Living on a farm with hens you might think that there would always be plenty of eggs.

Wrong! Hens are really crafty. They steal nests. This means you have to look for them; the nests and hopefully the eggs. There is a problem with this of course; you are never quite sure how old these ‘hen fruits’ are. However we had a useful bit of farm equipment in the kitchen, a pint glass with measure marks on it. You put the egg gently into the glass and then filled it with cold water. According to how full the pocket of air at one end of the egg was, you could tell its freshness – the older it was, the higher the rounded end would rise up. These marks told you to the day how old the egg was. If the egg lies flat on the bottom it is a fresh as the proverbial daisy.

Because of the precarious nature of producing eggs; during any glut - mainly in Spring, nature’s annual era of baby production; surplus eggs were preserved in isinglass. I never helped in this process but I was very often called upon to have an input! On occasions I was asked to fetch an egg from said isinglass - yuck - that was the most disgusting job I could be given! Not only was the cloam preserving jar placed in a dark and cobwebby corner of the scantily lit pantry - no electric light - there was just a small rectangular opening high up - no glass only crossed slats of wood showing light in diamond shapes, and that only when the front door was open! The job was always done by feel.

The isinglass used to have a very strange texture, slimy and crystalline at the same time and it formed a glassy crust which had to be broken. It was always icy cold. Breaking the crust you hoped not to break an egg as you did it because the process seemed to make the shells brittle. Not only that the texture and colour of the egg when cracked open looked very suspect.

If a preserved egg wasn’t good enough for what Mother was cooking and there wasn’t a fresh egg in the house, I would be dispatched at the cackle of a hen to see if it had laid. I was very good at this job. Hens are secretive creatures and you have to play all sorts of ‘hen games’ to get their eggs. You had to watch them, but pretend not to watch them.

Most hens have their favourite nest in which to lay. If they suspected you were after their eggs they wouldn’t lay, they would reluctantly get up off the nest and find somewhere else to perform. After all a hen’s job is to produce more of her kind, not feed greedy people. Their favourite, “secret” place to lay was in a cubby-hole in the top shippen. In days long gone I think this cubby-hole was a safe place to rest a lantern. It sometimes didn’t have any hay in it, but perhaps binder twine which a worker had coiled round their hand and thrown there making a nice round bed. Some hens cackle just before they are about to lay an egg, as if to say, “Here I’m going to lay you an egg. Here it comes….” and other hens cackle just after, “There you are I’ve laid you a nice egg.” If the former was sitting in the cubby-hole, and began to cackle, you knew to wait for a very fresh egg. This was how I saw hens actually laying. My eye line perfectly matched their bottom line. They cogitate for what to a child seems hours, you think of giving up – but you know the reward, and then suddenly just as they are going to lay, they stand up. Their bottom opens and an egg pops out all wet. Sometimes, if the hen wasn’t too pecky, I usually knew which ones were, I’d stealthily put my hand under her and catch the egg as it came out. The egg was all sticky and began to set, sort of fixing the egg to my hand. Job done; I had found an egg, Mum could do her cooking, we had a nice meal.

Hens have fleas. That cubby-hole in the top shippen was a hen’s flea paradise. If you disturbed their bedding, the fleas thought your arm was a nice fat meal and hopped onto it, and they do rather tickle That’s why Mother got me to do the job – she hated fleas, or rather, they loved her. They would bite her and my brother Richard, but not my brother Risdon, my father or me. Risdon would tease Richard in rather an illogical manner by saying to him, after he’d been bitten, “Fleas aren’t fussy.”

Fleas were a pitfall of farming – all the animals had them – cats, dogs, hens… and if that wasn’t enough other animals had worse vermin, sheep have ticks, cattle warble fly and pigs lice; and they are the more tolerable if not desirable residents on your stock. You can at least see them and eradicate them.

Hens’ secretive little ploy has another side to it. Suddenly you have a brood of chicks on your hands, when you could really have done with the eggs instead. However more chicks eventually mean more roast chicken dinners. ‘The boys’ come off worst, and end up in the oven. My mum used the head and feet as extra giblets, she prepared them by scalding them in boiling water, plucking off all the tiny feathers with a knife, skinning the beak and tongue and scraping the scales off the feet. When we finally got round to eating the carcase trimmings and giblets as stew I always chose to have either gizzard or better still a succulent gelatinous foot.

On most farms you have no idea how many hens you have at any one time, and won’t know if one has gone a.w.o.l. for twenty-one days. The offending hen will behave perfectly normally as she lays the eggs and as she comes to the end of laying her clutch, she turns broody, quietly steals off and sits on the eggs usually for twenty-three of the twenty-four hours of the day. She regularly shuffles the eggs over with her beak so that they are evenly warmed during the sitting. Her spare hour will be spent in finding some food, getting a drink and doing some famous broody poo - don’t step in it you’ll regret it, huge, extra smelly and coated in a white film; and no the eggs don’t get cold enough to harm the baby inside! Some hens do even cover them up with bedding whilst they are away. I’ve watched, but that is only to hide their nest!

At other times hens defecate, forage and graze throughout the day, normally finding beetles, snails, worms, earwigs, maggots from the dung heap, grubs and discarded human food waste as well as pecking grass, daisies, clover leaves and anything else that takes their fancy. They will fly up to catch moths and butterflies and I have even in recent times in my adult life seen one steal food from a lighted barbecue.

Hens take themselves to bed at dusk, finding a perch out of harms way somewhere a fox or badger couldn’t find them as food. Because of this most hens are shut in at night. Some farmers had a ritual of walking round the farmyard at night to check if everything was in order and one of their little tricks to keep foxes away was to urinate at strategic places to deter visits from ‘Charley’.

I know my father certainly ‘toured the buildings’ last thing at night. He probably did the same as all farmers of that time to protect his stock, but considered it too indelicate a subject to mention to his only daughter. The odd sprinkle of human urine would have been as nothing in the cacophony of smells and germs already in the yard! This was an extra protection for their hens and eggs – it might still happen!