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Updated: May 21, 2025
I do not hesitate to say that the comforts enjoyed by our own farm-servants half a century ago were far in excess of those thought more than sufficient by French labourers and their employers. On the following day my hosts took me round the farmery, fowl-run, piggeries, neat-houses and stalls being inspected one by one.
The situation was saved for the moment but there was no knowing what further excesses Ukridge might indulge in. I managed to draw him aside as we went through the fowl-run, and expostulated. "For goodness sake, be careful," I whispered. "You've no notion how touchy he is." "But I said nothing," he replied, amazed. "Hang it, you know, nobody likes to be called a fat little buffer to his face."
"I can't be paid any less than I have bin, sir," he agreed. "Exactly. And, as you say, it's a pretty place. You might just as well stop on, and help me in the fowl-run. What do you think?" "Very well, sir." "And Mrs. Beale will do the same?" "Yes, sir." "That's excellent. You're a hero, Beale. I shan't forget you. There's a cheque coming to me from a magazine in another week for a short story.
I had only heard casual mention of this relative hitherto, but I had built up a mental picture of her partly from remarks which Ukridge had let fall, but principally from the fact that he had named the most malignant hen in our fowl-run after her. A severe lady, I imagined with a cold eye. "Wish she'd enclose a cheque," said Ukridge. "She could spare it.
In the fowl-run a hen was crooning sleepily in its coop. It was a very soft, liquid, soothing sound. Presently out came the invaders with their loot, one with a picture, another with a vase, another bearing the gramophone upside down. They were singing in many keys and times. Then I heard somebody Charlie again, it seemed to me propose a raid on the fowl-run.
Gay old bird, he was. He " "This is the fowl-run, professor," I broke in, with a moist, tingling feeling across my forehead and up my spine. I saw the professor stiffen as he walked, while his face deepened in colour. Ukridge's breezy way of expressing himself is apt to electrify the stranger. "You will notice the able way ha! ha! in which the wire-netting is arranged," I continued feverishly.
Deprived of physical labour, with the exception of golf and bathing trivial sports compared with work in the fowl-run at its hardest I tried to make up for it by working at my novel. It refused to materialise. The only progress I achieved was with my villain. I drew him from the professor, and made him a blackmailer. He had several other social defects, but that was his profession.
He did not thank her or say a word. A small and scrubby-looking Frenchman, with red eyelids and moustaches that drooped over a pendulous underlip, now begged Madame to follow him through a small doorway beyond which could be seen three just shot gazelles lying in a patch of sunlight by a wired-in fowl-run.
I may quit my riverside residence and have a waterproof fowl-run in another street; but when I see somebody else taking his children out in my old boat, I shall only bite my lip and wish that I had quietly restocked my chicken-run.
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