One morning in 2009 I woke up with the title of a novel clucking around in my head. The title was ’Chicken Water’. Eh, what? Yes! I was puzzled! But I knew somehow that I would write the novel. I just didn’t know what on earth it would be about.
At the first opportunity I fired up my trusty Dell laptop and began.
I began with no hesitation. And the ideas, the concepts, the jokes, the silliness, and the slow-forming plot came through my fast-flying fingers with no thought or consideration whatsoever. I felt that I was taking dictation, often laughing aloud at how ideas led to other ideas, all making perfect and often uncanny sense, with no conscious input from me.
The tale was based around a devoted, impractical, blues-loving, home-schooling family of three, living in close quarters in a Cotswold cottage. Nothing like us lot then!
Narrated by the Dawkins-loathing Gene (not his real name), the story tells how Gene and family, who watch no TV and read no newspapers (preferring to discuss, among other things, quantum physics, The Hundredth Monkey theory and music's saving grace), slowly become alert to a burgeoning food and electricity shortage, all stemming from Brexit, was it, or was it perhaps a fuel crisis mismanaged by an incompetent and transient government? Who knows?
They join the rest of the country in a real-life self-sufficiency project. A flock of chickens and a cockerel are purchased, with the aim of breeding, selling eggs and nourishing the family. They cannot bring themselves to kill the resulting youngster chickies, though, and so farmer’s wife Fay, the valley gossip, comes over regularly to lend a rather brutal hand.
From the carcasses of said chickens emerges a glorious concoction. Warm, fragrant, deeply comforting and supremely nourishing! You might call it bone stock. Jamie Oliver (Head Nutritional Adviser to the current Government) got there first, sorry, and labelled it Chicken Water.
Chicken Water! The stuff has magic in it! Fay's mother-in-law Liv, local crime matriarch Sheena Peterson and friend Camilla all, after a couple of goes, say goodbye to various serious health issues! Remission? Misdiagnosis? Miracle? Maybe!
And as the country falls into rioting and chaos, it’s the children who take up the reins of courage and compassion, travelling to London with convoys of ambulance and firemen going to assist their sorely-challenged city colleagues. Gene's stripling son and his friend, Camilla's son Francis, are among them.
Keen to support the valiant young, Gene and his wife (along with Fay, her messianic husband Dave and mother-in-law Liv) (and of course Camilla and her husband Dr John) (oh, and Sheena Peterson's youngest, Lee), load up Dave's horsebox with as much of the excess produce crowding the countryside they can cram in and head for the capital. The fuel is provided by Sheena Peterson from her illegal stockpile.
The friends plan to stay in East Dulwich with Liv’s Buddhist brother Lars, whose house they find ransacked by rioters. From here (after tidying up) they plan to distribute the produce to the needy of London.
Soon the picture changes. St Thomas’s Hospital, Westminster, becomes the centre of operations. The rioters now have it under siege. The stripling and Francis are trapped upstairs, antibiotics are getting perilously low and Bono (recently and urgently come to advise the struggling government) has been airdropped into the hospital quadrangle with life-threatening peritonitis.
Getting into a hospital under siege, carrying large vacuum flasks filled with Chicken Water for The Patient, isn’t easy. Lars, on his last legs before their arrival, has perked up enough after a couple of helpings of Chicken Water to appoint himself assistant to small-town burglar Lee, whose pick-prowess enables the team to enter the hospital via the mortuary. Helped by a timid blues-loving pathologist, the team reach the heart of the hospital.
Do they manage to get the Chicken Water to The Patient, the saviour of mankind?
Maybe. It is clear, though, that whether this new version of 'Jewish Mother's Penicillin' has miraculous qualities, kindness certainly does!
PS:
The novel is accompanied by a 2-CD album containing songs by all the musicians mentioned throughout the novel. And there are many!
And I found a track absolutely pertaining to its own part of the novel's particular subject or event. It's spooky!
I even included a track by Kris Kristoffersson. But don’t let that put you off!
It's a jolly good accompaniment to a funny old yarn which I very much doubt is publishable but which does, I must say, seem rather prescient considering our current circumstances …
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