10. School Holidays 14 years +

For most of the boys around my age in Monkton, it was a priority during school holidays to earn some money. With five kids in my family, the only way I had of getting a pair of Levi jeans was to buy them myself. When I was about 14/15 my father went to work for Terry Whiteman, who farmed about 200 acres (80 hectares) of ground at St Nicholas and next to the River Wantsum along the Thanet Way. This led to me working there as well, up until I left school. It was hard work, but I loved it.

In the Summer we were picking up potatoes, planting cauliflowers and bagging up wheat on the old Massey Ferguson combine.

Bagging the wheat up on the combine was hard work. The bags we used at the start of the harvest held 2.25cwt (115kg) and it was all that I could do to just tie them up and get them down the chute on the side of the combine, much easier with 1cwt (50kg) bags. The bags had to be picked up in a bucket loader then stacked on trailers which were taken back to the farm in the evening. The first job the next morning was to unload the trailers, by hand, ready to start the new day.

It was not all work in the summer holidays. My friends Stephen Bing, Michael Dunk and I clubbed together and brought a three-man tent, sleeping bags, gas cooker and cooking utensils. This tent served us for three summers, where we camped for a week on Whiteman’s farm of Monkton Court Farm. Most of our time when camping was spent fishing in the rivers and dykes.

In the Christmas and Easter holidays there was a little work on the farm. In the Christmas holidays there was ‘Riddling Potatoes’ (shovelling potatoes out of the clamp and bagging them up for market) and ‘traying-up’ seed potatoes. Seed potatoes were brought, they came in 1cwt hessian sacks and emptied into seed trays and stacked in tiers in a frost-free barn. In the Easter holidays we would be planting the seed potatoes.

Fishing was still my main past-time in these holidays, but I started to spend more time sea fishing (which I still do today). Cycling to Minnis Bay or ‘Plum Pudding Island’. There was plenty of codling in the winter and eels & flounders in the spring to be caught in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Terry Marsh

Originally published in the Monkton News (June 2023).