Alfred Gotts commentary continued:
Everyone picked the hops, including the children. We loved picking, we used to race each other. ‘Course it was all the better for mum because you had to pick seven bushels for a shilling. They used to sing a song “they pay me seven a shilling, so how can a poor girl earn a living”. Father never came, he never wanted hopping. We must have earned a couple of bob for mum, maybe three shillings. We never had no money, mum took it all. She might give us a penny now and then, but we had other ways of making money down there, like I told you with fruit. If you had too much you sold it to somebody. If I went and took a pot full of apples, or a big saucepan with a handle on, fill it up with apples. Then I used to do mushrooming in the morning early. People used to want them. One and six for a quarter of mushrooms, and I used to get a basketful. When I was twelve I used to get a basketful. And they’d give us a penny for some.
So Mum enjoyed it as a holiday, it was good for her. It was a rest and a bit of money coming in.
You might have a bailiff in charge of you. I went to a farm near Faversham the year the ’14 war broke out and the bailiff bred chickens. White Winalots (Wyandottes). They have got a little blackish mark on their neck. Some of them weighed eight pound. One and threepence he charged for ‘em. To take back a few bob they used to fill up the potato baskets with a lid on at that time and hold a hundredweight of potatoes, with chickens, and sent us back to Holborn Viaduct at the cheap rate, with those baskets of chickens on the passenger trains. They were dead, we killed them and put them in there, and we sold them for half a crown, three bob each. One and threepence was the price we paid for them. He wanted to get rid of them for the winter, you see, as they don’t lay.
We would be away a month hopping, sometimes five weeks at a time. I’ve had six weeks down there. When one place had finished they’d say do you want to go and help at so and so’s.
The hop-pickers were mostly friendly. At the place in Faversham they were mostly flower sellers from Covent Garden and that all up the West End. Groups of families who got their living from the flowers. Bloomsbury and all that way, they lived. All the East End went, every district had its hop pickers. We weren’t worried about not being at school, that was our holiday. Our mother and father never took us for a holiday, that was ours: green fields and a ride in a train, it was a wonderful holiday.
Mum never made any wine or beer for herself. But I remember she made stuff for your chest, sweet nitre, oil of juniper, then she used to have black treacle, this black sticky like Fowlers treacle and she mixed it all in that for our chests.
We couldn’t grow anything of our own because the yard was crazy paving, so mother used to buy vegetables and fruit. There was some tinned things around. You could get a tin of fruit for threepence or fourpence. You might get gooseberries or plums, but you didn’t worry about that you mostly had fresh fruit.
You could get dried fruits, apricots, figs, and they were all cheap.
And we kept rabbits, and we ate them as well, but when you grow up with an animal you can’t bear to keep thinking of him. We used to feed them on chaff, oats and that, you could get plenty food for ‘em, carrots and that.
It never cost much to feed them, we would go and get dandelions, grass, cabbage leaves from the greengrocer.
We kept hens as well. My brother bought a lot of hens. He sent away for them. He was about seventeen, and he bought all these chickens and none of them laid. So he started to sell them, to the man next door, and as soon as he gets them they started laying. See, ‘cos we were pinching the eggs while he was out at work and we kept the eggs and ate them. And he never knew.
Meat was very cheap so we could eat it lots of times a week. You had a dinner, peas pudding and a faggot, that was a good meal for you. ‘course today the mixes is different. You could buy tinned meat like corned beef, but very seldom. When they first came in, you could get tinned meat off the docker boys that worked in the docks, but not many people liked it. You could buy a penn’orth in a grocers shop and get about a quarter of a pound.
In Bethnal Green Road there was stalls that sold meat. One was a cats meat stall there, fourpence, sixpence a pound. Meat for human consumption, lamb, tuppence ha’penny for strips of mutton. Cheaper than catsmeat and that was right up to the war. And fruit everywhere you went. Cox’s apples, Pippins, Ribstons, if you paid more than tuppence a pound you wouldn’t buy them. Everywhere they was, stalls along Farringdon Road from Clerkenwell to Smithfield selling fruit. A penny you could buy half a pound of apples, four a penny oranges, bananas four a penny. In the City you go in up Pudding Lane. By London Bridge was a sale room and then men used to sell canary bananas. They’d take them out the saleroom and stand there with the crates they’d come in, four a penny.
I don’t recollect mum eating less food so that the rest of the family could have more, but then I wouldn’t notice. Dad was just given his meal and that was the end of it. He didn’t get more because he was working. Sometimes I would bring him a treat. I had a friend in Leadenhall Street, and he used to give me halibut heads, all the heads, big plaice heads, turbot heads. And mum used to boil them and he used to like them cold. All jelly ‘cos once you let them go cold it goes to a thick jelly. He used to enjoy that.
We could talk during meals, when we had it just ourselves, they wasn’t so fussy. And us boys used to eat everything that was put on the floor, we were hungry but we didn’t worry. We seldom left anything on the plate unless we had been off somewhere and eaten. We didn’t wait to get things passed to us like salt, we just got it ourselves. We always had to use a knife and fork, not allowed to put our hands on anything. We weren’t made to sit at the table any special way, we were brought up rough and ready.
When we were finished our food we just got up and went. Mum was glad you go out so she could clear up. We mostly sat in the same place at dinner. We didn’t all sit together, Mum called out Tom, Dicky and Harry – come and have your dinner and you had it and went. Mum didn’t serve us in any particular order, she just put your meal down and get on with it.
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