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They got married and as the years passed my mother gave birth in turn to four boys. This meant that my father could no longer spend his weekends in his beloved countryside. Money was tight and he had to sell his bike and camping gear.

Then an opportunity arose to move to the country permanently. An advertisement in the Glasgow Herald by the Forestry Commission offered jobs to fit and healthy men to work in their afforestation programme in the Highlands. He got the job, and we were off. My mother, a Glasgow 'keelie' through and through, was not so keen.

My father, clueless as to the actuality of country living, decided to buy some hens. Through an ad in the 'Exchange and Mart' (the country man's Bible) he ordered twenty 'point of lay' hens, which duly arrived in crates on the back of an Albion lorry and were introduced to their new home.

Time passed and I can remember my mother complaining about the lack of promised eggs. My father assured her that its would not be long now.
'I will increase their corn feed,' he said. 'They will likely be needing more roughage to form the shells.'

Bucket loads of corn later, they had not produced a single egg, although the birds continued to grow with combs of fire engine red contrasting with their snowy white plumage.

The eggless mystery was solved unexpectedly in the dawn of a new summer's day. A cacophony of discordant sound erupted suddenly from the hen house. Twenty lusty thoughts greeted the sunrise as though competing for a prize. Twenty impostors who would not and could not lay an egg supposing they devoured fields of golden corn. Twenty beautiful red combed cockerels proclaimed their new found puberty - and not a hen for miles!

is a short story competition run by and Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio Scotland.