Sorry if I laughed, Sam S
am, the second horseman, or
with John Rowing
carter, on the farm where I started life as a farm student, the lowest of the low, was unusual. Unlike most of the others employed
there and on surrounding properties he had not been born in the area or worked on the land since childhood. Many of these, as children, before leaving a village school, would have helped their fathers in a large garden, which most tied cottages had and were regarded as part of their wage. (Tied cottages went with the job and should a man get the sack he would have to leave the cottage for the next employee, often causing hardship). Keeping several lines of potatoes hoed and earthed up together with such jobs as double trenching, or digging by hand two spits, or spade depths, down and burying the compost made many a young lad’s back ache giving them an inkling of what was to come in later life. There was also the possibility of poultry and perhaps a pig or two to be fed and watered before and after school. Sometimes odd jobs would be found for them on the farm such as leading the horses and wagons to and from the field during haymaking and harvest or as in our case the chance of making a few bob beating, (driving the birds over guns during the shooting season). We were what was known as a ‘Partridge Manor’ - where wild partridge were regarded as a crop. In the 1940s farming practice had
not changed a great deal over the last hundred years or so and in our part of the world at least, there was far more work carried out with horses than tractors. Production was being pushed to its limits in an effort to stave off Hitler’s hope of starving us into submission by his submarine attacks on the food bearing convoys at sea. Many of the younger men were serving in the forces and some of the older men who were now working the land had reached pension age, that in those days was 70 years! Many had started full-time work at a very young and tender age, often bird scaring, a tiring, lonely and in winter time a cold job. That farming
6 August 2011
had yet to be mechanized was fortunate for machinery used oil, and oil had to be brought in by ship. This ment farm work was far more physically demanding than today. It was taken as a matter of course that a man in his 60s could still hump a two hundred pound sack of corn, sometimes up a few steps into a granary and despite our many complaints against it there are some things we should thank the Health and Safety Act for. That today we rarely see the once very common village sight of elderly gaffers hobbling with a couple of sticks crippled by rheumatism and arthritis is one of them. Joints and muscle were frequently strained to the limit and unlike horses that were not put to heavy work until reaching maturity, boys started well before bone and muscle were ready for hard graft. While Sam did not stand out like a
sore thumb he differed in various ways. Although married he and his wife were not blessed with children in an age when many farm workers’ families were large. At mid morning ‘beaver’ or ‘Bait’ time when most of us had a chunk of bread and cheese, with pickle if lucky, much needed when you had had breakfast at six, he would often have a slice of pie or a home made pastie and a hot drink from a ‘Thermos Flask’. Such a thing in a cottager’s house was a luxury. The rest of us had cold tea. (The head horseman once told me that Sam had to take off his boots in the outhouse, unheard of in most other cottages where long suffering wives fought a perpetual battle with the mud and dust being lucky if they could get their man to walk on newspaper! But, continued George ‘he do live well’). I learned as much about farming, and much else, while we ate our ‘bait’ in those days as I did from working along side Sam and his mates. Football was rarely if ever discussed and in pre T.V. days ‘pop stars’ and ‘celebs’ did not exist. Instead it might be that surrounding farmers, their farms and families were discussed with a frankness that could well have shaken them. One such morning Sam told us how he used to be given his Skipper’s shot- gun when moored up at some isolated coastal creek and poach a hare or bird, for Sam had started his working life
barely into his teens as a cabin boy on a Thames sailing barge before World War I.
He was a London ‘foundling’ brought up by one of the institutions that took these unfortunate babies into their care. While such a life was not as tough as that experienced by those in Oliver Twist’s time it was no bed of roses but he was lucky for he had on his own admission a skipper and mate who, while tough was very fair and treated him well. Those large vessels with their brown ‘tanned’ waterproofed sails worked the East Coast of England and often made passage to the Continent. He wore his ‘14 – 18’ Merchant Navy ribbon on his Home Guard battle- dress with pride. Many were the tales of cargoes, and contraband, carried up the creeks and water-ways which only a few years before in the days of peace, I myself as a young boy had punted, rowed or sailed on during my school holidays. On hearing this Sam took me under his wing making sure I handled hoe, pitch and dung fork in the least tiring manner.
The need to increase food production meant many farmers had started to apply artificial fertilizer to the land in quantities hitherto unknown and Sam had a hobbyhorse that he rode, at times, with boring repetition. This often caused laughter in which the callow youth I was joined. According to Sam this increase in the use of such artificials was the worst thing that had ever
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