How my love of chickens took me from a barnyard to a stately home

I am a toddler the first time I meet a chicken, and we are equal in size and height. The hen has tiny eyelashes, a strawberry-jam face and a voice of purring clucks. I sense a happy spirit of inquisitiveness and smile in fascination. From that moment on, I will always love the company of chickens. It’s hard to explain completely, other than to say that it is an instant attraction, one owed especially to their movement and energy. I have found my tribe.

Hucknall, where I grew up and my family still lives today, is an ex-mining town in Nottinghamshire and the setting of my chicken childhood. By the time my younger brother Lyndon and I were born, its pits had shut down and Hucknall was left with the old slag heap, a man-made hill of black earth and slate-blue shale. It now looked like it was undergoing some sort of giant acupuncture treatment, planted with thousands of saplings as it was transformed into a park called The Ranges.

All around the lower slopes of The Ranges were allotments that backed on to a muddy path that my mum Jill would take us up most days on the way to nursery. This was where I got to know my first chickens. One of the allotment holders, John, had a merry flock of laying girls – several dozen of them – living in a big turquoise-painted shed.

I loved going into the hen house – the hens excitedly followed me about, pecking softly at my little boots. I remember one slipping past me out of the gate; John effortlessly caught her and then handed her to me to stroke, her bright fire-like eyes staring at me with her radiating central pupils. Gathering freshly laid, palm-warm eggs was the main treat, each one a totally perfect piece of work.

Town allotments were the first setting of my life with chickens. The next would happen thanks to my grandparents’ passion for holidaying in the countryside.

Visiting Derbyshire was our version of going to the seaside in the spring and summer holidays. We would spend days walking across the Peaks, having picnics and paddling, especially in the bubbling streams and torrents of Dovedale. The most grand but beautiful part of Derbyshire is Chatsworth. A day out here would often be the treat of our holiday. The house is perfectly nestled into its valley – if you can describe a 175-room palace as nestled.

I first saw Deborah Devonshire, or Debo as she was known to family and friends, in what is probably the most celebrated photograph ever taken of hen keeping. It is by the American fashion photographer Bruce Weber and shows Debo feeding her hens in an evening dress, cloak and pearls. This photo was on the back cover of one of Grandad Ted’s lovely gardening books. I was besotted by it. Today I have a copy, framed and hung up in my main hen house; when I am cleaning out the hens, Debo is there, overseeing the proceedings. I had no idea, back then, that the woman in question was the Duchess of Devonshire, married to Andrew Cavendish, the 11th Duke, or that she was the youngest of the famed Mitford sisters, the world’s first version of the Kardashians.

To me she just was a beautiful, mesmerising Queen of Chickens.

I quickly loved Chatsworth, even before knowing about Debo [then its chatelaine], because of the presence of all her chickens. When you got out of the car or off the bus, hens bustled to greet you. Across from the main drive is the octagonal game larder. In its heyday, 4,000 pheasants would be hung here after extravagant Edwardian shooting days. During my childhood years of visiting Chatsworth, it had been converted into the grandest of hen houses in which over 100 hens laid and roosted in a listed building, unbeknownst to them! Around it, neighbouring hen houses hosted more layers, together providing all the eggs needed to supply the Chatsworth farm shop.

Most of the hens were Warrens, or as Debo called them, ‘laying machines’. Others included Light Sussex, Welsummers, Leghorns and perhaps the most famous of the Duchess’s hens, ginger Buff Cochins. Just as the pedigree hens’ fine feathers broke up the sameness of the ginger-and-chestnut Warrens, their chalk-white, tinted-brown and terracotta-coloured eggs broke up the brownshelled uniformity of the boxed eggs for sale. All the hens were free to wander and peck the grass verges and pathways of the large visitor car park, with a few cockerels attempting to harem them. The flock would go about in beady-eyed gangs, on the lookout for picnics.

When we arrived at Chatsworth, I would excitedly go straight to the game larder to peer though the pop-holes. The hens would all suddenly peek back at me from their nesting boxes, cackling at this tiny-faced disturbance. Grandad Ted once followed me. ‘What ya doing?’ he asked. Then he suggested I should write to the person who owned them; he told me it was the lady in the photograph that I had been looking at on the cover of his book.

I must have been about seven when I sent the first letter. It was probably the first that I had ever written. I could hardly write at all, but I scribbled down a few shaky lines and attempted my best drawings of chickens.

A few days later, a letter arrived addressed to me as Arthur Parkinson Esq. Apart from birthday cards, I’d never had an actual, handwritten letter sent to me. It was thrilling. From then on, I wrote to ‘Her Grace Deborah Devonshire, Duchess of Devonshire’, always about one another’s chickens. Debo had chosen beautiful photos of her chickens to be made into postcards and she wrote her replies to me on these, always warm, interested and encouraging my own hatching passion for poultry.

What captivated me was the way Debo kept happy chickens on such a beautiful and public scale. She had a fabulous sense of fun with her hens and a magical way of getting people to connect with them. Debo took eggs as gifts to people; Lucian Freud was so taken with his that he painted them, but Margaret Thatcher, presented with a box of Welsummer eggs, gave them such a look of horrified distrust that Debo feared they would be thrown out of the window once the PM’s car was out of sight!

My dad Nick is central to my tale of keeping chickens. He built all the hen houses of my childhood, altering and repairing them, and managing what has often proved to be an endurance test of moving them from garden to garden. He even made me a chick brooder fitted with a professional dimmer switch.

The first chicken house was an ark. This structure was developed back in the days when hens were often kept in fields; sheep couldn’t jump over its triangle shape. My dad is a skilled carpenter, and the hen ark he made for me was of old oak.

The first hens we got came from Dad’s friends Tony and Anne. They had a smallholding in Selston with a rabble of ever-changing poultry: huge, ugly white turkeys, miserable-faced stained-nappy-white Sussex broiler hens and parades of totally bonkers guinea fowl that seemed to almost shake with endless calling, zig-zagging about the place. But amongst the chaos there were always some beautiful hens. Tony showed us into a large shed full of Warrens, the main hen bred for the egg industry but here all bonny and clucking.

We returned to Hucknall with two brown hens. In the car, they both behaved well, silently sitting in a banana box repurposed from Auntie Ros’s fruit shop, covered with a cloth; hens feel calmer in darkness. As usual Bob Dylan played out at full blast, and Dad had the windows wound down because Lyndon and I had strayed into a pig pen and its thick quagmire had stuck like treacle on to our wellies.

That afternoon we put the confused hens into their brand-new ark, with everything ready for their arrival. One of them duly laid her first egg after an hour of settling in.

You learn a lot with your first hens, all the little things that add up to keeping your next lot in a better, more understanding fashion. Dad had made an area for each hen to roost separately at either end of the coop, but they immediately chose to sleep together as hens instinctively like the comfort of one another at dusk. We were not prepared for the incredible size of their droppings, nor the rate at which they were produced. The hens quickly ruined the grass within the ark, and its footprint began to scar the lawn – none of the chicken books we’d read had flagged this up.

When we let the hens out, they enjoyed venturing under the hedge into the wild garden next door, disappearing into hip-high stinging nettles. But what they loved more than anything was joining [my grandmother] Nannar Min further down the garden in her tended vegetable beds. Here, the delicate, friable soil, recently raked over, was perfect for leisurely dust baths, with a surrounding all-you-can-eat buffet of delicious purple sprouting leaves.

One of my first teachers was Mrs Burnett. She could be stern, looking like a cross Rhode Island Red hen, but this was understandable, as a good half-dozen in my class of 30-plus pupils had bad behavioural disorders: biting classmates, escaping en masse, and smashing up furniture in fits of temper were not unusual.

I quickly noticed that the children acting like circus animals were getting far more attention than I was by sitting quietly and so I began to copy them in parrot fashion.

All this disruption delayed my learning to read. It was my interest in chickens that got me there. One book I especially wanted to be able to read was called The Backyard Poultry Book. Its paper binding quickly disintegrated with me scanning it over each day, desperate to be able to understand the tiny print.

When I read a book aloud to Mrs Burnett one day at school, she was so taken aback that she suddenly hugged me with joy and shouted: ‘We’ve cracked it!’

As well as reading about chickens, I’d draw them all the time; endless doodles of boomerang-bodies with large crowns for combs, triangles for beaks and stick legs. It took a long time for my style to develop into what it is now, reducing the beaks and feet to mere lines and focusing on faces, stances and feathers.

My classmates began to call me ‘chicken boy’ – it didn’t help that I would also do clucking impressions. The playground was barren and grey, and had a hard, nasty concrete surface that made your knees bleed if you fell over or, more likely, were pushed over. ‘F—k off, chicken boy!’ It was a jumble of madness and roughness; we all pecked one another as much as we played with each other.

The week my parents split up, Mum took me to Chatsworth. Unbeknownst to me, we would be meeting Debo on this visit, for the first time, as a surprise arranged through Mum writing to Helen Marchant, Her Grace’s secretary.

We came by train then bus, as we always did with Mum. It had been a beautiful autumn day, but then suddenly it started pouring with rain. We sheltered under the trees around the hen yard. Through the drizzle a Land Rover appeared. The window was wound down and a voice I knew from interviews said: ‘Do come, quick, quick!’ Mum and I piled in, sodden, and with our bags of things from the gift shop. There in the driving seat was Debo, immediately fascinated to see what we had bought – she was truly the duchess of shopkeeping.

As the rain became gentler, we ventured out; Debo with her famous big wicker basket on her arm for collecting her eggs. She asked if I could hold her umbrella while she unlocked the dusty double doors of the game larder. Her car park girls were all excited – they knew exactly what the presence of a Land Rover parked outside their quarters meant: an afternoon’s feed of mixed corn and table scraps! With the doors unlocked, we went in. Debo kicked aside some of the shavings on the ground with her boot. ‘Look! You see the mosaic – isn’t it beautiful?’ We collected the eggs together from the rows of low nesting. Debo pointed out a black hen amongst the bustling brown Warrens and shyer Welsummers: curiously, she’d appeared from nowhere, she said.

My most poignant memory is of Debo warmly taking my mum’s hands and going, ‘Oh, you are so cold!’ as she gave her some eggs; I think she sensed that Mum was going through a tough time.

When I left primary school aged 11, Debo sent me a copy of a photographic book, Extraordinary Chickens, as a present, and it’s one of my greatest treasures.

Extracted from Chicken Boy: My Life with Hens, by Arthur Parkinson, published by Particular Books on 6 April at £22. Pre-order at books.telegraph.co.uk.