209. A gift of some eggs
Rich pickings in tatty boxes.
In which Rebecca looks back on a present she’d received at the most bonkers campsite she has ever stayed on.
Dear Reader,
To mark Easter I have edited a post from my archive. This story had made its first appearance in 2022. I hope you enjoy its latest iteration.
Love,
Rebecca
🐣
A gift of some eggs: rich pickings in tatty boxes
As a small child growing up on a smallholding my favourite job was to collect the eggs from the hen house. In fact, my favourite place was the hen house: if ever I couldn’t be found, that would be the first place my parents would know to look. Hens are such soothing creatures: warm, friendly and gentle, and they’re so very interested in interacting with people that every noise they make sounds like a question. I’d head to the hen house to hide whenever I was cross or upset.
I wonder if my relationship with my feathered friends is why eggs became such a favourite food of mine? Eggs were certainly always plentiful, and I remember being so proud of how well we worked as a family to look after our animals, feeling as if we deserved the reward of their gifts to us.
Eggs travel well in our campervan. We don’t ever use the tiny grill for its designated purpose, so even when the van’s filled to the gunwales with Jim’s photographic equipment and all the other stuff we seem to schlep about the country on a regular basis, that’s where we’d stow egg boxes.
On our inaugural trip in our new-to-us van in the height of that first Covid summer we weren’t keen on setting foot at all inside any public places like shops or motorway service stations to resupply our stash of food, but getting hold of fresh eggs was never a problem. Reader, selling free-range eggs is a steady doorstep business – and travellers don’t have to go far out of their way on a rural lane to come across a repurposed beehive, birdhouse or bookcase containing a small pile of egg boxes and a jam jar labelled with the price.
Now, our grill can accommodate four egg boxes, and even when they’re empty the boxes remain in place so as to minimise some of that ceaseless rattling that is an enduring frustration of van life.
On a far-flung job on South Uist – a remote Outer Hebridean island high, high up off the west coast of Scotland (the next chunk of land in a straight line in that direction is Labrador, Canada) – we stopped at the side of the road for a swift egg restock. There were plenty of eggs in the crateful of boxes, and the boxes themselves were from a variety of sources: the nearest being a local farm across the causeway to North Uist and the farthest-flung an own-brand supermarket box from the northwest coast of England.
Wanting to add to the geographical diversity of the egg boxes to be offered by this tiny doorstep trader I fished three empties branded ‘Five Chimneys Farm, Hadlow Down, East Sussex’ out of the grill and deposited them on top of the small pile marked ‘Empty boxes here, please’. I helped myself to a dozen and a half lovely local island eggs in the random boxes they happened to be in, leaving my money in the jar. It still tickles me to think of the head-scratching that might have ensued when the next passing locals found their haul of eggs nestled in boxes originating from an English farm more than 650 miles south.
We ran out of eggs again on a subsequent trip. Jim was unperturbed.
‘It’s fine – when I booked tonight’s campsite I read the reviews: everybody talks about the owner doing the rounds of the site every morning to give each pitch a free box of eggs. We’ll be golden.’
Nobody was around when we arrived at the campsite. I’m calling it a campsite, but it was actually just a rutted field with a pen of sheep, a hurdled-off paddock containing three donkeys, and a couple of hen houses at the bottom. Jim rang the owner.
‘It’s Jim – we’ve arrived, and I owe you twenty quid for tonight. Are you around?’
The man – let’s call him Tony – told him that we could pitch ‘wherever floats your boat’, and said he’d come and find us later. ‘About seven do ya?’
In the meantime we explored the campsite, giving the donkeys each a scratch on our way past. Right at the bottom of the field we met the hens and a large flock of white geese so plump that we guessed they weren’t much looking forward to Christmas.
Later, just as we were pouring ourselves some wine and enjoying the peace and quiet, we heard an engine revving and the repeated blast of a horn. A large white pick-up careered towards us, its side door bursting open as it slammed to a halt. A Jack Russell terrier was sitting bolt upright on the passenger seat.
The driver – the early evening visitor we’d been expecting – was barefoot and wearing a stripy towelling dressing gown. His speech was slurred.
‘Jim, you’re Jim, right? Are you Jim?’ Tony was looking at me wide-eyed as he leaned through the campervan’s front window.
Accustomed to this not uncommon misgendering of his wife, Jim leaned forward from the back seat, laughing. ‘Yes, that’s us – hi!’
(I must stop wearing that baseball cap. Reader, it does me no favours.)
‘Twenty quid the night, then.’
Jim paid him, saying: ‘We’ve met your hens! Could you sell us some eggs?’
‘Naaaaah, I’ll give you half a dozen free, gratis and for nothing. I’m off down there now, as it happens.’ Tony lurched sideways.
‘Would you like this, then?’ I handed him an egg box from our stash of empties in the grill.
‘YESSSSSSSSS!!!!!’ he bellowed in triumph, beaming. Jim and I looked at each other with concern: this was quite some reaction to an empty egg box.
Tony’s pick-up bolted down the field like a badly-aimed torpedo, perhaps a little too close to the animal pens. We were impressed that the donkeys didn’t flinch. ‘Must be used to his driving’, Jim mused.
Soon Tony was back, bearing a whole dozen eggs rather than the half that he’d promised. Both boxes were struggling to contain their contents of eggs, feathers and straw, having certainly seen better days. One had no lid at all, and the lid of the other was dented out of shape. Not all that clean, either.
Our next three days’ breakfasts assured, we thanked him profusely. I walked over to his pick-up to say hi to his dog, now relegated to the passenger footwell. Clearly aggrieved, it looked up at me with big eyes, then down at the floor. It let out a long sigh.
The empty cardboard bargaining chip which had unexpectedly qualified us for those six extra treasures rested pristine, noble and open on its passenger seat throne. Our rich pickings had been the eggs. But for our genial, towelling-clad barefoot host, our stay had provided a new, unbattered egg box to impress his next set of campers.
Love,
Rebecca
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My friend dropped by with two dozen eggs yesterday to enrich our Easter. We paid her back with a full sack of empty egg boxes and a loaf of fresh bread. Eggs make wonderful currency!
I loved this so much the first time and perhaps even more this time around. What a fabulously written tale!
I do enjoy the egg honesty boxes everywhere on our rural island, and just today saw a range of small sprouted herbs in pots for sale, listed on a carefully lettered blackboard leaning up against the storage box. Such a refreshing way to ‘do business.’