Cock of the roost

YOU don’t need to read much Ottoman history to realise that the Sultan’s harem was seldom an erogenous zone of unbridled pleasure, a fact borne in on me again last week by a clipping I discovered in an elderly edition of the Sunday

Times. It concerned an unidentified Emir, fretting because his harem was full of frantically bored ladies. According to the report, ‘the wife of the English District Commissioner had suggested to the Emir that they should be Girl Guides. He was pleased because it gave them something to do’.

COUNTRY LIFE readers know this, just as they will instantly recognise in the realities of harem life the mix of routine and barnyard politics that characterises what the French so succinctly call le basse cour or chicken run. Our own birds currently live in the fruit cage, which means we don’t get many blackcurrants, but do keep hens, because it’s heavily wired and almost impregnable to badgers.

After the last assault, a friend presented us with a handsome trio. The cock is a splendid bird, all comb and Frenchy tailfeathers, but he’s also a total cad. His greed is boundless. Never before have I kept a cock who insists on feeding himself before his flock. He is handsome and selfish. He tolerates the brown hen and devotes his waking hours to bullying the lilac araucana out of her dinner.

To make matters worse, the brown hen is simpering and acquiescent, but the araucana suffers from hunger and low self-esteem. It makes me sick to watch them and they don’t lay a whole lot of eggs, either.

Araucanas can’t be Girl Guides, of course, so, last Sunday, I took the matter in hand and headed up country to a field surrounded by old oaks and disreputable outbuildings, hunting up a parking spot among the old Subarus, Fiestas and vans held together like farmers’ trousers with baler twine.

I got my number and a catalogue from the girl at the desk and watched a young man with a head mike drumming up bids for eggs. Punnets of fancy birds in the shell were being knocked down every minute as I studied the form.

One of the pleasures of the catalogue is the alphabetical listing of lots: pair of ferrets, polecat, gill and albino hob; pair of mandarin ducks; pair of oven gloves. Outside, the real excitement had already begun with the opening bids for the deadstock, which was laid out in rows on the grass. Livestock, of course, means live animals; deadstock, curiously, just means stuff. It’s back-ofthe-garage stuff, small-barn gear, a thieves’ pudding of garden-shed material—galvanised feeders, strimmers, wheelbarrows and cultivators, ride-on mowers and the assortment of solid rubber tyres and wheels that clog up every rural outhouse.

It’s here that you might find yourself a nearly new bike or a useful vice and the slouching, hands-in-pocket crowd that follows the auctioneer along the grass will buy it, so it can’t be junk.

Business in the egg shed was rather slow, but, with the deadstock out of the way, the excitement was building around the birds, displayed in long lines of cages. Each cage had a plastic cup of water pinned to the wire with a clothespeg, it being a hot day and the birds thirsty. An auction runner went up and down the lines with a watering can.

A boy in a John Deere tractor suit enumerated the merits of a pair of bantam leghorns to a smaller boy with the same brown, open face and curly hair. Two sandy gentlemen who wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Cambridge high table leaned on a cage containing a solitary pekin duck and murmured to each other out of the corners of their mouths. A woman with piled-up blonde hair tapped her catalogue with a pen, making a point to a big man with a rearing snake tattooed on his neck.

Shortly before the off, the auctioneer stepped into his baldachin, a chariot with tiny iron wheels and a corrugated roof, from which he conducts the sale. Every few lots, he and his chariot get mysteriously rolled along to the next set of cages, presumably under the pressure of eager bird-fanciers leaning on the rail. The most eager leaners get closest to the action, but the biggest spenders stand a little further back and indicate their bids in the time-honoured way: a slight chuck of the chin or a motion of the eye, imperceptible to anyone but the auctioneer.

We opened with a trio of porcelain sablepoots and, before I knew it, I was the proud possessor of two bantam wyandottes with feathers scrolled and watermarked like old banknotes, a light Sussex hen and a sinister-looking French Copper Black Maran pullet.

After a few days’ quarantine, I introduced them to the fruit cage and am pleased to say that we seem to be re-enacting a period from Ottoman history known as the Sultanate of Women, in which the harem ladies called all the shots and the Sultan trembled in his gilded chamber. It’s not the Guides, but the araucana appears to have laid me an egg.

Jason Goodwin is the author of the ‘Yashim’ detective series, which now has its own cookbook, Yashim Cooks Istanbul (Argonaut). He lives in Dorset Next week: Jonathan Self