As a child my parents  kept a half dozen Rhode Island Reds for their eggs in the huge grounds of the vicarage of Shelford in Nottinghamshire. Our Swiss au pair would call,"Kum bibibbi, bibbi, kum", as she scattered the chicken feed in the orchard every morning. We reckoned that we had reared the only chickens in Britain which undersood Swiss-German.  Even now in suburban Oxford we have two Rhode Island Red cross breeds. They haven't done the lawn any favours but we do have wonderful fresh eggs every day.

Each morning, our  kids regularly collect a couple of warm brown shelled eggs. Even through the bitterness of last winter they continued to lay - perhaps because every time my wife expected a frost, she would pack our two "girls" into the cat's travelling box and park  them next to the kitchen radiator overnight. The cat has been very long suffering but she does have the choice of all the other radiators and beds, occupied or otherwise, throughout the house.

In Kenya (my last post overseas) we had a fine chicken run and a dozen inhabitants.  We had had all sorts of problems getting our one year old daughter Beatrice to eat. But she would  contentedly tuck  into the pan of chicken's rice and mash we had cooked, as we walked to  the run every morning to collect the eggs. We were a bit concerned that she would react to all the additives in the mash but were so relieved that she would eat anything at all so we cooked best basmati rice for the chickens, which she wolfed. It worked, as Beatrice didn't grow feathers or the chickens   get Newcastle's disease, but all grew bigger and healthy.

As a young man,firmly grasping the MA and Post Grad. Cert. of Education I had gained at Oxford,  I took a job as a Lecturer in a missionary Teacher Training College in up country Sierra Leone, training desperately needed Primary School teachers. We lived forty miles from the end of the tarmac road on the edge of the jungle. There was plenty of rice, fruit and beef to eat, so there was never any danger of starvation, but the diet was monotonous. Poultry seemed to be the answer. In Sierra Leone if you went visiting you would be given a parting gift dependent on your rank and status. A Bishop would receive a live sheep to take back with him in his car. A Lecturer (like me) would receive a small live fowl, to take home on his/her lap in the back of the local Mammy Wagon. Our first acquisition,"Happy Birthday", so called by my two year old daughter, Lucy, would lay an egg each morning in the bathroom sink and we cross bred her with imported Leghorns providing their offspring with natural immunity to Newcastle's Disease.  Happy Birthday was an affectionate animal who loved to be petted. She made a very good mother and we soon had a fine brood, providing eggs, meat and company for our ducks and guinea fowl. One "gift" cockerel was a real Sensitive New Age Guy, taking his turn at teaching the chicks how to scratch in the dust and fluffing himelf up to twice his normal size when he spotted a bird of prey overhead and under whose wings the chicks would scurry for shelter. One morning I found him stretched stiff and dead on the chicken house floor. I buried him with full military honours, a credit to his gender. One of my students who had done some courses at Njala, the agricultural university, warned me that this looked like the work of a snake, probably a spitting cobra, from whom he would have been protecting his wives and offspring.

 Sure enough, the next day at dusk, I heard a huge commotion in the chicken run. Donning my sandals and lappa (the local male wrap around kilt). I peered into the gloom through the door and could just make out the tail of a spitting cobra, with its head under one of the chickens stealing an egg. West African cobras, can bite, causing death to a human within a very few minutes so wear heavy trousers, boots and gloves, or they squirt their venom at the eyes of their attacker, causing extreme optic pain and often blindness, so wear goggles and carry a long stick. Feeling seriously under-dressed to argue with a cobra and discretion being the better part of valour, I backed off and took advice. Which was as follows: snakes eat eggs by swallowing the egg whole (they have almost elastic jaws) then they constrict their bodies, breaking the egg, swallowing the liquid contents and spitting out the shell, so, put down some hard boiled eggs which they will swallow but be unable to break. They will be unable to regurgitate the egg, and die of acute constipation a few days after. Gotcha, that one's for my cockerel.  I did as advised and sure enough we had no more trouble from snakes.

West African pineapples are lush. The best way to grow them is to  buy one then cut off the top, eat the fruit and bury the  leafy top remaining and a new fruit will grow under the leaves. But just as our pineapples  were ripening someone was getting into our garden and stealing them. My wife took the advice of a little old lady in the village who had a large pineapple plantation, which was: "Juju (witchcraft), come, look". At the four corners of her plantation was a rough tripod, dangling from which on a string was a coca cola botle in which was a message on a piece of paper. "Juju. 'e too strong, no problem with tiefman," the Old Lady confided complacently. It did not take us long to construct look alikes, though whether the first verse of St John's Gospel in Greek could be considered a curse, I don't know, but it worked and no one  risked sneaking by our ersatz juju  to steal our pineapples again.

In suburban Oxford  we can't grow pineapples and the threat to chickens is more likely to be in the shape of a fox than a snake, but you never know, so I keep a hard boiled egg at the ready just in case.

Frances King worked for the British Council for many years around the world but now lives with family in South Oxford UK.