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Growing Up In Feltwell in the 1950s & 60s – Part – 20. Proper Wages
I was about 12 when I first went blackcurrant picking at Northwold. I think a small group of us cycled via the Cranwich road early one summer’s evening after school. Some of our parents – and wives of schoolteachers – had already started going and gradually well behaved children were allowed in too. It was not too hard on the back but breaking the stems with your finger nails so that clusters could be placed in a bucket was a fiddly job. Jim recalls the baking sandy soils that made for some very hot knees. At 2/- (10p) a bucketful, we were lucky to make 4/- in an evening and the adults not much more than 6/-. I don’t think I ever tried it for a full day. Petrol costs had to be taken into account when travelling to work but often that cost could be shared. As I write this, petrol is close to £2 per litre which equates to £9 per gallon. But back in the early 60s petrol was just 4 shillings (ie 20p) per gallon - or 4.4p a litre! My second-hand Lambretta enabled me to work further afield during the school holidays. I tried strawberry picking out at Terrington but I was making rather less than £1 a day even before fuel costs. It was not quite so back breaking as the potato picking I later tried but it was a poor net return financially and, working alone in those big, desolate fenland fields, there was little social interaction. At least I had tried.
Men chopping out sugar beet was a common sight back then. For the farmer, it was an expensive one too. I tried it a few times: it was a skilled job. You would often see half a dozen or more men spread out across a huge field, all working along the rows in near silence at their own steady pace. Until the early 1960s it was difficult to sow beet evenly spaced along the drills and some seedlings needed to be cut out so the seedlings remaining were evenly spaced some 7” apart. Also, beet often grew up in “doubles,” which needed singling by delicately inserting the hoe between the two and taking one of them out. Then the introduction of pelleted monogerm seeds obviated the need for that and enabled mechanical drills to distribute more evenly and accurately. One evening while working in a field just west of the old Methwold Rd for Edwin Porter of Grange Farm he came across to inspect my work which was probably borderline in terms of acceptability. But his beet was remarkably clean with hardly any weeds and needing very little “chopping out”. It was far superior to any other field of beet I had seen or worked on and I told him so. He nodded gently and said “Marvellous stuff this monogerm seed,” giving a little satisfied grin and a friendly nod as he walked away. I had not heard of it before then but its potential was there to see.
Lennie “Curly” Fletcher, a successful farmer growing potatoes, celery and carrots in the fen fields down the Southery Road, drove a big silver Jaguar saloon “LCF 1” and often smoked a fat cigar. Opposite his house in Short Beck and in a building in the yard now occupied by Paul Jarman’s Veterinary Practice was where carrots were topped, ready for the canning factories, by hands holding just a sharp knife. A regular group of ladies were the mainstay of the operation but about a dozen of us over 15-year-olds were employed for the school summer holidays. For us this was a Godsend. In my first year (1963) we stood in front of wooden crates and topped carrots from one into another and got 2/6d for each crate filled. The next year things had moved on and we topped straight onto a moving conveyor and we got 2/- for each sack we emptied. Working hard and with less than a 30 minute lunch break, we almost always cleared £1 per day, collecting £5 at the end of each week – a princely sum. (For comparison: a brand new bike with 3 speed might cost £25) It was quite sociable topping in the long shed with about a dozen of us and 20 or so mature, noisy ladies. Curly’s son Malcolm seemed to run the operation and carrots were brought in for topping not just from his own farm but also from other farms so usually there was plenty of work. The problems occurred when, for whatever reason, there was a shortage of supply and not just our hands but also those of the mature ladies went idle. We were then seen as a bit of a nuisance, stealing their jobs. Also, occasionally the carrots were extremely small so that many more had to be topped before the sack was empty. One or two of the mature ladies would take two sacks to top but extracting the larger carrots to make up one sackful and returning the other now full of small carrots to the supply pile, refusing to top them. Once, when the supply dried up completely we were offered a day’s work potato picking down the fen: several of the ladies extolled the virtues of potato picking: “I love potato picking – it were my favourite job before I got my lumbago”. I decided I would give it a try for a day. A more back breaking job I have never done and I only just earnt 15/-. None of the ladies had joined me that day but of course by removing some of us from their shed for the day, they had improved their chances of getting their hands on more of any carrots that were delivered.
With the money I earned In the first year, I was able to refurbish my older brother’s old BSA bike (which was now mine) with new handlebars, seat and saddle and new dynamo and 3 speed; plus a range of camping gear I had long wanted. In the following year I rather foolishly purchased a revolutionary new Moulton Cycle which had suspension and very small wheels. They were popular for a time and spawned clones from Raleigh and Royal Enfield but they were no match for a standard wheeled touring cycle on long journeys as I discovered when Jim and I decided to cycle to Hunstanton one Friday, returning via the hilly ‘B’ road through Ringstead and Sedgeford.
For several Christmases in the late 1960s, there was turkey plucking in the evenings at Grange Farm, Blackdyke. Under the glow of a single tungsten lamp but otherwise in a dark, cold shed; the birds were stunned and killed before us, our constant conversation deadened by the snowy white feathers in which we stood ankle deep and Husky the little long-haired Jack Russell played happily. We plucked the wings first because they were the first to cool. That first year I ordered a 15lb bird for Christmas lunch and, being not in the least bit dry but moist and very flavoursome, Dad declared it one of the best we had ever had. I suggested it was all due to my plucking. Dad laughed and said bad carving could ruin a good bird but his good carving and my plucking could not rescue a poor one.
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