And when their laying days are done instead of being swiftly slaughtered they're pensioned off into a
And when their laying days are done, instead of being swiftly slaughtered, they're pensioned off into a nearby field to enjoy the rest of their natural lifespan.But a snake was lurking in this garden of Eden. The first Bill knew of it was one morning shortly after the Gulf War, when three RAF Tornado fighters blasted over his farm a mere 250ft above the ground. Bill's birds "went up in the air like flamingoes", as he puts it each time he tells the story - and it's a story he's told many times since. What he hadn't realised when he built his farm was that the land lies directly beneath a Ministry of Defence flightpath used by military aircraft. In the following weeks and months, the appearance of Tornadoes and Chinooks was to become a fairly regular occurrence.The thing is that Bill could probably have lived with the noise if it hadn't been for the effect that it had on his hens. Shortly after those three Tornadoes first flew over his farm, he discovered that two or three hundred of his birds had laid strangely misshapen eggs. He had eggs as small as peas and eggs as big as tennis balls.
Some were oddly wrinkled like walnuts and there was even one shaped like a banana. Stress was the cause and Bill complained to the Ministry of Defence, but without much success.The story of the chicken farmer and his strangely shaped eggs was picked up by the local press in Essex; Bill was even featured briefly on the television news. And there the story would have ended, had the Reuters news agency not picked up on it and put it on their wire service That's how Scott Mateer came to hear of it. Mateer was a breakfast-show DJ on the MISS103 radio station in Jackson, Mississippi, and it struck him as a nice little item, bearing in mind that chickens and eggs are Mississippi's main commodity. So he tracked Bill down and set up a telephone interview with him."I thought it was just going to be a one-shot interview," Mateer recalls.
"But after measuring the audience response and feeling his charisma over the phone, I thought, 'This guy's a star'."The one-shot interview turned into a daily spot. Bill was christened "Uncle Bill" - and such was the response to his cheeky Cockney humour and homespun wisdom that a month later he was flown over to Jackson, courtesy of one of the station's sponsors, a supermarket chain called Jitney Jungle.THE HURRICANE was by now in full force, When he arrived at Jackson airport, Bill was greeted by a crowd of over a thousand well- wishers clutching flowers and balloons Even the state governor's wife was there Bill knelt down and kissed the ground like the Pope. William Talbot's musings on the "unflagging pursuit of fortune and fame" and Hope's Clintonesque final soliloquy bring these nineteenth-century stereotypes firmly into the present.Yet for all this, Ross Gilfillan is no Dickens, and while he has produced a charming, atmospheric first novel, the strength and presence of the characters falters by the end. He "unleashed ruthless ambition and rose to the top like the scum in a pond".