Louise parked the embarrassing green van outside the school. We were late, so no little girls stood gazing curiously and sniggering as I arrived. Mummy took me in and handed me over to Miss Neilson, whose browny-red face and knot of white hair reminded me of an onion.
My new school was wonderful. Light bow-windowed classrooms, different coloured exercise books for each subject, a huge playing-field surrounded by chestnut trees, order and punctuality, and best of all, girls. I had never experienced undiluted female company before. I frisked in the soft scented air which surrounded the sixth-formers, and studiously copied the fourth-form fashions in folders and satchels.
On the first day at Rec, the new name I had to learn for playtime, I sat stiff at my desk, willing someone to come and talk to me but at the same time praying for invisibility to observe the bonds of friendship forming between the others. A sturdy girl with the face of a refined bull terrier approached. ‘I’ve seen you at Pony Club,’ she said, and I cringed. I recognized her from a day when Shalimar demolished the doughnut stand at a horse show and Mummy laughed so much that she lay down on the grass next to him, her dress beaded with sugar from the doughnuts. Humiliated by both pet and parent, I had walked away from the scene.
‘I’m Amelia Letson,’ continued the bull terrier. Searching her face for mockery, I found none, and replied, ‘I’m Gabriella Lincoln.’
Another girl, big-boned, blonde, skin the colour of rich cream, moved towards us. ‘Hello. You ride at my aunt’s stables, don’t you? I’ve seen you when I’ve been to tea at Grandma’s house.’ I recognized her as Sasha Warton and smiled gratefully. We talked about ponies until a bell shrilled in our ears and classes began again.
Each day, after assembly in the hall where wafts of lunch and beeswax polish mingled with teachers’ scent and pupils’ nail varnish and hairspray, I examined my timetable. Terrified of being late, I ran to the classrooms. The chemistry lab was my favourite room in the school even though I was not good at science. High mahogany tables ran in rows and on each table Bunsen burners were umbilically tethered to hidden gas pipes by yellow tubes. Test tubes gleamed in neat ranks, half-filled with peacock-bright crystals of blue, violet and sulphurous yellow.
Chemistry was like cooking in a well-ordered kitchen but more fun. My chocolate-brown chemistry exercise books were immaculate. I relished their pristine perfection and lost marks for writing on only one side of the page. I left the facing page blank because it looked nice. At the beginning of my third year, the school opened a new three-storey science block and I lost interest in chemistry. The subject had no charm when we sat at plastic-topped desks and worked at low white benches round the wall. The brown exercise books became blotched and crumpled like all the rest of my work, and I found no pleasure in mixing formulas. The possibility of inventing Frankenstein’s monster had evaporated like burned-off copper sulphate in the new sterile surroundings.
Briefly inspired by botany, I made a garden at Mildney. I dug a small patch by the kitchen wall and planted it with mint and tulips. Each day I weeded and tended my patch, gaining satisfaction from the regimental rows of flowers and my manicured expanse of earth. It was a hazardous pastime. The path leading from my garden to the back yard was the boundary of the conceited cockerel Cedric’s province, and its prettiness belied the danger lurking in the lupins. Cedric was a bantam. He had long russet feathers which glistened copper and green when he preened. He had a blood-red comb as plump as an ear lobe and a very high opinion of himself.
But like all braggadocios, Cedric was a coward. Camouflaged, he hid in the flower-beds awaiting his victims, the amber bead of his eye glowing malevolently from the foliage. He watched me toiling in my garden and, when my back was turned, sprang, neck extended and wings akimbo. His hooked beak jabbed my ear, his horny spurs scrabbled against my spine and I screamed and ran for the back door. Cedric let go and vanished, a ball of fire tumbling into a distant clump of nettles where he knew he was safe.
Brodie came out with a stick to chase him but Cedric crouched invisible until Brodie turned his back and then he repeated the ambush. He was Brodie’s bird, but he ignored the rules of fealty and attacked his master as much as anyone else. He deserved a gruesome punishment, but the massacre effected by the dogs was too great a price to pay.
Returning from a family outing we bumped up the drive, opening the doors of the car before it had stopped. I ran to greet Honey and my puppy, Miriam. They were newly back from the muck heap. ‘Ugh, you dogs stink.’ I edged past them towards the field. Looking back at the house, I noticed dark bundles littered across the grass, inert heaps which from a distance looked like stones. I approached one and gasped. It was Cilla Black, the mother of the Pop Stars, one of our bantam families. Cilla Black’s beady yellow eyes were closed, her beak was half open and her little pink tongue protruded pathetically. She lay, her neck twisted awkwardly on the glistening black bulk of her body, dead but still warm. A few yards away, Gary Glitter and Rod Stewart, a pair of young roosters who had been inseparable in life, were heaped together in death, their long tail-feathers trailing like a widow’s weeds.
I stood appalled, my mouth a screaming square. No one came. No one came. From all over the garden I heard the shrilling yells and bellows of my brothers as they discovered more corpses. Mummy was crouched over something by the washing line. Leaning over, I saw what she was looking at. Emerald the tame hen, who laid her eggs on the doormat for our convenience and ate from our hands, gently, not with the darting movements which frightened small children, lay panting and trembling at Mummy’s feet. Relief washed over me. At least one of them was alive.
Mummy was crying. ‘Those bloody dogs. Those bloody dogs.’ Miriam loped up, kissed Mummy with her soft tongue and whisked off again.
‘I think she was saying sorry,’ I said.
‘Don’t you believe it.’ Mummy’s tone was grim. ‘She’s deranged. Honey would never have done this. It’s all that puppy’s doing.’
We took Emerald into the coal shed and made her a bed on Flook’s anorak. We gave her bread and milk and she fluffed up her feathers and regained her low crooning voice. Daddy appeared in the door of the shed with a spade. ‘I’m going to shoot those goddam dogs,’ he muttered, ‘but first we must bury the dead.’ He stomped off to dig a grave. Brodie and Flook, a drooping hen under each arm, trailed after him to the Wilderness. Twenty-five hens died. Only Emerald and Cedric, whose cowardice had protected him, survived. Cedric was roosting high up in the lime tree squawking hoarsely every two minutes as though he had been hypnotized. He did not come down until the next day. The hens had been frightened to death by Miriam’s game. She pranced and barked around each one, whipped into further hysteria by the flying feathers and squawks as the poor foolish hens ran round in circles trying to escape.
Mummy said we had to give Miriam away, and sadly I agreed. She could not go on living in a house with hens, even dead hens. Miriam was taken. Mummy felt a twinge of conscience as she was driven off by her proud new owners, a pair of pigeon-fanciers from Wisbech whom we had told nothing of her crime.
Emerald recovered but the shock had affected her hormones. Hearing a strangled cry a few days later, I ran out and found her perched on a log trying to crow. Every day she ritualistically made the attempt and, as her crowing improved, long tail-feathers sprouted and her comb grew raspberry red and large like Cedric’s. In three months her transformation was complete and Emerald became a cockerel, a fit sparring partner for the insufferable Cedric.