Behind enemy lines

Eggs – depending on your point of view, either God’s way of showing us all how clever He is or evolution at its finest. And when our aged bantam – daily serviced by the cockerel - laid a clutch and got seriously broody, we waited for her to produce a new and rather more productive generation of hens - but instead ended up with just a pair of chicks, both of which turned out to be cocks. And a right pair of bastards they were too – perfect coq au vin material. Evil eyed, bolshie and aggressive, all they needed were hoodies to compete in the meanest of farmyards.

Which gave me an idea. Although a devout omnivore (and unlike our more practical farming friends), I’m far too much of a coward to slaughter anything – stroppy cockerels included. So I was especially pleased to come up with a suitably devious plan to rid us of our self inflicted menace.

Down the track, over the stream and up a woodland path on the opposite side of the valley, lies a farm. No doubt you have a happily bucolic vision of French farms – gnarled wood and stone, hens pecking in the yard and crisp laundry billowing on the washing line. However, our friendly (but thankfully distant and hidden from view) neighbour doesn’t have one of these – his is more the ‘knackered bungalow, series of barns in varying degrees of dilapidation, rusting tractors and enough plastic wrapped silage bales to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool’ type. And, amongst the legions of inbred fowl scuttling about, it’s not somewhere a couple of extra cockerels would be noticed. Perfect, in short, for our needs.

It was now early November and, having waited for a starlit but moonless night, No. 1 son and I donned our ski masks, popped the protesting birds into a small crate, strapped it to the quad and set off. Stopping a few hundred metres from the drop zone, the birds were extracted from their box and, with their beaks gently but firmly held closed, we crept up to the farmyard.  The dog barked briefly, then thankfully buggered off back to his kennel. We released the cocks and scarpered, looking back just long enough to watch them scope the yard then swagger off to find some unsuspecting victims.

There’s a chemin rural which passes through the farm, so for weeks after our incursion we could ride by and watch our feathered thugs thrive and randomly terrorise its residents. Then one early spring day they disappeared and we could only guess as to their fate - although the waft of cooking coming from the kitchen might have been a clue.  A true morality tale, but with chips.