AD
1968
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1975
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1977
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Me
9
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My father had been a farm labourer. His brother Ralph still was. Every
Sunday morning dad took me up to Uncle Ralph's, and while he helped with
mending and maintaining walls, machinery and buildings, I played with my
cousins or did the hens. Uncle Ralph and Auntie Phyllis had a battery of
hens, which needed daily feed-hopper filling, collection of eggs, and mucking
out. On the weekends, the children did these jobs, so on Sundays that included
me. There was a machine that drew wide scrapers along underneath the hen
cages to clean out the muck, but sometimes this broke down and you had
to fix a handle to a crank and pull the scrapers along manually. I used
to enjoy doing this because turning the handle smoothly was just possible
for a ten-year-old boy, and success was reinforced by the emphatic thud
of a hundred droppings simultaneously exitting into the chute. After seeing
so often, early in life, hens cooped three to a tight cage, I have never
been moved by arguments about the cruelty of factory
farming, at least as it applies to chickens. That this is based on
a wash of experience rather than lines of rational thought is undeniable.
Ralph and Phyllis's daughters, my cousins Sylvia and June, were a few
years older than me. We spent many Sunday mornings playing in their farm's
buildings, with their animals and their toys. They told me that one of
the (unused) cowsheds was an elevator that transported you deep underground,
but I wasn't allowed to go because I was too young. Then they ran in, closed
the door and, presumably, slid open the control console, with its levers
and flashing lights, and powered it down the shaft. When they returned
and stepped out, blinking in the sunlight, I went in and checked: all the
controls were hidden again.
After 1968 they stayed in bed on Sunday mornings and didn't appear
until it was nearly time for us to leave. Later I had early crushes on
them - my last crushes before love got serious.
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