She Wasn’t A Chicken Herself

She wasn’t a chicken herself, but she had a sister who was. Nancy, they’d called her, which was a perfectly normal name for a sister, but a little out there for a chicken. Her parents could never be drawn on the specifics of Nancy’s birth. First, she’d had two brothers. Then, her mother had been thick with the possibility of a third and disappeared for several weeks to the hospital from whence babies came, only to return with a wicker basket containing a clucking brown hen. “Meet your new sister, Nancy,” Mother had said and smiled up at her in a most convincing fashion. Daddy had been smiling too and nodding like a lunatic, so she’d said, “lovely to meet you Nancy,” and smiled and patted the chicken on top of its sleek, brown head, though she wasn’t for a minute convinced. Even if her brothers weren’t, she was old enough to know the difference between a chicken and a sister.

Nancy was no work whatsoever. She ate what was put in front of her, required no fancy frocks or frippery of any kind and followed her siblings demurely round the garden each time they were put outside to play. If from time to time, Nancy embarrassed them by laying a smooth white egg in the presence of the children from next door or necking a wiggly worm straight out of the flowerbed, her behaviour was always excused by her older sister. “Don’t mind Nancy,” she’d say. “She’s just rather young for her age. Mother says she’ll soon grow out of this chicken phase.”

Mother said no such thing. Mother had yet to acknowledge that her fourth child was a chicken. She made no difference between her youngest and eldest daughter. Both slept beneath chintzy white sheets in the girls’ nursery. Both were given china-faced dolls as Christening presents: Mabel for one, and Elspeth for the other. Both were dandled upon her knee each night as she read a bedtime story from the works of Beatrix Potter or A.A. Milne, though Nancy was inclined to fidget dreadfully throughout the reading, pecking viciously at her mother’s earrings. If anything, Nancy seemed favoured above the other children, though perhaps this was an unfair reading of the situation. Nancy was the youngest and as such, most likely to be babied by her mother. Even at three and four, she was still being carted around the house in her mother’s arms, cradled like a tiny infant. The pair of them even developed their own language, clucking and curdling at each other in a guttural tone which no other member of the household understood or thought to learn.

She wasn’t a chicken herself, but noticing how spoilt Nancy had become, began to take on chicken-ish mannerisms, squawking and flapping round the house with her arms triangled up to form wings and her chin shot forward like a beak. She hoped her mother might notice the similarity between her and her younger sister. She hoped she too might become the favourite. Though she stopped short at nibbling earthworms and could not, no matter how hard she tried, lay anything like an egg, she did her very best to be a chicken. It was only a matter of time, she told herself, before Mother noticed and rewarded her efforts accordingly.

When Mother finally noticed her pecking her garden peas off the dinner plate as if they were specks of scattered corn, she did not find it amusing. She did not reach to draw her eldest daughter on to her lap or say, as she often said of Nancy, “look how clever my big girl is, eating her dinner all by herself.” Oh no, Mother was not pleased when she noticed how like a chicken her daughter had become. “Behave yourself, young lady,” she said and rapped her over the knuckles with the dull side of a butter knife. “The dinner table’s no place for such animal behaviour.” Which seemed strange to her, and a little unfair, for Nancy was currently squatting amongst the bread rolls, laying her daily egg in full view of the entire family.

Inspired by Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel Dumb Witness