The Egg and Spoon Race

The Egg and Spoon Race

The hens hadn’t laid any eggs all week. A sly old fox prowling around their coop had put them off their laying. From her bedroom Ellen could hear their frantic fearful cackling. “No doubt wondering which of them he’d get tonight, she thought, pulling on her dressing gown and picking up the farm shotgun which she didn’t really know how to use properly.
The following day was the school’s sports day. Ellen felt like beating her head with the basin she carried in the hope of collecting some eggs. What the hell was she going to do? It was five miles to the nearest grocery store and she didn’t drive. She felt a snort rising in her throat; a farmer that couldn’t drive and didn’t know how to protect her hens. What the hell was she doing here! And what had she been thinking jumping up at her first parents’ school committee meeting and announcing she was the new owner – well she and she partner Charles were the new owners of Gailey Farm and she’d be delighted to provide freshly laid free range eggs for the school’s egg and spoon race.
“Only you would have been so stupid – no crazy to offer – yes offer – to supply eggs free of charge,” she growled shoving her hand under the hens sitting on their nests as she went along. A hen jabbed at her, drawing blood before fluffing out its feathers and haughtily stalking off on its webbed feet. Its red comb puffed up in anger “If the fox comes tonight I hope he get you first,” Ellen shrieked after it sucking the blood from her injured hand.
Those country born and bred farmers’ kids in her daughter’s class would shun her when there was no eggs for the egg and spoon race, she thought. They’d call her “little miss city slicker “. She exited the chicken coop immediately. She wasn’t having that. Moving from a private school the city to a village country had been a big enough ordeal for her lovely six year old Lila Rose.
Brushing the straw off her designer jean Ellen decided now was the time to learn to drive the farm tractor.
The school canteen ladies looked slightly bemused when Ellen presented them with three cartons of brown eggs with the gleam of straw still on them.
“Eggs for the egg and spoon race,” she announced breathlessly. She hesitated. “Can I have a spoon please? A little practise might help. The mothers were so competitive! “Don’t want to let my little girl down,” Ellen explained as she tentatively started down the floor with a brown egg on a spoon.
After the third brown egg had spread its yellow yolk across the clean tiled floor the canteen ladies hurriedly removed the rest of the eggs.
“I think you might do better with this hard boiled one,” a woman in a striped pinny said, trying hard not to laugh.
“Hard boiled,” Ellen said. “The eggs have to be hard boiled first?”
Red-faced from trying not to bust out laughing the canteen ladies nodded solemnly.
Slipping out of the side door of the school Ellen drove the tractor home praying she wouldn’t meet a school bus or another tractor on the narrow road.
She could feel her face and neck burning with embarrassment. No wonder all the other yuppy girls at her school had won egg and spoon races. She had never won an egg and spoon race when she was young because it kept rolling off the spoon and smashing on the ground. The damm things needed to be hard boiled!
Swinging down from the tractor in the farmyard she began to see the funny side. The canteen ladies would talk. They’d tell anybody that would listen. The word would spread like a gorse fire.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of ‘marketing’ strategy she had in mind when she offered to supply the school with free eggs for the egg and spoon race. Hey! What the hell, she thought. They’ll be talking about it for YEARS. It’s sure to bring in business if only out of curiosity to see the new owners of a chicken farm whose hens don’t lay and who don’t know you need hard boiled eggs for an egg and spoon race.
The shotgun was still leaning up against the chicken coop where she had left it last night. “Now for that pesky old fox,” she smiled.
Gemma Hill 2019 ©