicken with greenish-black feathers and a bouffant white extravagance atop her head. She had an effervescent, curious personality and hilarious running style, and she crouched and spread her wings to be picked up when you stood next to her. She was our favourite, and I suppose we were hers too. At seven years old, she was still laying beautiful white eggs, about 50 grams each, with elegant pointed tips.
Ellie, also known as Frizzle, had that nickname because of her luxuriant, twisty feathers that mirrored my own daughter’s mane of curly hair, only darker. Even her feet were feathery. She was the smallest and sweetest of the flock, laying lovely, creamy white eggs that verged on translucent.
Layla, the surviving white Sussex, ceased laying her robust, thick-shelled brown eggs two years ago. With this stoppage her temper cooled, and she no longer harassed other members of her flock. She was never massively social with us, but when her fellow white Sussex Ella was still alive, they loved to sunbathe together, finding a good patch of dirt or dust to scruff around in to clean themselves of insects, and then lying on the grass to spread their flight feathers wide to the sun’s rays.
From left to right: Mia, Ella (who looked the same as Layla), and Ellie AKA Frizzle
On the morning King Charles was crowned, my husband came into the front room. ‘I think the chickens are gone,’ he said. My daughter was in the kitchen at the time, making an omelette with herbs and Mia’s eggs. I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. They had put themselves to bed after having a leg stretch in the garden - these were the phrases we used to describe their activities - but my husband had forgotten to secure their overnight safety by closing the door of the run after them.
We had let them down, we had let our feathered family down. Sometime in the dusk of the night before, or in the middle of the night, or in the dark before the dawn, the fox had come to take them. I can hardly stand to think that it might have been one by one, that he might have fetched the first and left the other two to await their fate, and so on until all three were gone. There was almost nothing to see, just a few feathers, which we kept. Otherwise they were as magically vanished as if they had been spirited away by aliens.
At first, my daughter did not want to eat the omelette she had made with Mia’s eggs. But then she said she did not want to let it go to waste, did not want to throw away Mia’s last gifts to us. She gave me half, and we sat together at the kitchen table, choking down the omelette and crying.
Ellie’s last egg.
For seven years we had lived our lives to a soundtrack of Mia’s screaming for attention in the early mornings of spring and summer; the triumphant post-lay clucking that we called ‘the egg noise’; the range of ambient noises they made when they were curious or aggravated or content; the excited ‘treat noise’ one would make when she found a fat worm and ran away with it to eat it; and the corresponding sounds the others made when they gave chase, hoping to get some too.
The garden was eerily quiet as we disassembled the chicken run and moved the chicken house away, out of sight. The coronation weekend was long, and we used the time to go to the garden centre. We tilled the earth, fertilised by seven years of our chickens living there, and planted dozens of plants and flowers in their place. Some of the plants have since faltered and died, but many more of them have flourished. We bought an oval hanging ‘egg chair’ so that my daughter and I can sit and overlook this garden on a balmy summer evening.
It is growing.
Dear Readers/Listeners! Thank you for loving and supporting Wednesday’s Ghost. The newsletter and podcast have been on holiday for a while, following the completion of my Big Project, but from this week Wednesday’s Ghost will be published fortnightly to make consistency more realistic for me (turns out self-produced podcasting is a lot of work). So look out for it in your inbox and/or your podcast app every other Wednesday.
This week’s exciting news is that in the UK you can pre-order my new non-fiction book now: Reboot: Reclaiming Your Life in a Tech-Obsessed World.
In this book, I lend my storytelling style to a subject about which I’m passionate: building a more mindful, deliberate, values-driven life and improving the relationships we have with and through technology.
Of course, if you are an annual paid subscriber to Wednesday’s Ghost, you’ll receive a copy of both Reboot and All the Ghosts in the Machine from me as a thank-you for becoming a supporting subscriber.
But if you’re planning on buying Reboot from your independent shop in the UK, your favourite e-tailer or retailer, or checking it out at your local library, I have an ardent plea…
There’s at least one way to count your chickens before they’re hatched that is definitely recommended, and that’s pre-orders. Pre-orders are incredibly important and consequential for an author and the success and reach of a book. Bookshops use preorders to decide how many copies to buy in, or whether they’ll stick a copy in the window. Pre-orders push an upcoming title up the bestseller charts, which of course is great for me but also enables more people to encounter the book, which is what I most want.
Pre-orders are so important, in fact, that pre-ordering a book you’re interested in — rather than waiting until it’s out — is one of the best ways to support an author you like. If you’re a library user, great! Ask your library to pre-order a copy and make sure you’re first on the list to check it out once it’s on the shelves.
Thanks to all of you for your appreciation and support. You’re stars.
Elaine xoxo
Wow loved this.
Makes me want to be a vegetarian. So touching