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One Over The Eight
My brother and I were brought up on the on the edge of London, in Chorley Wood, in Hertfordshire. Soon after the outbreak of war we were evacuated. Our parents had moved to the Midlands where my father had work in an aeroplane engine factory on the edge of Coventry. They found some temporary digs so we were able to join them. Soon after we moved in to a converted, two section, chicken house. This was set up in the garden of the off-licence for the village of Birdingbury.
Our hut was bitterly cold in winter, we had only one paraffin heater, and suffocatingly hot in summer, but it was home.
I kept asking my father for a pet. One day he climbed a tree to take a fledgling magpie, which he put in his shirt to keep it quiet on the way home. He hadn’t realised how flea-ridden it was and had to strip when he got back to get rid of them.
We called the bird Maggie although we had no means of knowing what sex it was. We rather assumed it was male, I don’t know why.
He became a great favourite, sleeping on one of the roof tiesin the chicken hut home. He was happy to sit on our shoulders, though it was quite painful to have him on our heads — he would really dig his claws in.
When perching on our shoulders he would often took to leaving his ‘card’ down our backs. This amused my father inordinately but my mother was not so amused, she had to do the washing.
Maggie even flew into the adjoining field to mix with other magpies, to our consternation at first, but he always came back.
One day we thought we had lost Maggie when he didn’t come back at lunch time. In the middle of the afternoon my mother saw him fluttering and staggering up the path beside the hut.
We were convinced he was ill, but after a sleep on his perch he seemed back to his normal cheerful self.
Later the lady who owned the off-licence told us he had joined the men having a lunch time pint on the benches in the field and had been finishing off the beer at the bottom of their glasses. They thought it was a great joke and from then on encouraged him.
He was better able to hold his drink after a while but his after lunch nap became a habit.
We had also been adopted by the off-licence cat, who even had her kittens on my bed! She was quite friendly with the magpie and even allowed him to perch on her back sometimes.
When we left Birdingbury a year later some friends took Maggie in a covered cage to Marton, some miles away. As soon as he was let out he flew straight to the nearest pub, about half a mile away.
Sadly his friendship with the cat proved his undoing an one day our friends found a heap of feathers in the back garden with their cat skulking nearby.

Me with Maggie
David Critchlow
6 Camelot
63 Surrey Road
Poole BH12 1HG

The converted chicken house

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