Domestic fowl

The domestic fowl are a continuing part of the household’s life, first as brown hens at Aughawillan and then as birds transported to the barracks. Their story joins the practical work of keeping a family supplied with food to the larger change of leaving home: the hens travel with the family, adapt to a new yard, and become part of a remembered domestic landscape shaped by feeding, sound, and smell.

At Aughawillan: Eggs and Loss

The brown hens’ laying stops before the family leaves Aughawillan. The absence of eggs brings a small domestic mystery into view: Toby is discovered swallowing them, as he had swallowed mice escaping from the stack. When Breedge tries to take eggs from him, he bites her hand; she also says he attacked her face. The hens’ eggs are thus not merely a food supply but the point at which the household’s care for an animal collides with its need to protect its members.

The narrator promises to tie Toby up and take him everywhere on a lead, but this does not resolve the problem. The workmen take the dog away. He escapes the first attempt, swimming ashore after being tied in a stone-weighted sack and thrown into the lake, and returns to the cowhouse. The reprieve lasts only a few days before he is taken away again and does not come back. The sequence places the hens’ eggs within a harsher household economy: their loss helps precipitate Toby’s removal, while the narrator’s grief for him is expressed among the cows. The hens themselves remain in the background of this episode, but their eggs set its practical stakes.

The Move to the Barracks

When the family’s furniture is loaded onto a lorry for the move, the brown hens are also packed into crates. Their inclusion makes them part of the household being transferred, alongside its furniture and other possessions. At the barracks, the crates are shut inside a henhouse while the birds become accustomed to their new surroundings. Other hens are already picking about in the large rhubarb beds in front of the lavatory, so the newcomers enter a place that has its own established yard life rather than an empty version of the old home.

The move changes the setting but does not end the hens’ place in the family’s routine. The arrival is marked by the work of carrying possessions indoors; as the furniture is brought through doors and up the barracks stairs, the day’s mood lightens into quiet jokes and laughter. The hens, however, are kept enclosed in their crates until they can adjust. Their transition is quieter than the family’s noisy arrival, but it is part of the same relocation: home is being reassembled from objects and living creatures in an unfamiliar building.

Raising Hens in the Barracks

The brown hens brought from Aughawillan remain with the family in the barracks until they grow old. Their flock is supplemented by fluffy, golden, day-old chicks, which arrive on the bus in cardboard boxes punctured with circular air holes. The chicks’ chirping is remembered as a familiar sound of buses at the time. Before they are strong enough to live outside, they are raised in a wooden box beneath the table under the window, protected by netting wire. These details show the care involved in turning a transport container into temporary shelter and then keeping the young birds safe until they can be moved outdoors.

Feeding the hens is a repeated household task, carried out with simple equipment and food the family can use. Small potatoes are boiled in a large pot, mashed in a wooden tub with a pounder, and kept in the scullery. The account follows the food from preparation to storage rather than treating the flock as an incidental feature of the yard. Raising the birds depends on work inside the house as well as on the space outside it, binding their care to the family’s daily rhythms.

The Flock as a Record of Home

The memory of the scullery gathers the hens’ care into a precise domestic setting: a wooden mirror in the window, a view across Lenihan’s field toward the stone houses of the Bawn, an iron washstand, and the sour smell of mashed potatoes beneath the long trestle table. The flock is not only recalled through its eggs or its presence outdoors. Its food and shelter leave traces in the rooms and sensory details through which the barracks are remembered.

The brown hens’ passage from Aughawillan to the barracks gives continuity a material form without making the two homes interchangeable. The birds survive the move, but the narrator remembers that they seem to have no memory of Aughawillan as they peck and scratch around the rhubarb beds. That contrast belongs to the narrator’s own attachment to the lost place: the hens persist in the new setting, while the remembered connection to the old one is carried by the act of recollection. Their story also extends beyond the first relocation, as old hens are joined by new chicks and cared for through successive stages of growth. Domestic fowl therefore mark both the practical persistence of family life and the unequal ways a home’s past remains present to people and animals.