These stories are contained in "Through the Keyhole" by the Green Chicken Writers
The case of the green chicken.
It was end of a busy day at the Nairobi Royal Agricultural Show. We had watched police dog demonstrations and horse jumping. We had seen prize-winning fruit and vegetables, fashions and furniture.Mummy, Daddy and my brother Berry were ahead of me on the way out. I was dawdling, still engrossed in this and that. And then I saw the green chicken.
This stall had spent the day selling dozens of day-old green chicks. I was told that the owner injected the eggs with green dye before the chickens hatched. I don’t know if this is true.
Now he was crushing large flat cardboard boxes into a trailer. In one of the boxes on the trailer I saw a small lonely chicken. A box was about to be dumped on top of it.
“Stop, wait!” I yelled out.
“Uh?” groaned the stall owner.
“There’s a chicken in there,” I wailed.
“Umph,” groaned the tired man, continuing to swing the empty box onto the trailer.
“A poor little chicken!” I howled.
People around began to wonder what the commotion was about.
The man reached in and hooked the bird out. “Here, take it,” he said.
I now held the fluffy green cheeping ball. He even gave me a tiny cardboard box to take it home in.
At home we had a poultry house full of hens, but this baby would probably not survive in there. I found a pretty wicker basket with a decorative lid. It was round and lined with red silk. I tossed out the few oddments of a sewing kit and put the chicken into it.
I showed it off to the family in its smart new home.
“Get it out of there!” screamed my mother, “before it poops!
This was her precious but neglected sewing basket. I own it now, it is still clean and very nice and useful.
So the cheeping fluffy ball was whizzed out of the basket and I took it outside with me while I considered boxes and perches and where to put it. In the garage I found a sack of corn, the hen’s food. I scooped a hollow in the corn inside the sack and popped the chicken into it just for a moment, closing the sack over it, while I rummaged about looking for a box.
Berry called to me, “Hey! Your chicken is out here.”
The chick had escaped. It was high stepping across the lawn. Chummy the dog had seen it. He bounded towards it and reached it first. He picked it up in his mouth.
“Chummy, no, no,” I yelled.
What a good dog. He carried the chicken gently in his mouth and brought it to me!
That chicken had a hundred lives. A hutch was made for it, and it often had the run of the garden. It turned into a strutting white cockerel. Chummy chased it playfully.
It grew quickly. Very soon it had grown so big and fast that it would wake Chummy from a doze and chase him.
In a month or so more it became a fierce, angry dragon. With white wings beating, tough sinewy legs and yellow taloned feet, it sped across the lawn and began to chase us too. I was picking mulberries one day when it lunged at me. It sped past at shoulder height, talons to the fore. It scratched my cheek. Everyone was nervous of it, including Daddy and the houseboy.
It crowed every morning before dawn, and in turn all the neighbours visited us and wrote to us complaining about it. One elderly lady was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, an overwrought mother’s newborn baby was being woken, a solicitor needed a clear head for his work, a court judge’s judgement would soon be impaired by the persistent pre-dawn call.
“I wish someone would ring its neck!” said my mother. “We could have it for supper.”
“It would probably be too tough to chew,” I said, “and who’s going to catch it?”
Perhaps the dye had affected its brain.
I begged Daddy to let it into his poultry-coop. At least it would be contained and the hens might calm it down.
Daddy worried that we’d never dare collect any more eggs if we let it into the henhouse.
Perhaps a Government exterminator could rid us of the vicious bird.
It was evening when Dad, at last, agreed to let the cock in with the hens.
With corn sprinkled in front of it and people behind waving leafy branches we chivvied the daemon forward. Dad opened the netting door. The cock leapt past him into the coop. Immediately it was lost in a fracas of scurrying, flying feathers, a blizzard of fluffy down and squawks of terror from the hens.
We went into the house, had supper, not roast cockerel, and we went to bed.
During the night we heard more screeches from the hen house. We ignored them.
In the morning we went to look at the night’s probable catastrophe.
The hens were calm, pecking about, scratching in the litter on the ground as usual.
There was no sign of the cockerel. He wasn’t anywhere to be found.
Our houseboy came to greet us. He was bent double, clutching his ribs and laughing fit to burst.
“So what happened?”
He showed us. At the back of the enclosure the wire-netting had been cut. A shadowy character had been haunting our garden for weeks. During the night he had broken into the cage.
Now his blood was spattered over the wire-netting. A bloody trail led across the grass, up the path to the gate, and even out onto the road. We half expected to find an ear, an eye, or a nose on the ground.
The thief had paid dearly for a chicken dinner.
The daemon cockerel was gone. We felt sorry for the thief and even rather guilty as we sat down to our fresh eggs for breakfast.
Is this my Daddy?
Springtime came. I was six years old. I went
skipping down the school driveway to catch my bus
home. The bus was already waiting on the opposite
side of the road. The teacher was helping children
into it.A man was watching me from near the school gate. I pointed across to the bus. He didn’t respond, so I pointed to him and then the bus again.
He came towards to me.
“Would you please cross me over to the bus,” I said.
“Don’t you recognise your old Daddy?” he asked.
His face was shaded by a grey felt hat. A long grey raincoat reached down to his ankles and black-laced shoes.
My Daddy was in Africa. He wore khaki shorts. Sweat trickled from under the band of his old straw hat.
I’d been warned not to talk to strangers. They might offers of treats to lure you away.
“You don’t need the bus today,” he said. “We will go and have tea and cake in a café.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but my Grandmother will worry if I don’t go straight home.”
“I’ve been with her all afternoon,” he said. “She knows all about it.”
He took my hand and we walked away from the school. A scream would be very awkward to explain if this really was my Daddy.
As we walked along I tested him, “Do you know my brother’s name?”
He sounded puzzled, “Of course I do,” he said.
We continued to walk along in silence while I tried to think of a better question for the test. We reached a teashop and I said, “I ought to phone my Grandmother so she will know that I have thought to phone her myself.”
He asked the shopkeeper where there was a phone. There was one in an alcove at the back of the shop.
The man dialled and said, “Hello Mother, I have picked her up from school, and we are stopping off for a cup of tea.”
There could be anyone, or no one, on the other end of that phone.
I reached up. “May I speak, please?”
He raised his eyebrows a bit surprised, and passed me the receiver.
I stressed my words very slowly and clearly. “Hello, Gangan, this is Girlie. I am with Daddy in a cake shop.”
A voice said sharply, “I am aware of that, dear!”
I gave back the phone. I could do no more. I deserved to enjoy the tea.
We sat at a little table with sandwiches, a cake from the display, a cool drink for me, and a cup of tea for him. He asked questions like: “Have you made any good friends here?” and, “Are you happy at school, and at home?”
In truth my life was unhappy and lonely. But was wisest to tell of friends and allies who would be eager to help me.
I looked about at the strangers around me in the café. Could I pretend to to recognise one of them? Or did a teacher see me leave school. Would she walk into the café at any moment with a pair of policemen? Inventing a clever plot that might sound true wasn’t easy.
Between mouthfuls of cake and sips of juice, I replied, ‘I have many good friends,’ and ‘I am doing well, thank you.’
The man said solemnly: “Now I have a big question for you. Take time to be sure of you answer. My question is this: Would you like to come and live with me, or do you prefer to stay here with your grandmother?”
He was solemn. I was to choose. I felt new sense of dignity and worth. My answer could change everything. Was he like Mummy’s little seaplane, a miracle come to save me from this scary and lonely life?
I said firmly, “I would like to come with you.”
He paid for the tea and we left the shop.
We passed the railway bridge and walked up a long hill. I began to recognise this road. It led to my grandmother’s house. The man’s hand held mine warmly. Unless we walked straight past the house or called in to ask for a ransom I should put all silly doubts aside. He must be my Daddy.
Gangan let us into the house. Our reception was cool but expected. That evening Mummy arrived from her school. She was extremely angry. I was sent to mind Berry in a bedroom upstairs while she sorted things out. Then, downstairs, the shouting began.
Days ago I had made a daisy chain to put around Aunty Ro’s cat’s neck. Now Aunty Ro burst into the bedroom, “Did you give the cat another necklace? I think you did, and now my cat has hanged itself,” she boomed. “Stand up when I speak to you!”
I stood up. “I didn’t make another necklace, and a cat couldn’t hang on a daisy chain!” I said. “Daisies have soft, weak stems. You just poke one through the next one to link them. They break easily.”
“So, where is my cat?” she persisted, “What have you done with her?”
I said, “I don’t know where she is.”
“You’ve shut her in somewhere?” asked Aunty Ro. “Think about it!”
“I haven’t. I wouldn’t do that,” I replied.
Aunty Ro stormed out.
Then Mummy called me downstairs. “Have you told your father you want to go back with him?” she demanded.
“Yes, I did,” I replied.
“You are a nasty little traitor!” she said. “A nasty, nasty, little traitor!”
A good idea came to me. I said. “I thought you would be coming too, of course.” Immediately I feared that these silly words might have undone everything that was good.
Daddy said sharply. “I took you at your word. I have bought and paid for your ticket.”
“Go up to the bedroom,” Mummy directed.
I went upstairs and sat down opposite Berry on the carpet. I was ‘Girly’, the big girl who listened when Mummy said that the farm was a dust bowl and the locusts would destroy it. I was her cheerer-upper from loneliness! Now, in the flick of a bat’s wing, I was ‘a nasty little traitor’.
Although he was too young to understand me, I told Berry. “I might be going away to live with Daddy. My ticket is paid for!”
Then amidst the battle downstairs, Aunty Ro burst in through the front door and sent up a booming howl from the hall. “My cat has been run over in the road and tossed into the gutter. Tossed into a gutter, do you hear me? Does nobody here care?”
My Mother wrenched open the living-room door. “We all hear you very clearly, Rosa! You’ve lost a cat while I am about to lose my daughter!”
Berry zoomed his toy cars, while I listened to the voices below. I was a nuisance person. I was the ‘she’ at the heart of the trouble. Uncle Ted’s wife, Aunty Joan, had written to Daddy to say that a man of honour would not burden family members by expecting them to raise his child for him.
I was called downstairs again. This time I took Teddy with me. I was directed into the front-room and the door was closed behind me. More questions had cropped up, I was alone in there.
A picture of bluebells in a forest in a big black frame hung on the wall near the door. A large black dining table and chairs filled most of the room with two upright armchairs beside the fireplace. It is amazing how quickly things can change. A shout and the slam of the front door could mean that Daddy had left, defeated, and I must stay here. A log in the fireplace crumbled. The fire was now just a glowing ember.
Daddy opened the door. He said, “Are you ready to fly away?”
I was so very glad of his smiley face. Daddy and Teddy and I left there.
The zoo and the Princess.
I don’t remember where we stayed that night, but in the morning we had a spare day before we must be at the airport. Daddy suggested a visit to London Zoo.There must be many days in many lives that pass by without comment, and are then entirely forgotten. This was not to be one of those days. This was a momentous day that still sends ripples out to me now.
Daddy was taking me to the zoo for sheer pleasure. It was an amazing, incredible, out of this world new experience. My Daddy was usually busy with work, and thinking up plans for his work.
Now he had flown from Africa to England to rescue me, to take me back with him, and to spend time with me at the zoo. This I could not have dreamed up even if I was a genie that had leapt out of a lamp.
Busses and trains took us to the zoo. We joined a queue and bought tickets along with others who planned to spend a pleasant day out.
In those days, it was 1948, England was still in wartime rationing. However, at the gate of the zoo they sold buns for visitors to feed to the bears in the bear pit. I expect they were very costly, and perhaps the money was for animal food or to help the Red Cross. Daddy bought me a bun for me to give to the bears.
Our precious bun was put into a brown paper bag. I clutched it to my chest and off we went.
We walked down the aisles between mesh fences strung on iron poles. We came to a spacious pen that housed giraffes, zebras and antelopes. I had seen these animals out in Africa. Daddy said that giraffes had eaten our sisal fences and trodden them down so that deer got into our crops.
Now a giraffe broke away from the others and came towards us. I stopped to admire her. Quite a crowd of people gathered. The fence came up to the giraffe’s chest and she stopped right behind it. She looked directly at me.
Then she swung her long neck down over the fence. The crowd moved back with grunts and gasps of surprise until I stood in a space alone. Daddy was a short distance ahead of me and he was as surprised as anyone as I stood mesmerised, gazing up at the giraffe.
The giraffe’s beautiful head with big gleaming eyes and luscious long eyelashes reached towards me. Her eyes levelled with mine. They were big, soft brown eyes. I could feel her warm breath on my face.
“It is that bun she’s after,” said Daddy. “Hold it up for her.”
“The bun is for the bears,” I said, wondering how to hide it.
“I would give it to her,” said Daddy.
I grasped the bag by the top and reached inside to pull out the bun for her.
The giraffe’s gaze moved to the bag.
Very politely, she put out her long rough, blue-grey tongue. It was a strong tongue and it pulled the bag right out of my grip. Up she rose with her banquet in a bag. With her head held high and a look of triumph on her face she munched her prize and swallowed it bag and all.
Then the great and beautiful beast turned and strode elegantly away.
“She has eaten the bag,” I said in alarm. I had watched the bulge move slowly down her neck.
“It’s a paper bag, just a bit of extra roughage.” said Daddy, “It won’t hurt her. She was pleased with it!”
Some onlookers gathered round me with curious faces. A woman put her hand on my shoulder and said. “That gave you a horrible fright.”
“No,” I said. “I liked her.”
I did, I admired her. Like me was from a strange land, Africa, and yet shut in here she had cleverly spotted the bun, and like a grand Princess, she had displayed the majesty of a Queen in accepting it and enjoying it.
Daddy was smiling and joking with people. Then off we went again talking, laughing and excited. All the people around went buzzing on with their day with just a wave and a smile and a “Well, what a very lovely day it is indeed.”
The bears, when we found them, were down in a large round pit with caves and a tunnel off the sides. A few uneaten buns lay scattered over the floor around them. None of the four or five bears bothered to take half a glance up at us.
Our bun would have been wasted down there.
Can marriage survive dirty shoes?
I was a newlywed in Cambridge. John was a research student at the University.Most days I walked to a small private primary school in a nearby street. There I listened to the children reading and supervised them at playtime. If a teacher was away I stood in. I also shepherded children to the bus stop after school and saw them safely onto their bus.
After a while, I was asked to teach drawing and painting. This was a lovely job and the children were excited with the classes too. Corridors and open-day displays filled up with the children’s art projects. I loved it.
Each day after school I’d go home to cook supper for John and myself, and sometimes for guests. I was proud of my household management ability.
Then, one day John remarked, “Have you looked at my shoes recently?”
“Not specially. Why?” I asked.
“They are filthy,” he said, “how long is it since you cleaned them!”
“I don’t clean shoes!” I said, “Cleaning your shoes is your job!”
John insisted that I was neglecting my duty to his shoes and I determinedly refused to clean them. The silly tiff started to escalate until I said, “Then I’m obviously not the wife for you. I will leave.”
He looked at me with arrogant complacency, “In that case you will need your suitcase,” he said. “This one, isn’t it?” He pulled my pink suitcase out of a cupboard.
I threw a few things into the case. When it was ready, he picked it and we headed for the station. Soon we could see the station entrance just past the school where I worked.
“So where are you planning to go?” John asked.
I had not really planned to go anywhere.
“First I will go home to my mother,” I said blandly, “and then I will consider what I want to do next.”
“Well, I hope you enjoy whatever you decide,” he affirmed.
It was going to be very awkward explaining this to my mother. “I have walked out of my marriage because of a quarrel over cleaning a pair of shoes.” I could already see the scorn on her face. How could I back down on this stupidity? It would be difficult while this man carrying the pink suitcase was looking so horribly smug.
Which of these two horrors could I pull off best? Was I going to let this conceited twit boss me about with his orders? No, I was not! Was I going to face my mother’s scorn? No I was not - or was I?
Every step was taking us closer to the station. We were less than five minutes from it, when suddenly a solution occurred to me.
“Oh dear, I’m short of money for the ticket,” I sighed.
“That’s no problem,” said John as he pulled his wallet out of his pocket. He took out a five-pound note. “Wait a moment, you may need a bit more to tide you over,” he added, as he opened his wallet again.
“Thanks,” I snatched the five-pound note. “This will do.”
By now we were walking beside a hedge, almost at the school gate. I began to realise that I was also walking out on my job and letting down all my classes without any warning, and all for nothing.
“Oh!” I gulped. “We can’t go past the school!”
“Why not?” he said.
“The children are coming out,” I said.
It was true. It was Thursday, my day off, but it was a school day, and the children were coming out of school.
“If they see me going to the station with a suitcase, they will all want to know why I’m leaving,” I said. “What can I tell them?”
“Quick then,” said John. “Let’s hide behind this hedge.”
I agreed with enthusiasm.
We nipped into somebody’s garden and crouched down behind the front hedge. We felt like conspirators as we looked through the hedge and saw them go by.
“We’ll look so stupid if they see us,” I whispered.
John reached out a hand to me and we giggled so much that we had to hug each other.
When the children were gone we crept out from our hiding place and hurried back to our flat.
John says that I then cleaned his dirty shoes, but I am sure that he did it. In fact, I now clearly recall that he insisted that he would clean both his and my shoes from then on, forever and a day!
