Irish Examiner Column 03/05/2021: At heart, i’m still a pullet

Pullets. It’s one of the words from my childhood that I assumed that everyone used. Words like haggart -the field or farmyard closest to the house- or budget -a knapsack sprayer my father wore like the Mandalorian (without any protective gear, natch) or Latchiko which was a catch-all for people who’d be hanging around and might possibly steal a lawnmower. And then I didn’t hear them again for years. But yesterday, I thought again about pullets.

Pullets are young hens. Hen people will know it but I heard it much in non-hen circles. You’ll recognise non-hen circles because the ground still has a lot of grass on it. Hen-circles are scratched clean.

Every couple of years the hen-house was replenished with pullets to replace those lost to old age or The Fox. It wasn’t one particular fox. It was many foxes. But they would strike without being seen so they were all part of Big Fox.

Sometimes those pullets came to us from cages in giant sheds where they hadn’t had a whole haggart to move in their hen-circles.

After these battery pullets arrived, they huddled in the hen-house for days. They didn’t know how to roost so they stayed in the corner waiting for some bad thing to happen. Unwilling to move. Or even unable to comprehend the concept of moving or the giant world around them. And then gradually, once my mother had mixed Layers Mash with water for enough days and edged them out of their big pile of Hen, they started to get a new lease of life. And before long they were pecking the ground instead of each other and going on to scratch out a very happy existence. Before dying of old age or at the paws of Big Fox.

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