DIARY
DEBORAH DEVONSHIRE Athe days lengthen, the new hens are laying well and wander further across the park. There are the old breeds of Light Sussex and White Leghorns plus some Marans to give a touch of dark-brown class to the egg basket. Newcomers to the flock are matronly-looking birds with partridge- coloured feathers of grey, buff and burnt sienna. For me they are an experiment, being the progeny of a Maran cock and Welsummer hens. No doubt 49,999 out of the 50,000 Spectator buyers (congratula- tions, by the way, on the huge circulation) know this cross well, and will have records of their annual egg production and whether they make reliable broodies. After you with these, please. A little piece in a poultry magazine about my freest of range hens has got me into trouble. 'What do you feed them on?' asked the man from the maga- zine. 'Wheat, maize, layers' pellets and kitchen scraps,' I answered, innocently and truthfully. Authority spotted this and came down on me like a ton of bricks. 'You can't give them kitchen scraps. It's against the law,' said he. 'Oh dear,' I said. 'How do we know you aren't importing Chinese liquid eggs which might bring in untold numbers of diseases?' I thought that was a bit of an insult to my kitchen as I have never fed my family or our guests on liquid Chinese eggs. `Well, you can give them bits of bread but no meat or fish,' Authority told me. All Spectator readers know that meat and fish is what they adore. A tin of Kit-e-Kat cre- ates a riot in the poultry world, so does a herring or the end of a steak-and-kidney pudding. And what about worms? I sup- pose Authority bans them. They are defi- nitely meat. In this wet weather a No Worm rule will be difficult to enforce. I must ask the advice of my MEP who I hope will provide a policing service from the UN. But I expect he is too busy making laws to put an end not just to keeping chickens but to all farming now we mustn't kill anything.
Which brings me to foxes. Last week Charles James did in 12 of my hens. He bit off their heads and left the bodies strewn about, mounds of feathers in the wet grass. I photographed them to show the school- children who come to our farmyard what Mother Nature gets up to when you look the other way. Charlie didn't bother to eat any of the corpses and none was dragged to the family earth to feed the wife and kids. He was just a serial killer having fun. Long live fox-hunting.
Which brings me to hounds and P. Leigh Fermor's 'D'ye ken John Peel?' in
Italian. I didn't have room to enlarge on it last week but you remember the third verse.
Yes, I ken John Peel and Ruby too, Ranter and Ringwood, Hellman and True ...
Paddy turns Giovanni's hounds into Rubi- no, Vantatore, Rondo Bosco, Campinaio and Fedele. I presume Peel was hunting a mixed pack, as surely Fedele was a bitch (with some Heythrop blood in her, I hope). Not easy for a Cumbrian whipper-in to berate an erring bitch called Fedele, or a dog hound called Vantatore for that mat- ter, but names often sound odd through the clenched teeth of a hunt servant.
The arrival of a new grandchild has reminded me of the excitement of a birth. I have seen calves, foals and lambs born, but never a human baby and I don't think I want to. There is too much at stake. But when it is all over, the neatly packed parcel is a joy to behold and you are overwhelmed by the importance of the start of a new life. Generous friends bring flowers, chocolates, baby clothes and even toys, though it will be a long time before they are of any use to the sleeping recipient. The plastic objects of wicked colours which bung up the nurs- ery are so hideous that I have resolved to stick to books for babies. So I have been looking yet again at nursery rhymes, which never fail to delight, charm, perplex and frighten me all at once.
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread.
That's a good start and a taste of thrills to come.
Ihave been haunted all my life by the plight of the old woman who fell asleep on her way to market. A pedlar named Stout seized the opportunity to cut her petticoats all round about. In a state of shock she couldn't remember who she was: 'This is none of I,' she wailed. There is no sign of Women's Lib. Some of the females are hor- rid but that's not necessarily the same thing. Admittedly Old Mother Slipper Slopper jumped out of bed when she heard trouble outside, but she made her John go out to do the dirty work. The girls know their place and are busy sewing, baking and making themselves pretty. There are four important doctors. Foster, who was so unlucky with the weather when he visited Gloucester; Fell, whom no one liked; Faus- tus, who whipped his scholars out of Eng- land into France; and Hoffman. The last was the GP in charge of the Frankfurt mad- house and the author/illustrator of Struwwelpeter. The title page of this unri- valled classic of don'ts for children reads `Pretty stories and funny pictures'. Pretty? Funny? They are terrifying. We know some of the subjects. You only have to walk down the King's Road to meet Shock- Headed Peter. 'Just look at him! There he stands with his nasty hair and hands . . . ' Great Agrippa, `so tall he almost reached the sky', looked exactly like my father who used to get out of what he called his good clothes and put on a schoolboy's dressing- gown, the very double of Agrippa's. Little Suck-a-Thumb was left Home Alone by his mother and in spite of her warnings 'the thumb was in' and then the tailor 'in he ran, the great long red-legged scissor man'. You know what happened next. It's a comfort to get back to the Lady Who Loved a Swine and Mrs Bond who cried, 'Dilly, Dilly, Dilly come and be killed,' to her ducks. Children brought up on all this can face anything in later life.
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