”Who wouldn’t say ‘no’ to £1m? But I wouldn’t let them dig her body up. She’s worth more to me resting than £1m.”Has anyone accused the family of doing Violet in, in an attempt to get their hands on her life insurance? ”No one Everyone knows what we thought of her,” says Mrs Flight. Mr Burgess, a Finchingfield resident, plucked the feather from Violet’s rear end after sidling up to her on the village green.”We will pay the full amount if death is determined to have been caused by the parish council or their agent,” he affirms.But a payout is unlikely – Mrs Flight refuses to have Violet’s body exhumed. Simon Burgess, chief underwriting officer for Grip, the firm which organised the policy, says the DNA would be compared to that of a feather he has on file.

One morning, Mrs Flight found Violet’s body lying outside.Should the Flights put in a claim for the insurance money, a DNA test would first have to be carried out on the chicken’s body – now in a flower bed – to establish whether it is the insured bird. But just when they assumed Violet was out of harm’s way, tragedy struck. ”The aliens bit was a laugh, but the rest was to show our concern for Violet’s welfare in light of what we considered an assassination attempt,” says Mr Flight.In July last year, when he got a job as operations manager at Stansted airport, the family moved back to Cornish Hall End. There were feathers everywhere.” The unmarked van has never been traced.The Flights were so upset that they insured Violet for £1m against abduction and being eaten by Finchingfield parish councillors, or abduction by aliens. ”She would stand at the edge, then put one foot down and run like a bat out of hell. She was running across the road when this van suddenly appeared and crossed to her side of the road The driver most definitely aimed for her. Not long afterwards, the chicken, named after Mr Flight’s grandmother, was involved in a hit-and-run.

”Violet had a particular style of crossing the road,” explains Mrs Flight. I told them that Violet was not the ducks’ ringleader.”Unable to keep Violet in her pen because of the distress it caused her, the couple cleared up the bark themselves. The volunteer claimed they were scattering the grass with tree bark used to keep the weeds down in the surrounding flower bed, and she had to tidy it up.”Then one of the councillors said one cheap way to deal with it was to wring the bloody chicken’s neck,” says Mrs Flight ”This was my daughter’s pet they were talking about. ”I was in the pub one day when someone came up to me and said: ‘You’ll never guess what’s on the agenda at the parish council meeting – your chicken.’ I couldn’t believe it,” Mrs Flight remembers.At the meeting, chairman Edwin Collar read out a letter from a volunteer who looked after the war memorial, accusing Violet of encouraging the ducks to come over to the memorial from the pond.

”She saw the ducks on the village green and naturally assumed it was OK for her to wander around because they were. Off she would go, lording it up.”But trouble began several months later. ”My husband Ron built a luxury apartment in the garden,” says Mrs Flight, sitting in her lounge, looking wistfully at a picture of Violet. ”It was five-star for a chicken.”In October 1997, the Flights moved to Finchingfield to manage a pub, the unfortunately named Fox, which overlooks the village green. They initially tried to keep Violet in her pen, but she became so distressed her feathers started falling out, and she was soon given free rein of the bar.”It was like opening Pandora’s box,” says Mr Flight.

She couldn’t have got out.”Violet, a Rhode Island Red, became a member of the Flight household in Cornish Hall End, two miles from Finchingfield, four years ago. She was five weeks old when Mrs Flight’s daughter, Jessica, then 10, brought her back from school.It was love at first sight for all the family. But their outrage was nothing compared with that of Violet’s devoted owners who, despite insuring her for £1m, found her lying in their back garden, stiff as a board.”The suspicious thing is why her body was outside her pen,” says Violet’s owner, Paula Flight, 35, who runs a bistro where chicken is now firmly off the menu ”I always locked her up in the evenings It was an automatic thing, like feeding my children. She loved animals, particularly the ducks around the pond in Finchingfield, Essex. She may only have been a chicken, but such was Violet’s social standing, she was included in paintings of the pretty village sold to tourists.
So residents were understandably horrified when rumours started circulating of a plot by Finchingfield Parish Council to strangle her.