The Hopkins Manuscript

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It is strange how, in a game of cards, three aces will sometimes turn up, one upon the other, without design or reason.

Three aces suddenly turned up for us in Beadle valley – just when I was beginning to think there were none left in the pack. Nearly four weeks passed by in complete, eventless solitude, and then, upon the twenty-seventh day, came three remarkable events, all within the space of a couple of hours, bewilderingly on top of one another.

In those first four weeks we adapted ourselves swiftly and happily to our new conditions. It was a good idea of mine to arrange clear, definite duties for each of us, for we became so eager to make a success of our job for the sake of the others that we had little time for introspection or disturbing thoughts.

Every morning, directly after breakfast, Robin went off with his fishing-rod and gun. His wound healed quickly, although I knew that he would carry the ugly scar of it to the end of his days. He revelled in his work as hunter, but for three days he returned at twilight, depressed and empty-handed.

I was beginning to grow alarmed at the boy’s lack of success. It was grimly possible that the earth had been swept of every living thing that might have been fresh food for us. Our tinned meat could not last beyond a month and I knew that life depended upon something more than vegetables.

But on the fourth day the boy returned, to my astonishment and consternation, with a hedgehog. He had caught it amongst the willows by the river and he declared that hedgehogs were delicious when baked in gypsy fashion, complete with skin and bristles, over a brushwood fire.

Pat and I had a bad half-hour as we waited in the kitchen, listening to the crackle of Robin’s fire outside and trying to overlook the horrid odour of burning quills. We agreed, for the boy’s sake, to eat a bit of it, and I was just getting out the brandy as a precaution when Robin came in, red-eyed from the smoke, to make the curt announcement that hedgehog was off the menu. The creature had looked so uncanny without its bristles, he explained, that he could not go on with it. But that was our darkest evening, for next day a far different Robin – a triumphant, jubilant Robin, came in with three small fish. We fried them in sardine oil and ate them like smelts: they were rather tasteless but at least they were fresh, and we drank to Robin’s first success in port that night.

Then came the evening when we saw him scrambling breathlessly up the hillside, waving a small brown object in the twilight and shouting: ‘Hi! – look here!’

It was a young rabbit. Miles away, in a cleft of the downs, he had come upon a thicket almost unscathed by the hurricane, with standing trees and shrubs in blossom, and best of all, the burrows of rabbits.

We stewed it and it was delicious. I was inexpressibly relieved, for where there is one rabbit there are many. Robin never returned empty handed again: a rabbit almost every day, and fish that we quickly learned to cook most palatably with Worcester sauce. Once he even shot a crow, but I cannot describe its appearance when plucked, and we buried it beside the hedgehog.

I loved my work in the garden. I had enjoyed growing vegetables even when they were plentiful in the markets, but grim necessity now gave double zest to my work. In the past I had bought my seeds in packets, but now I had to preserve my own. I had, of course, to draw mainly upon my stores at first, but the seedlings were coming on well and I dug several new parts, once used as flower-beds, for extra potatoes and brussels sprouts. I made the most careful calculations and was confident that with reasonable luck I would not fail the kitchen for a single day in the year.

Best of all was the time when Robin and I returned home at twilight, our day’s work done, to test what Pat had prepared for us during our absence. She knew quite well the need for conserving our scanty store of food, but she never failed to produce a tasty, four-course dinner, varying our supplies with the help of Mrs Buller’s cookery book and presenting us with never-ending varieties.

I wonder sometimes whether I am now looking with rose-tinted spectacles at those anxious, strenuous, exciting days – whether I have forgotten many a dark moment of hopelessness and terror that we sought to conceal from one another – but always I think back upon them with pride and happiness.

We had to keep careful check of the days, for we had no means of knowing which was Sunday and which was Monday unless I ticked each evening in my diary before retiring to bed. We checked our watches by the sun, for my diary told me the time it set each day.

It was Pat’s idea that Sunday should be a day of rest, with a gala evening at the close of it.

We had a simple service on those Sunday mornings. I was afraid it might be embarrassing with only three of us, but it turned out to be refreshing and quite natural. After Sunday lunch we would walk a little, although Pat insisted that we should rest as much as possible that day.

And then, after tea, would come the big event of the week. Robin and I changed into dinner jackets and Pat put on an attractive dress that she had salvaged from The Manor House. Dinner was cold, to save us cooking, but more generous and varied than upon other nights. I had six bottles of champagne, and one was opened with great ceremony upon each Sunday evening. We followed dinner with a dance to the gramophone and a game of cards, and Pat would say, as we said goodnight, ‘That’s kept us civilised for another week!’

It was upon the Monday following the third of our gala nights when that startling sequence of events occurred: startling because they were totally disconnected from each other, and yet all three happened within a couple of hours.

Robin and I had gone to The Manor House to bring some coal across from the cellars. We were just slinging the sacks across our shoulders when suddenly, without warning, an old man came shambling out of the coach house with a spade.

We dropped our sacks in astonishment: I could scarcely believe my eyes – and the next moment Robin was shouting: ‘Humphrey! – my God! – it’s Humphrey!’

The man stared dumbfounded: for a moment he crouched down in terror at Robin’s headlong approach – and then he threw down his spade and took Robin’s hand and began laughing and crying and muttering incoherent sounds: ‘Master Robin… Master Robin…’ was all that I could understand.

He was an old man, past seventy I should say, small and wiry and wrinkled. He had lived in a cottage upon the far side of The Manor House and for twenty years had been a man-of-all-work upon the farm.

How he had survived we never clearly knew, for he was very hazy about it himself and the account of his adventures varied a great deal in each telling. He didn’t ‘hold with’ the dugout in Burgin Park, and on the fatal night had ‘just gone to bed’. The noise of the storm had kept him awake until suddenly ‘the whole bloomin’ house had fallen on top of him’. He had wriggled beneath the bed and lain buried for ‘no end of a time’. Eventually he had made his way through piles of debris and hobbled to The Manor House. Finding it deserted he had made up a bed of straw in the apple store, creeping out occasionally to look for scraps of food in The Manor House larder, but lying for most of the time in the darkness, nursing an injured knee.

We helped the old man across the valley and Pat was overjoyed to see an old retainer of her family. She gave him tea and a slice of pudding. Humphrey was obviously devoted to the boy and girl (he had, amongst other things, looked after their ponies when they were children), but the poor old fellow was so dazed by his sudden change in fortune that he could only mutter through his mouthfuls of pudding: ‘Anything I can do, miss… anything I can do…’

We elected him at once a member of our Community and gave him a job of his own. There was nothing that Humphrey did not know about farming. The home farm of The Manor House was upon high ground beyond the ravages of flood, and as the fields had been sown before the cataclysm, Humphrey was elected our farmer. He was to care for the crops, and bring the wheat along when ready.

The old man was a little frightened by his heavy responsibilities and kept murmuring: ‘If only I had a cow… I’d bring you all you needed then.’

‘Maybe we’ll find a cow one day,’ said Robin.

‘You find a cow and a bull, Master Robin! – I’ll do the rest!’

We were a little perplexed to know how to accommodate the old man. To take his meals and live with us in a social way would have been embarrassing both to us and to him, for although he was not actually a half-wit, there were obvious limits to his conversational powers. But fortunately he solved the problem himself by asking permission to live in the apple store, where he had made himself very comfortable.

‘I’ve always lived by meself,’ he said, ‘and I’d like to now – if it’s the same to you.’

It was a spacious, well-built shed, very little damaged, filled with the sweet odour of stored apples and hay. We brought a mattress and blankets from The Manor House and made the place as comfortable as possible. Pat was reluctant to let the old man live like this, but he so obviously preferred it that I persuaded her from ill-spent kindness. He was to come over to my house for an hour each morning to make the fires, skin the rabbit and do the work which I hated Pat having to undertake herself. He was to spend the rest of his day in the fields, receiving in return his meals and any comforts we could provide for him.

Although naturally I was glad to have the old man to help us, I must confess that I was a little offended by his general behaviour. He was so completely obsessed by a desire to ‘help Master Robin and Miss Patricia’ that he scarcely glanced at me, and when he replied to my questions, he spoke to me as if I were another servant instead of being the principal person. But he was, as I have said, a completely illiterate old man, and I made allowances for him.

We had only just left Humphrey to enjoy the comforts of his shed and were returning across the valley when the second, and infinitely more dramatic, event occurred.

Slowly, from the stillness, came a sound: the first man-made sound within a month to disturb the silence of the valley. At first I took it to be the purr of a motor-cycle a long way off upon the Mulcaster Road, but gradually it gathered power and fullness: the purr rose to a roar, and over the hillcrest came an aeroplane!

We behaved like maniacs: we ran up the slope, waved hats and handkerchiefs and yelled our heads off!

The pilot of the aeroplane did not appear to share our frantic excitement: we saw his goggled face peer down at us in complete unconcern: he gave no response to our waving hats, and it seemed at first as if he would leave us to our solitude. Then he changed his mind, circled around in search of a landing place, and dropped gently to the downs.

I will leave the reader to imagine the burning thrill and excitement of our scramble across to that shabby little monoplane. The discovery of Humphrey in the apple store was nothing compared with this. Humphrey was a slow-witted farm labourer: one of our own villagers who had nothing to tell us beyond what we already knew: but here at last was a messenger from the outside world! – someone of intelligence: someone who could, at long last, quench our desperate thirst for news!

The pilot was out of his machine and pulling off his goggles and helmet when we reached him. He was a tall, thin young man with a pale, grimy face and intelligent, deep-set eyes: he was wearing grey flannel trousers, an oil-stained leather jacket and a red and blue striped muffler.

Had I been in a normal state of mind I should have resented his casual, offhand reception of us. No doubt he was tired and I am sure that we must have appeared ridiculous and undignified as we raced up to him with outstretched hands, panting out joyful words of welcome and incoherent questions.

He accepted our handshakes abruptly and impatiently, although he favoured Pat with a thin smile and a slight inclination of his head. But while the eyes of all three of us were upon him with burning interest, he took little notice of us in return. He glanced around him and began to study a ragged map in his hand.

‘What’s this place?’ he asked.

‘Beadle!’ we chimed in chorus.

He pored over the map in silence for a while, then raised his eyes and let them rove across our valley. Only then did I see how desperately tired they looked, with deep grey pits beneath them.

‘Beadle…’ he muttered. ‘I see. How many of you are there?’

‘Three!’ I said.

‘Four!’ cried Pat, ‘counting Humphrey!’

The young man produced a greasy little notebook and a stub of pencil.

‘Beadle… four,’ he muttered as he wrote it down. Then he glanced up, dropped the notebook into his pocket and nodded to us. ‘Thanks,’ he said – and to my astonishment turned and climbed back into his machine.

I was dumbfounded by his extraordinary behaviour. ‘But surely!’ I exclaimed, ‘aren’t you going to stay?’

He looked over the edge of his cockpit in surprise. ‘Stay?… why?’

I was growing angry. Only by an effort did I control myself and answer calmly:

‘Don’t you realise we haven’t seen a soul… not a single living creature… since this happened?… Surely you realise we want to… to know something!’

He gave a short, hard laugh. ‘How much work d’you suppose I’d do if I stopped and gossiped with everybody I meet?’

‘But we want news!’ I cried.

‘What exactly d’you want to know?’ he answered.

For the life of me I could not frame a definite question: there were a thousand things that I wanted to know – a thousand questions tumbling over one another to be asked – but all that I could say was:

‘Where’s the moon?’

It was the young man’s turn to look surprised.

‘Don’t you know!’ he exclaimed.

‘Of course we don’t know! – we’ve heard nothing!’

‘The moon’s in the Atlantic. I thought everybody knew that,’ and he began to adjust the controls of his machine.

It was Pat’s turn to play a part. She had remained quite silent until this moment, but now she came forward and laid her hand upon the edge of the machine. ‘You look frightfully tired,’ she said. ‘It isn’t good to fly when you’re tired. Come in and have some tea. It’s ready now.’

The young airman was tempted. He fidgeted with the control board of his machine, glanced at his watch, then braced himself abruptly to the call of duty.

‘Good of you,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got to do the rest of Hampshire before it’s dark.’

‘You’ll do it a lot better after a cup of tea,’ suggested Pat, ‘… and a few chocolate biscuits,’ she added.

The young man’s head came up with a jerk. ‘Chocolate biscuits?… where did you get those from?… looting’s forbidden, you know.’

His remark was no doubt meant in fun, but it gave me an unpleasant shock. I had most brazenly looted the grocery shop in the village and had probably laid myself open to a sentence of death.

‘Come and try our loot, anyway,’ said Pat.

The young man gave way. ‘Ten minutes, that’s all,’ he said, and climbed out of his seat.

Robin said afterwards that Pat had behaved like a shameless huzzy, luring the young man from his plane with a lot of cheap ‘vamping’. But I knew quite well that she had done it for my sake, in order that I could satisfy my lust for news.

Pat went off to the kitchen to make the tea and the tired young airman sprawled himself before the library fire.

‘You seem to have come out of it pretty well,’ he remarked, glancing around the room. ‘My name’s Rooke-Glanville,’ he added.

‘Mine is Edgar Hopkins,’ I replied.

I wished that I could have said ‘Sir Edgar Hopkins’ or something of that kind. The patronising manner of the youth offended me, and I should have enjoyed giving him a gentle snub. He scarcely spoke until Pat returned with the tea. He apparently considered Robin and me of little consequence, and was awaiting the return of Pat in order to show off before her.

‘Now!’ said Pat, placing a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits beside him: ‘you don’t go until you’ve told us everything. Start at the beginning and go on until the end.’

The airman laughed, and pushed a biscuit into his mouth. ‘You want a ten-hour story in ten minutes!’

‘All the more reason for starting at once!’ rejoined Pat.

We had made a mistake in greeting the youth so eagerly, for he clearly belonged to the type that loves the taste of power and he made the most of it by playing upon our suspense. He stretched his legs to the fire as if the house belonged to him and began to prolong our anxiety with silly compliments to Pat about the tea. I could see that Pat shared my opinion of the young gentleman, but she played up to him against her will in order to get the story as fully as possible.

‘I’m not an airman by profession,’ he began. ‘I’m really a scientist: the air was just my hobby. I was one of the scientists selected by the Government for their big dugout at Beaconsfield: the Government took careful steps to see that as many as possible of the best brains survived.’

He winked heavily at Pat to make sure of her understanding this as a piece of wit.

‘Beaconsfield is on high ground. It missed the flood and we came through safely. By eight o’clock in the morning we were having breakfast as if nothing had happened.’

‘I was walking about at six o’clock that morning as if nothing had happened,’ I put in. (It was a slight exaggeration but I was compelled to keep the bumptious youth in his place.)

‘Never mind what we all did!’ said Pat. ‘Tell us what happened!’

‘That’s what I’m coming to,’ said the airman. ‘The scientists reckoned that if the moon struck the earth at the time expected – at 8.23 pm – it would land with a bang in the centre of Europe, and goodbye to the lot of us. Fortunately they were wrong: wrong to the tune of nine minutes, and those nine minutes saved us. The moon came over Europe like a huge meteor, falling in a slanting direction from the north-east: it was less than five hundred miles above you when it passed over this valley…’

‘We never saw it!’ said Robin.

‘Of course you didn’t see it. It was too close to the earth to take the reflection of the sun, and in any case it was dragging that colossal dust cloud along with it. It landed at two minutes past eight-thirty, upon the western edge of Europe, just grazing our own island at Cornwall, the west coast of Ireland, and France and Spain.’

The young man took a biscuit and crunched it noisily before proceeding.

‘No scientist expected the world to survive, you know… that stuff about a “graze” was just bunkum… just a sop to keep you quiet.’

‘We realised that perfectly well,’ I stiffly replied. ‘I am not altogether a country yokel, although I live in the country. I happen to be a member of the British Lunar Society and knew a good deal about all this – probably before you did!’

‘Fancy that!’ said the young man with a laugh. His conceit was so intense that the rebuff had no effect whatever.

‘Go on,’ said Pat.

‘Possibly the air pressure had something to do with it – possibly the resistance of the Atlantic – anyway the shock was not fatal to the earth: it performed some strange antics and the moon rolled into the ocean, like an enormous bagatelle ball into its pocket, and collapsed.’

‘Collapsed?’ I exclaimed.

‘Of course it collapsed,’ replied the airman. ‘The moon is a dead world, and the cooling of its inside had naturally caused great caverns. Practically speaking it was a hollow body with a thick crust and the force of its landing made it collapse like a fat pancake. Have you got a map?’

I produced my Encyclopaedia Britannica and opened it upon the map of the world. The airman produced his stub of pencil and began to trace a rough circle that filled the whole of the North Atlantic, one side of the circle merging upon Ireland and Spain, and the other upon Canada and the United States of America.

‘There’s your new Map of the World,’ he said, handing the book to me. ‘The diameter of the moon was 2,000 miles – the width of the Atlantic is 3,000. It was the moon’s collapse that made it span the whole ocean from one side to the other.’

Pat was staring at the map over my shoulder. ‘Then America is joined to Europe!’ she exclaimed.

The young man nodded and pushed the last biscuit into his mouth. ‘You can now walk from Penzance to New York… if you want to. Could I have another cup of your excellent tea?’

We were silent while Pat filled the young man’s cup. The news was bewildering, for I had thoroughly decided, in my own mind, that the moon had ‘grazed’ us and disappeared into space.

‘What are we going to do about it?’ I asked.

‘Nothing has yet been decided,’ he replied, with a meaningless wink at Pat which annoyed me.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘you will favour us with some news of how the world survived the shock?’

‘There were three separate, independent forces of destruction,’ announced the young man as if he were lecturing to children, ‘the tornado, the earthquake, and the flood. The tornado was worldwide and we can only judge its havoc by our own experience. A lot of damn fools refused to go to the dugouts’ (it was my turn to exchange a wink with Pat) ‘and most of these were killed, buried under buildings or swept away. The flood was caused by the masses of water displaced by the moon when it fell into the Atlantic. Most of the water was forced north and south, over Greenland and towards the South Pole, but a huge wall of ocean was forced up the valleys of England and over the Continent.’

‘Within a few feet of this house,’ I said.

‘It would have been about 800 feet high, receding gradually as it flowed inland. If you look at your map of England you can reckon that all the land coloured green was submerged for about two hours, and all the land coloured brown, over 500 feet, remained dry like islands in an archipelago. There was a reaction – a “back suction” – that drew most of it away, but it hasn’t settled down yet: it still sways to and fro, running up the valleys and flooding all the low land every day or so.’

‘How did London fare?’

‘London,’ said the airman, ‘is still under water, covered by fathoms of mud. A good many people escaped, mainly those who were in the Underground Railways. They were led along the tunnels and brought out at Hampstead which stood above the flood: as for the rest…’ The young man blew a kiss in an offensive indication that they were dead.

‘And what happens now?’ asked Robin. The boy had scarcely spoken. His eyes had been fixed upon the airman in fascinated silence.

‘The Government’s been set up at Oxford,’ said the young man. ‘They are working like stoats and doing pretty well. Every town and community is looking after itself as best it can until the central control gets working. The Government is mobilising labour to clear the roads and engineers are getting the main services at work again. And now,’ he said, laying down his cup, ‘I must be off.’

He stood up and reached for his helmet and goggles and we walked with him across the downs to his machine.

‘What have you got down there?’ he asked, pointing to the King Lear in my meadow.

I explained to him, but he was not particularly interested. ‘There’s a couple of battleships and a submarine on Salisbury Plain,’ he said, ‘you were in luck to get a luxury liner!’

‘It may seem amusing to you,’ I tartly replied, ‘but that happens to be my meadow! If you are in touch with the Government I shall be obliged by you telling them that I want the boat removed with as little delay as possible.’

‘How do you suggest they move it?’ he asked.

‘That is not my business. I presume it takes to bits?’ The young man stared reflectively at the huge, rusting hulk in my meadow: its great screws glittered in the setting sun.

‘I’ll tell them,’ he said, ‘but you can’t expect them to take much interest. There’s no Atlantic to cross any longer.’

My heart sank. I had forgotten that the moon now blocked the sea passage to New York.

‘Take my advice and keep it,’ he said. ‘One day you can turn it into a hotel.’

‘But it’s lying sideways,’ objected Robin.

‘Makes it more interesting,’ replied the airman. ‘Call it the Hotel Sideways: doors in the ceiling – windows on the floor – great novelty.’

He climbed into his monoplane and pulled the goggles over his eyes.

‘Scattered people are being told to make their way to the nearest towns.’ He pointed vaguely to the north. ‘You three had better pack up and trot along to Mulcaster – there’s about a hundred people in the town. You’ll be all right there. It’s about six miles across the downs.’

‘Having won every important prize at the Mulcaster Poultry Show,’ I replied with biting sarcasm, ‘I know where Mulcaster happens to be, almost as well as you do.’ I was really angry at this absurd attempt to patronise me. ‘We have organised ourselves here without waiting for instructions. We are self-supporting and propose to stay in Beadle.’

‘Good!’ responded the airman. ‘All the better! – Self-supporting – that’s the great thing.’

He reached over the cockpit and shook hands with Pat.

‘Thanks for the tea,’ he said.

‘Thanks for all the news,’ replied Pat.

‘Not at all,’ said the young man, holding Pat’s hand with offensive familiarity. ‘A pleasure. Goodbye!’

‘Goodbye!’

We watched the battered little monoplane drone away into the evening sky, and as we turned towards the house Pat glanced at me with a glint of amusement in her eyes.

‘You weren’t very polite,’ she said.

‘Awful outsider!’ exploded Robin.

‘A cad, I’m afraid,’ I murmured.

‘Anyway, we got the news we wanted. Strange to think we aren’t the only people in the world, after all!’

Strange it certainly was – but stranger still was my own reaction to it. It would be absurd to suggest that I was not deeply glad to hear that many others had survived, but the news of people living as near to us as Mulcaster had somehow taken the edge off our gallant adventure and brought anticlimax to our brave determination to face the world alone. The dark moments of the past three weeks were forgotten now. I thought only of the happy, sunlit mornings as Pat waved goodbye to Robin the hunter, as he strode down the valley with his gun: as she waved goodbye to me the gardener, as I strode up the hillside with my spade. I thought of the evenings, with the day’s work done, when we gathered in the dining-room to see what food Pat had prepared for us – and the nights, around the fire, as we talked over our adventures of the day, and planned the work ahead. It all seemed over now: and only now did I realise how intensely happy I had been.

I do not think that I was alone with these thoughts, for Pat and Robin were very silent as we returned to the house. It needed an hour to dinner-time. Pat went to the kitchen to prepare the meal: Robin, unusually reflective, sat down in the library and pored over the map of the world upon which the airman had drawn that rough circle with all its incredible meaning.

For the first time since the cataclysm I felt at a loose end. I called out to Pat that I was going for a stroll: I took my hat and walking-stick and went out to encounter the third, and to me the most delightful and miraculous surprise of that eventful day.

About half a mile beyond the ruined village, the valley closed in to a kind of narrow neck, and in this neck an immense pile of debris had collected as a result of the storm and flood. I had not, until now, had leisure to inspect this mountain of wreckage and I decided to walk down and see whether anything of value had got stranded there.

I found it to consist mainly of broken trees, part of the Beadle cricket pavilion and a large assortment of small, empty beer bottles, apparently from the Fox & Hounds.

I was poking about in this depressing rubbish when I was startled by a faint rustling sound. Noise of any kind was rare in our silent valley and my senses were immediately alert. After a while it came again – a little to my right, from amidst a thick mass of twisted branches – a furtive, uncanny stirring…

I can face open, visible danger as well as anybody, but there was something in that feeble sound that clove my tongue to the roof of my mouth and dried my throat – the thought came to me of some half-drowned, half-living human body, horribly emaciated by weeks of exposure, and I knew that I was a coward. With Pat or Robin with me I could have gone calmly to investigate, but I was terribly alone – I was trembling – I was upon the point of stealing shamefully away, when something white upon the ground attracted me: a snow-white feather – fresh, unmuddied – and dry! In a flash I was beside the tangled branches, frantically pulling them apart: there was an alarmed flutter, a cackle of fear, and there was Broodie! – my beloved Broodie! – the finest hen that ever stepped in Hampshire!

How can I describe my feelings of wonder and delight? There stood Broodie, cowering in the arbour of branches where she had made her nest – and there behind her lay three eggs!

Never shall I know the epic story of Broodie’s survival. I can only assume that when my chicken houses had blown away, Broodie was caught in this barrier of branches and saved from destruction. How she had lived through the past three weeks was a miracle, yet characteristic of this sterling hen. There was a pool of brackish water nearby – and for food she must have lived, literally, from claw to beak.

‘Broodie!’ I cried. ‘Broodie! – It’s me!’

Poor Broodie did not recognise me at first, and I do not wonder, considering what she had been through. She cowered back in her wild, ragged nest, until I had made my way, with many jags and scratches, through the branches. I took her up gently and held her closely to my face.

‘Broodie!’ I said, ‘don’t you know me?’

Broodie stared at me with a bloodshot, beady eye, and then grew calm and began the little crooning cry that I knew so well.

I carried her in triumph to the house. I held her up to the astonished eyes of Pat and Robin.

‘Look!’ I exclaimed.

‘A chicken!’ cried Robin. ‘Chicken for dinner tomorrow! Good for you, Uncle!’

I stared at Robin in amazement. The boy could not have hurt me more if he had struck me between the eyes. I realised afterwards that he did not know how revolting to me was the thought of having Broodie for dinner.

‘It is Broodie,’ I cried.

The announcement seemed to convey nothing to Pat and Robin.

‘How can you tell?’ asked Robin. ‘They all look alike to me whether they are broody or not.’

For answer I walked to the cupboard of my library, threw open the door and pointed to the unique collection within – to Broodie’s fifty First Prizes – to her ribbons, medals and challenge cups.

‘Those,’ I said, ‘are Broodie’s prizes.’

Pat and Robin exchanged scared glances. I think that, for the moment, they feared my mind had become unhinged, and then light dawned upon Pat.

‘Oh! – she’s yours! D’you mean she won all those prizes! – she must be a wonderful hen! – she is a wonderful hen’ – and Pat was stroking Broodie’s head.

I waved my hand once more towards the cupboard.

‘She won all those in nineteen months,’ I said.

‘She’s done something on your coat,’ said Robin.

I liked Robin, for he was a nice boy, but I frequently had cause to be irritated by his thoughtless and rather silly idea of humour.

But Pat was different: she understood.

‘How splendid to find her! Where was she?’

I told her.

‘We must make her comfortable and give her a home… and something to eat.’

It was growing dark and Broodie was very tired. She pecked listlessly at a few crumbs of biscuit and yawned. I fixed her up for the night in the toolshed; I laid a broomstick across the shelves as a temporary perch and decided to make a run for her next day.

Broodie’s arrival had delayed dinner for a few minutes and Robin was annoyed.

‘Lot of fuss over a damn chicken,’ I heard him say to Pat as I returned, and for the first time I lost my temper with the boy.

‘We all take a pride in something, my boy. Broodie may only be a “damn chicken” to you. To me she happens to represent the result of years of striving – years of work to produce the ideal chicken.’

Robin looked at me in surprise. ‘Sorry,’ he said. And for the first time in our adventure he ate his meal in sullen silence.

It is a pity that so many of our happiest experiences are marred by some trivial squabble.

I lay sleepless for many hours that night, the joy of Broodie’s return crushed by the fear that this little difference with Robin might widen into an irreconcilable quarrel, for I knew that Pat, in the long run, must take her brother’s side.

But gradually the miracle of Broodie’s return surmounted every other thought.

When we had appointed old Humphrey our farmer, he had sighed and said: ‘If only I had a cow and a bull, I’d give you everything.’

In bed that night I tossed to and fro, murmuring again and again: ‘If only I had a cockerel – a good, thoroughbred cockerel, worthy of my Broodie!’