The company of hens could be the best cure for depression

A friend of mine, an inspirational teacher, says that one of the best things parents can do is to allow children to believe that their dreams can come true. Arthur Parkinson met his first chicken as a toddler, growing up in a former mining town, and from that moment he longed for a brood of his own. So his father set to, building a handsome ark-shaped hen house, poring over Ad-Mag to find amusing poultry for sale, driving Arthur around country lanes at weekends in search of rare breeds.

Parkinson also had doting, Charlie-Bucket grandparents – Grandma Sheila, Grandad Ted and Nannar Min – who, when he was small, took him on holiday to Derbyshire, where a visit to Chatsworth led to a deep friendship with ‘Debo’ Devonshire. The ‘Queen of Chickens’, Parkinson says, was much prouder of her hens than of having lunched with Hitler, and she remained a ‘warm, interested and encouraging friend’. Dreams come true indeed.

But Parkinson’s story is not cloudless. His fourth grandparent, Grandad Cyril, died when he was three, and was bipolar. And a little way into the book he lets slip that, from childhood, he too has been ‘ambushed’ by depression. He doesn’t delve too deeply into it, but he admits that to keep the right side of darkness he needs ‘the familiar, the safe’. A vital part of this is being surrounded by his chickens – ‘my tribe’ – with their jostling energy and 30 different forms of ‘cluck’. ‘If only you could bottle up the happiness of chickens,’ he says, ‘you’d be on to a groundbreaking antidepressant.’

Not all chickens are happy, of course – even free-rangers. In a gripping chapter on ‘villains and vermin’, Parkinson describes foxes jumping seven-foot fences to grab ‘the girls’, and rats, who grow ‘bigger and bigger’, scuttling under hen houses because they relish the feeling of their backs being scratched.