Jobs

Tasker Dunham over at "A Yorkshire Memoir" has just been merrily blogging away about part time jobs that people did when still in full-time education.

Living in a village situated in the middle of productive farmland, there was always money to be made at harvest-time. I mostly recall potato picking and also pea picking. Even for a ten or eleven year old boy, such work was back-breaking. You really knew about it when you had spent six or seven hours stooping in a field and in addition the filled wire baskets were a struggle to lug back to the trailer.

I had an evening paper round between  the ages of twelve and fourteen. There were around forty copies of "The Hull Daily Mail" to be delivered every night. In those days almost every other house in the village subscribed to that paper. My friend, Paul Budd, delivered weekly and monthly magazines. I recall that a man who lived in a  bungalow on the edge of the village subscribed to "Playboy" but for several months he never got it on time. I am sure you can guess why. 

I must have been fifteen when I began working at the turkey farm near Brandesburton. It involved weekends and some holiday work. It wasn't a proper "farm" as portrayed in children's story books, it was more of a concentration camp. There were several sheds populated by thousands of gobbling white turkeys at different stages of development. The job was mostly about feeding and watering them and ensuring that the shed floors were reasonably clean. Fresh wood shavings had to be manually scattered  every two or three days. As they grew older the turkeys became noisier - quarreling over food and the imminent approach of workers like me.

When I was sixteen, after I had finished my O level exams, I got a job at a caravan camp just south of Scarborough. It was called The Crow's Nest - formerly just a farm - and it was run by the Palmer family who, I believe, still run it today. I was provided with a small caravan to lodge in and I had various duties to perform - mostly related to the farming side of the business. There were eggs to collect from the battery sheds where in three tiers, hens shared hundreds of cages from which wires ran into troughs out of  which you collected the eggs  twice a day. There were also wax milk cartons to fill and seal in the dairy every afternoon.

During the Christmas holiday of 1970-71,  I was the stand-in caretaker at the village school. The regular caretaker, Maurice, was hospitalised I believe. I had to clean every floor in the school - mostly using a heavy floor-cleaning machine that scrubbed and then buffed the floors. It was difficult and tiresome work but financially beneficial so I didn't mind too much.

From sixteen to eighteen I was the lead singer of a semi-professional rock and roll band and though I did it for the love of it, we occasionally received pay packets. I guess that in the time I was with them we played fifty or sixty paid gigs. We called ourselves Village and I still have the pewter tankard that the band's manager presented to me  a month or so before I left them to follow a different dream - teaching in The Fiji Islands under the auspices of Voluntary Service Overseas.

I could go on to write about work I  undertook during the time I was a university student (1973-77) but I think I will leave that for another time.