Aren’t baby animals delightful? I was allowed, aged 12, to have two muscovy ducklings because my mother fell for them as well. They were fluffly, yellow, dinky, cheeping and adorabubble. I called them Dickens and Jones.
But soon they grew bigger and bigger and needed a larger pool in the garden, more food, care and attention, and made a bigger mess. Up and down the garden path I would go – we had a large, suburban garden – lifting up the stone slabs for them. Worms would wriggle, bugs and scary spiders would spring up, but my ducks would snap them up before they got to me. They were not as pretty as they had been in their youth, but were more magnificent – with beautiful white and green plumage and the male with a red, lumpy area round his bill. My plan was to start a duck-egg business. I still loved them. My mother did not.
Then I went away for a weekend and, when I returned, my ducks had gone. Tragedy! Where were they? My mother had taken them to a happier life, she said, to live on Mr Clanfield’s local poultry farm. Why? Because she’d stepped outside for some coal, trod in duck poo, and then tramped it all over the living room carpet. Enough was enough.
From then on, every week when we went to buy eggs or chickens from Clanfield’s farm, I would search among the hundreds of chickens and ducks roaming around the fields and yards hoping that I might spot Dickens and Jones. I was never sure that I had, but at least they were among friends, I thought, free and happy.
They weren’t really. Enraged by the piles of crap, my parents had eaten them. Traitors. They didn’t dare tell me until more than a decade later. They were disappointingly tough, and Jones was full of eggs. My egg-farm plan crushed before birth.
I still haven’t got over it. Only one thing consoles me: at least my ducks had a few months of happiness, and even Clanfield’s poultry had a bit of reasonable life and could run about in the open. They were not so overfed that their legs collapsed. They weren’t stuffed with antibiotics, debeaked, crammed into mini-pens in mega-farms. Rationing of “feeding stuffs” had only just stopped a year before, in 1953. In 1950 we had about 50 supermarkets in Britain and we ate about 1m chickens a year. But by 1967 we ate more than 200m from nearly 3,000 supermarkets.
If only we could bring back rationing. We didn’t starve. Still, I don’t like to sound extreme, so it needn’t be so harsh. But it will never happen, so perhaps we could all be a little less greedy and wasteful. And never, ever eat our children’s pets.
• Michele Hanson is a Guardian columnist
