Of Chickens, Rhubarb and Broken Windows

Way way back in the mid 1970's, at just 21 years of age, I decided to give up my job as an engineer and to go and explore the big wide world, to do a bit of living away from the mundane grind of being a motor mechanic.

In no time at all I found myself working and living in an old inn on an Island far from home. In my first week I was trying to find my feet a little and needed to seek out some sort of clothes washing facility. The problem was there wasn't any laundrette type of service and so I started to ask around if anybody knew anybody who could wash and iron my clothes. A colleague suggested an eighty plus year old couple of twin sisters, Nanette and Naomi, or Nanny and Nomi as they were lovingly called.

One afternoon I happened to see Nanny and Nomi in their garden picking some rhubarb which they would sell to the island shop to make a few extra pennies to supplement their old age pension. They were really friendly right from the get go and agreed to do my clothes for me. Oh boy, did they ever do my clothes. My white shirts came back to me like new, and I mean new! They actually went to the trouble of putting a card inside each shirt and folding and pinning it before putting it in a transparent plastic bag. It was getting a brand new shirt every time. Brilliant. However, one day I discovered that there was a very dark, black sided sense humour to these two innocent seeming little old angels. They were killers!

Sat in the Inn's beer garden, unseen by Nanny and Nomi, I saw them apparently feeding some chickens that they had. This activity started to take a dark turn when I saw Nanny come out of the garden through a white picket gate with a pair of garden shears. Nanny simply went to stand with back to me inches from the picket fence and simply stood doing nothing. I didn't see anything that might have needed a trim with shears which piqued my curiosity somewhat.

Meanwhile, Nomi was holding a corn bag and seemed to be laying a trail on the ground for the chickens to follow one piece of corn at a time. Eventually Nomi got to the picket fence and dropped a few pieces of corn at the other side of the fence where Nanny was waiting with the shears. No sooner had the chicken unwittingly put its head through the fence to get the corn than Nomi bent forward with shears open and in one snap of this deadly garden tool cut the chickens head clean off. I was shocked to see these two sweet little old ladies perform that little trick of deception three times more. What effected me the most was the pragmatic nonchalance with which these acts of violence were executed. Once done, Nomi went back inside the garden to help her sister collect the dead chickens and rhubarb to tie all together into two separate bundles before heading down to the island shop. They did explain to me the next time I went to very nervously collect my 'New' shirts that they just couldn't stomach strangling the poor birds.

Later that evening I had some time off and decided to kick a ball about in the beer garden with a fellow barman. Lost in the moment he struck the ball goal wards, two sweaters for posts, and scored a direct hit on a lounge window, which shattered into a thousand small pieces. Fortunately, the boss was off the island and the bar was closed. My colleague Malcolm told me not to worry as he had a large pane of glass at home. We raced to his house and went to his garden shed with a glass cutter. We started out with a very large piece of glass, about 4 by 4, but we were so bad at cutting it broke in the wrong place every time we tried to cut it to the right size. Eventually we ended up with a bag full of broken glass fit for nothing more than throwing away. In the end we had to come clean with the boss who was surprisingly forgiving with a boys-will-be-boys attitude.

A great many more weird and wonderful things happened on that island, some of which I alluded to in my book 'The Island' (out now on Amazon KDP).

In the end some of it was just a little all too much for an innocent none man of the world like me and I fled in a hurry, half fearful that I might at some time have unwittingly caused offence to Nanny and Nomi. I was no chicken, but the thought of those garden shears around my neck was more than enough to send me running to the local helipad and leave post haste.

I would like to extend my thanks to Carol Price for inspiring this story and donating me the title.