8. School Holidays (Part 1)

Up to the age of about 12, nearly all my friends and I would spend most of our school holidays either at home or wherever our mothers were working. Being with my mother was the best option as in the 1950’s & 60’s she would be working mostly on Monkton Court Farm, either out in the fields or around the Turkey Farm, which to me, my brothers and sister and several other friends, was nothing more than a great adventure.

Out on the fields there would be trees to climb, straw stacks to play on, or piles of wooden boxes to climb and make a camp, in which we could hide. The field work was done mostly in the warmer, drier months of the year and it hardly ever seemed to rain. Some of the work our mothers did could be quite tedious, walking the upland fields picking up all the large flint stones was one of the dull jobs. Pulling Mangelwurzels was good fun, but it was hard work to pull those beet’s out of the ground. Sometimes Bill (wagoner) Andrews would be in the field with the horse (Blossom) & cart, and we would help to load up the Mangelwurzels, which would then be taken into the farmyard to be stored, then fed to the cattle throughout the winter.

The first half of the Christmas holidays would be spent around the Turkey Farm. Here a lot of the mothers would spend a couple of weeks plucking turkeys for the Christmas market (fresh turkey’s being the normal in those days). The enclosed area outside the plucking shed had a high framework of scaffold poles, about six foot off the ground on which the plucked birds hung before going to market – it was a marvellous climbing frame!

For a few years, the last week of our summer holidays would be spent picking hops on Baxter’s Farm. We would either help mum pick the hops, as she was paid by how many bushel baskets she managed to fill each day, or go and play in the trees that surrounded the hop field.

In the Easter holidays, most of us boys had a hobby which was banned in 1964, egg collecting (or ‘bird nesting’ as we used to call it). 1963 had the longest period of freezing conditions of the twentieth century. The boys in the village were taught by our fathers and elders to respect nature. You only took one egg out of a nest and once you had one of that particular bird you didn’t need another. When I went to secondary school a lot of the boys from the towns would take a whole clutch of eggs time and time again for no reason at all. We didn’t like having to stop collecting eggs, but we understood why it had to be done.

Most of our holiday time was spent out in the fresh air and nothing was more boring than having to stay indoors, which, fortunately only happened when the weather was at its worst.

Next month School Holidays (Part 2)

Terry Marsh

Originally published in the Monkton News (April 2023).