Farm Labour.
In the social system of the 1950s, we were working class, I have no problem with that. As a kid, I don’t remember my family ever having much disposable income. We never had a car, but we always went on holiday. Every year we went to stay with granddad Ben Boyce and see granddad Butler and auntie Mae and all our relatives in Rosslare, Ireland. The year before I went to Secondary School, we went to Jaywick Sands near Clacton. Someone in the Brickworks had a small holiday chalet there and let my dad have it cheap for a couple of weeks. Nipper Gunter, a friend of dad’s, drove us there and brought us home for petrol money. Jaywick was nice, you could walk along the coast to Clacton Pier, passed Butlin’s holiday camp. We couldn’t afford Butlin’s. I didn’t want to go there anyway, with its barbed wire fence it looked like a prison camp. At one time, during the war, it almost was one, but instead, it was nearly destroyed by the Pioneer Corps who used it as a training camp.
When it came to holidays, some of the middle-class kids at Fulbrook School, also failures in the egalitarian 11 plus system, went to France, Spain or Italy. Some went on educational cruises on the Uganda or Nevassa. Strangely, I ended up an engineer officer with British India, who owned those ships. Still, I never got to sail on them. My personnel record had a note in it saying ‘Argumentative. Not passenger ship material’ which I took as an accolade.
I was not psychologically scarred and didn’t need therapy for being a disadvantaged child. My mum paid 1/6p a month for my ‘Flying Review’ magazine, as I was obsessed with aeroplanes, and 6p a week for ‘Look and Learn.’ The middle-class kids had ‘Knowledge’ magazine at 2/6 a week. Never-the-less, it was me who won the school’s High Sheriff Cup for General Knowledge. Which proves, you can take kids to the fountain of knowledge, but you can’t make them drink.
In my childhood, I was always short of cash. If I wanted something, I had to save for it. One time I wanted a long Tennessee rifle (plastic) from Brightman’s shop window in Bedford, 7/6p it was. It took me fifteen weeks saving 6p a week to get the money to buy it. On Saturdays, when I went to Bedford with my parents, the stress was terrible in case it had been sold. It was a happy day when I finally walked out of the shop with that rifle. And what joy when my Uncle Tommy and Auntie Kay came back from Bedford one day with a Davy Crockett suit and a coonskin hat.
One way of earning money was going potato picking. Mr Hunter, a farmer from Bletchley, came every year to pick up women to go potato picking. They worked in pairs, my mum and her friend Mrs Hinson worked together, and in the summer holidays, us kids went along in the back of the open Land Rover. Initially, we didn’t work we just roamed the fields and woods and splashed around in lakes and ponds that we came across, generally making a nuisance of ourselves with the locals. Orchards were of prime interest. I remember one time a group of us got caught. When the man asked us for our names and addresses and found out we came from Brogborough, it seemed to explain everything. Still, nothing came of it, and we just got a ticking off. When we got to about twelve Mr Hunter, a very nice man, deemed us responsible enough to work for pay. We did piecework, getting paid by the sack which we had to tie up with personalised coloured string. It was great getting your wages at the end of the week. Happy days, with warm tea from thermos and lunchtime picnics, but the work was seasonal, and I needed a more regular income.
In 1962 I was thirteen and friends with Rodney Bonfield, a few years older than me who lived up the top street in Brogborough. He was a trainee farmer studying one day a week at Sisloe Agricultural College. He worked on Bevington’s farm a short walk from Brogborough. To give the head herdsman a break, Rodney asked if I would be interested in a job. It involved helping to get the cows in, milking, bottling up, and delivering milk to a hundred or so houses in Brogborough, and taking full churns to a farm at Ridgmont. It would take about four hours a day at the weekends and be finished by 09:00. Over one hundred years since the Slavery Abolition Act, the wages for the eight hours was 15 shillings old money, 75p new decimal. I took the job. There was a problem though, young farmers have something of a reputation, and at the weekends Rodney always slept through the alarm clock.
Consequently, I had the additional responsibility of getting him out of bed. At 04:30 on crisp winters mornings, in clouds of frozen breath, I’d make my way to his house. Under a black star-filled sky it was so quiet I could hear the freight train coming down the track from Bedford. At Rodney’s, I’d go to the back of the house and climb the drainpipe onto the balcony and bang on his bedroom window. Some times it would take ten minutes before he opened the window bleary-eyed so I could climb in from the freezing cold. We would sneak downstairs so as not to wake his parents, raid his mum’s drink cabinet and sit in the kitchen with a tumbler of Cinzano Bianco each. We then took the record player and a bundle of LPs and made our way to the farm. At the milking shed, we’d set up the record player. We had Eddie Cochran, Billy Fury and Elvis, but before getting the cows in we’d put on Buddy Holly. They liked Buddy, he relaxed them, and a relaxed cow gives better milk.
While Rodney cleaned the cows’ udders and got the milking equipment on, I sterilised the bottles ready for filling. Once the milk started coming, I’d take the buckets into the bottling room go up the ladder and fill the header tank. The liquid then ran down over what looked like a corrugated washboard cooler before bottling. Each bottle had to be filled and capped by hand. Capping involved putting the foil top into the rubber insert of the hand-held capping tool and pressing it onto the bottle. I had a quota of pints and quart bottles to fill, the excess went into the churns for Ridgmont where it was probably used for cheese. You couldn’t bottle up with gloves on, in the unheated shed in winter handling nearly frozen bottles I was close to getting frostbite. With numb fingers, sometimes a bottle would slip on the stainless steel table, and I would get soaked in milk. When this happened in the heat of summer, I’d get home stinking of spoilt milk.
It was a pleasant time, the two of us working in synchronisation, and the cows’ head-locked into the stalls happily chewing on straw. With their tails flicking back and forth to the beat of ‘That’ll be the day’, ‘Summertime Blues’, Halfway to Paradise’ and ‘Jailhouse Rock’, it presented a scene of pastoral tranquillity.
Once the cows were milked and returned to the fields, we’d load up the crated bottles and churns, and hitch the trailer to the big farm tractor. With Rodney driving and me jammed between him and the wheel arch we’d go off to Brogborough to deliver the milk and pick up the empties. On Saturdays, we had to collect payment for the week’s deliveries to each house. We either knocked on the door or pick up the money that had been left out on the step overnight by those who wanted a layin. After dropping off the churns at Ridgmont, we’d go back to the farm, wash the bottles and then go home for breakfast.
The money was crap, but it was a learning curve and working on a farm was a good experience. One morning we arrive around five to find the headsman had been called in because a cow was in trouble calving. He had his arm right in her up to his shoulder to turn the calf. Then with the headsman holding the cow, Rodney and I had to haul on a rope tied to the calf to get it out. There was a lot of heaving and bellowing from the cow until a new long-legged life form came stumbling into the world, steaming in the cold winter air.
I worked weekends on the farm for two years until I got a better-paid job on Beardo’s fairground at Woburn Abbey. That’s another story.