On our farm, the cereal crop was oats and wheat. It was all sown by hand and when it was ready for reaping, it was cut by scythe, and bound into sheaves by hand, it was made into stooks on the field and later built into a big stack in the most sheltered part of the field. Then came threshing day.
The threshing machine was hired and it went from farm to farm until all the corn was threshed. Now they have combined harvesters which does the whole job at once. All the neighbours came to help on that day, and there was lots of nice food. We could hear the threshing machine as we ran home from school and the excitement was great.
The corn was bagged as it came out of the machine, then stored in the barn. The flour was quite coarse and had to be mixed with white flour to make it palatable. Shop bread wasn't bought then, though it was a great treat if ever we got some.
White flour was bought in eight stone white cotton bags. From four lovely white bags, my sister Delia would make a beautiful cotton sheet, all hand stitched. I said there was nothing she couldn't do.
In the late twenties and early thirties the economy was very bad. I remember my father taking the lambs to market and could only get fifteen shillings each, and took them back again to feed for another couple of months. Bull calves were worth nothing. Heifer calves were more valuable and could sell. We weren't poor, except in spirit, there are many kinds of poverty.
There was a big family living near us. Ten children, the last born three months after the father died. They were such a happy family. They had a grandmother. Hardly anybody had a grandmother, so she adopted us all. We loved going there. As we grew up and started going to dances, we all met up there. The mother was great, she never interfered, she just enjoyed us all. There was another family as poor as church mice, but there was such love in that house. We loved to visit there. So that's what I mean about many kinds of poverty. On New Years Eve, I used to walk around the yard, listening to the animals in their stalls. It was so quiet at midnight and I felt so lonely. Next day was alright again, we celebrated the New Year and looked forward to better times, which came eventually, nothing stands still forever.
We always had a lot of chickens, well hens actually. The hatchlings were the chickens. We loved the job of collecting the eggs. We had Rhode Island reds which laid big brown eggs and Black Minorca's which laid white eggs. Several hens would be crowning at the same time and we would be running all over the place to find where they had laid. Several times at the end of spring and beginning of summer, one or two hens would go missing. Well either the fox had got them or they were laying out. Then after two weeks they would appear in the yard with their little family of chicks. They were very clever at hiding their nests under a hedge or in a messy bank.
In the hatchling season we often put a clutch of duck eggs under a broody hen. When the ducklings hatched out, they very soon found the pond down in the field. The poor mother hen got demented around the pond calling to the ducklings, which were having a great time. It was very funny to watch. Sometimes a fox raided the hen house, he didn't just take a hen, but killed several and frightened the remainder. No eggs for a few days.
I think the most boring job we had to do was keeping the hens, ducks and turkeys out of the corn field when the grain was ripening, for hours on end we walked the perimeter of the field. If I had a good book, I would forget the hens. We had no pets on the farm. Dogs and cats earned their keep. The cats kept the mice and rats under control, they lived in the barn and got a bowl of fresh milk at milking time. The dogs had it harder, they mostly lived outside or in an open shed.
We had a black cow and when she calved she went mad for a few days, but her milk was so rich and creamy, she provided most of the butter for the family. We loved the new calves, we were allowed to feed them from a bucket of milk. We'd put our hand into the bucket and they'd suck the milk through our fingers.
My brother John is the only one left now on the farm. He just farms now for pleasure. He keeps a couple of horses for pleasure and some goats and dogs, which he enjoys. Wise man. How we longed for a bike when we were kids, no chance. Delia had a bike, as did some of the brothers, so we pinched them every chance we got. I was eighteen when I got a bike. We had to walk three miles to the shop and carry heavy shopping. We had to walk half a mile for the lovely spring drinking water. It kept us fit. I still love walking.
