29. A gift of some eggs
Rich pickings in tatty boxes.
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Dear Reader,
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 this relationship between me and the hens is how 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.
Breakfast in our house is always four eggs scrambled in butter with salt – always salt – and plenty of pepper, shared between the two of us and eaten from bowls with spoons. I never tire of eggs.
We have the same breakfast on our van trips, too: eggs travel well in their boxes of six even when the van is filled to the gunwales with my husband’s photographic equipment and all the other stuff we seem to schlep about the country on a regular basis. Not eating toast we don’t ever use the van’s tiny grill, so it is in there that our breakfast eggs spend their time on the road.
On our inaugural trip in our new-to-us campervan 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.
Last summer 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 a farm more than 650 miles away.
We ran out of eggs again on a recent trip. My husband 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 field with a pen of sheep, a hurdled-off paddock containing three donkeys, and a couple of hen houses at the bottom. My husband 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 Terry – 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 a glass of 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?’ Terry 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.’ My husband 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.’ Terry lurched sideways.
‘Would you like this?’ 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.
Terry’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 Terry’s driving’, Jim mused.
Soon Terry 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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Fun stuff Rebecca, and fun to see that you’ve got the local egg trade going round you as well. Did you see my “Egg Car” piece a while ago? You’ll laugh at the similarities. https://open.substack.com/pub/tompendergast/p/the-egg-car?r=ofba&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
As a chicken-keeper, trust me, egg boxes are ALWAYS welcome and received with delight – when you gift eggs to people, you never get the boxes back 😂