Country life

No news

Patrick M arn ham '

This is the story of Sun Valley, the broiler chicken who got away. As an epic it is not the equal of The Long Walk, but it has its own drama. And it illustrates the most strikin.g feature of the country in winter. In Arcadia we are enjoying the peace of the tomb.

In primitive lands where black men live they take chickens to market hanging upside down with their legs tied to a stick. The birds dangle there all day, slowly choking to death, Until somebody buys them and they can be dispatched. It is the sort of sight which puts gentle spirits off package tourism for ever. hut in the developed world we order such things properly. The chickens are packed into wire baskets of regulation EEC size and loaded onto lorries. If you live near a Sun

Valley broiler farm, you frequently see these lorries speeding along the bypass throbbing With feathers and beaks as their live cargo Struggles to find a way out. The chickens can generally get about halfway through the• mesh, where they stick and remain more or less alive until they reach the supermarket depot. But this one bird was scrawnier than Most and managed to fall off the back of the Sun Valley lorry. It was seen by Bob, a born countryman who is nowadays provided with Work as a builder. (The times have long since past when such men had to toil in the fields.) Anyway Bob was late for work and thought no more about it until on his way home he found it exactly where it had fallen. The weather was mild that day and about one thousand people must have driven past, but Since they were all in motor cars with their Minds on box junctions and Anne Nightingale they could hardly be expected to notice they were also within feet of a verge decorated with a motionless hen

At first Bob thought the bird was dead, but then he realised that it just did not know how to walk. There are people who, confronted With a broiler hen on the loose, would take it to the RSPCA. But there are others, a dimin!Thing and practical band, whose thoughts instead turn to Sunday lunch; Bob was one of them. He was in fact the only person that day Who passed through this well-tended corner Of the rural wilderness, and who had any idea Of how to live in it.

The recent weather has underlined the remoteness of the hills and moors in winter. If a moving car is buried in snow on a main road that is naturally News. But it does not need winter weather to render the countryside remote in winter. Once its use as a summer recreation area ends in late autumn, the country becomes deserted to an extent that might have baffled the much smaller national population of forty years ago. Where, then, there was a boy and a dog with ...the cows,. there is now an electric wire.

Where there were four men hedging, there is

11°w one man and his tractor — the man wearing ear mufflers. The footpaths which

were used twice daily by all the school

children on the hill are now abandoned and, very properly, put under the plough. The

Only objection comes from the self-righteous

rambler who arms himself for his intrepid raid on the meadow with compass, first aid Acts of Parliament and 'day-glo' anorak In ease he should require helicopter rescue.

Of course it is an excellent thing that this stout adventurer should concern himself with what has been destroyed, but somehow though he comes in coachloads it does not make up for the disappearance of the people who formerly worked the land.

Venturing into this desert alone is now, even for country people, a hazardous undertaking. In the nearby market town an old lady who missed her turning on the way home from the shops found herself in a field. She was too tired to cross it but it was not a cold night and she apparently survived till morning. However, though the field ison the edge of town, it was two days before anyone else walked in it, and by then she wasdead. A healthy ganger walked up the railway line in broad daylight and disappeared. The police searched for a week. Eventually they concluded that he had just decided to leave home. Six months later a blocked culvert led to the discovery of his body. He had fainted and fallen into a ditch and been washed under the embankment. It was less than one hundred yards from the station where he was last seen. Last month two married couples went out for a celebration dinner. On the way home their car crashed. This was on a trunk road which is currently being widened due to the load of traffic it carries, and the accident happened just after midnight. For three and a half hours two bodies an'd two survivors lay by the road, and nobody passed or noticed. Eventually one man managed to crawl for help. The other survivor by then had died. Another old man has now been missing for a month in a neighbouring village. His body will probably turn up behind the bus shelter. None of this is News.

As for Sun Valley, when Bob got it home he found that not only could the bird not walk, it could not peck either. Neither skill is needed by the broiler hen. So unusual a chicken aroused the naturalist in him, and within two weeks Sun Valley could walk, peck and, by some fluke, lay eggs. So now it rangesover the fields round his house, which overlook the bypass and the Frankensteinconvoys of feathered lorries.