A pony in the kitchen, a goat on the Aga

The essays of cult novelist Elspeth Barker offer a playful glimpse of her life among an unlikely menagerie

240pp, W&N, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£18.99, ebook £11.49 ÌÌÌÌÌ

Two years ago, W&N republished Elspeth Barker’s pitch-black, prize-winning comingof-age novel, O Caledonia. Think I Capture the Castle, but as seen through the looking glass, nightmarish and nasty. It begins with the tableau of 16-year-old Janet, clad in her mother’s black lace evening dress, lying dead in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the great stone staircase in her family’s castle. She’s been murdered, but by whom? Barker was 51 when the novel was first published in 1991. A fiction editor was smitten by an essay she’d written for a magazine – the delightfully titled Hens I Have Known – and asked the author if she’d ever considered writing a novel.

“Hens I Have Known” is one of the 29 pieces included in Notes from the Henhouse, which Barker’s daughter, the writer Raffaella Barker, describes in the foreword as having been compiled from an “excavation” of her mother’s shorter work. (It isn’t the first time much of this material has appeared in book form – just over a decade ago, Black Dog Books published a collection of Barker’s non-fiction under the title Dog Days, along with an edition of O Caledonia that was accompanied by a selection of Barker’s short stories, but both have since fallen out of print.) It’s a jaunty, joyful piece, making a “plea for the respect due to the magical, reckless, random and august ovipositor,” too long eclipsed by the cock, “potent symbol of masculinity, plumed and gleaming life force, harbinger of doom.”

Notes from the Henhouse is quite the menagerie. Joining the bantams and Rhode Island Reds is Portia the Pig, who’s “addicted” to geraniums, and emits “cries of ecstasy” that Barker “can only liken to sex noises on television” when fed ratatouille or pumpkin pie. A Shetland pony clatters about the kitchen and a baby goat scorches its tiny hooves on the Aga. Every time that Barker works in the garden she accidentally desecrates a once beloved pet’s grave: “I recall beginning a new flowerbed and exhuming a dreadful pair of yellow legs complete with claws. ‘That’s Joanna,’ observed a passing child, unmoved.” Most memorably, there’s the pet jackdaw Barker kept as a child, who turned her bedroom into “a guano-ridden cavern”, and was the inspiration for Janet’s own adored bird in O Caledonia.

The novel, Raffaella confirms, was “a version of Elspeth’s childhood”, reality “transformed into

myth”. Barker always drew on her own life for inspiration, which, Raffaella contends, is why her writing “lands vivid and alive in the reader’s mind”. She’s not wrong. Even the shortest pieces here are memorable. Barker’s prose is poetic but not inflated; visceral but smooth. She writes in what feels like the same way we see her responding to visual art in some of these pieces – most evocatively in her story The Dance, which is inspired by the 1998 Paula Rego painting of the same title – instinctively, as if with something more akin to muscle memory than a cognitive process.

“Mother hen,” she writes in Hens I Have Known, is “a term of derision, implying pointless clucking, ungainly fussiness,” but with Barker having rescued the fowl from vilification, and championed these birds instead as “romantic, racist, cruel, heroic beings”, I feel comfortable in assigning her the role of majestic, gleaming-feathered matriarch of the roost. She describes both marriage and motherhood as great sources of happiness in her life. (She spent three decades in a relationship with the poet George Barker, with whom she had five children.) “You are never safe again after you’ve had a baby, terror and loss lurk around every corner,” she writes in Cherubim, a meditation on watching one’s children grow up. “I would like to be one of those wooden Russian dolls and have them all packed neatly back inside.”

In The Longest Goodbye she is similarly candid writing about grief: “I cannot believe that all that passion, wit, eloquence and rage can be deleted by something so vulgar as the heart stopping […] I am not a widow, I am George’s wife. Why must our marriage be nullified by his death? Sons, daughters, aunts, friends all retain their relationship. I shall retain mine.” Barker herself died in April of last year, but Notes from the Henhouse is a vibrant, jubilant testament to both her life and work.

i ‘I would like to be one of those wooden Russian Dolls’: Barker in 1991