The double-bottom hamper

On 14 March, the carrier left a square ash hamper at the lower gate of Bevill Farm. I entered it as twenty-four chicks, carriage paid, £1 8s. 6d. due to the Banderos Chick Company. That was my work then, dispatch tallyman, though the place was struck off at Lady Day and the figures put under Mr. Pell in accounts (he already had eggs and feeding meal, so they said another column would do him no harm).

The hamper had two brass air slides and a lid held by six screws. Miss Alix Mercer fetched it from the gate in a handcart. She ran the poultry yard and could tell a weak bird by the way it stood under the paraffin brooder. She counted twenty-three. I counted twenty-four at the gate, or believed I did. The carrier had watched me lift the corner of the sacking, but he had not put his hand inside.

That one bird made six weeks of business.

Through the departments

Miss Mercer called the whole hamper “the March lot.” To her it was live merchandise, including the wooden case, the sacking and two tins of mash fixed under the lid. She signed for twenty-three chicks and carried them into the long house beside the orchard. By dinner she had moved the birds to the brooder, washed the tins and sent the hamper up to accounts.

Mr. Pell called it “the deficient consignment.” He set it beside his high desk and used the lid for the carrier’s docket, my tally slip and Miss Mercer’s receipt. He weighed the empty hamper on the meal scales: thirty-one pounds and ten ounces. The supplier’s card allowed twenty-six pounds. He weighed it twice more (I worked the sliding weight the last time), with the same result within an ounce.

For him the hamper became proof. He sealed both air slides with red wax and asked the carrier to take it back to Banderos. The carrier refused because the return label had been torn when the sacking came away. Mr. Pell then put it in the passage while he wrote for another label.

The passage belonged to yard service, according to the foreman. He called the hamper “that obstruction” and moved it behind the coal shed. It stayed there through two wet Sundays. A wheelbarrow struck one corner, and the lower board sprang loose. Under the ordinary floor was a second floor, set one inch and seven-eighths beneath it. The space between held six flat lead pieces wrapped in brown cloth.

I saw them taken out. Each was the length of two fingers and stamped with a small five. Together they weighed five pounds and eleven ounces. That accounted for nearly all the difference on the meal scales, though not for the extra chick I had entered. Mr. Pell changed the heading on his papers to “weighted carrier” and locked the lead in the petty-cash cupboard.

The foreman wanted the broken hamper burned. The village schoolmistress, who had come for two sacks of spoiled oats for paste work, asked to have it instead. She called it a “sectioned packing case” and said the older pupils could draw the concealed floor. By then its use had changed again, and it went away on the school donkey cart with the loose board tied across the top.

The count

I was asked whether a chick could have entered the space under the floor. The opening was narrower than my thumb, and the lower compartment had no droppings or down in it. I said so. Miss Mercer’s count was entered after she had moved the birds, while mine was made through sacking at the gate. Either count may have been wrong. The Banderos clerk answered that all March lots had been packed by fours and that their hatch book showed twenty-four for Bevill.

My post ended on 25 March. Mr. Pell took my stool and the two tally books into his room. I helped him rule the first page because he made the chick column too narrow (only by half an inch, but it caught the figures). No deduction was made from my final wages.

The schoolmistress let me measure the hamper again on 9 April. It was twenty-six inches square, seventeen inches high, and twenty-six pounds one ounce after removal of the lead. The hamper now stands in the upper classroom of Kelmarsh School, against the wall between the mineral cabinet and the blackboard.

See also

• Bevill Poultry Ledger — Bevill farm