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One of the memories of Mrs Kathleen Burdett (nee Hinde) who was born in London in 1940.
My father and my Nan took my friend Margaret Crossman and myself hop picking. This was new to me although I had seen many families go years before. What happened was you hired a large lorry and took your household furniture to Kent where the hop fields were. These were the only holidays children had in those days.
When you arrived at the hop fields you were allocated a hut. This was where you stayed for six weeks, so it was our second home. The children were sent to collect 'faggots', these were bundles of twigs tied together. With this you built your fire outside the hut. There was no heating inside just your bedclothes.
During the day the Pole-man pulled down vines and you were given a 'bushel basket'. When you picked the hops off the vines you dropped them into the basket and you were paid so much a bushel, less of course the rent for your accommodation.
Normally the vines were lousy with bugs or fleas, so when the 'Pole man' came you would scamper so the insects never got into your hair. That was your holiday!
Once a day we would walk one and a half miles to the farm and carry back a churn of milk. You had to get it every day, as there was nowhere to keep it. As it was summer, everyone built their fires outside their huts and cooked their dinner on the fire and sang songs.
In between the late afternoon and the early evening we would go 'Scrumping'. This was climbing apple trees and shaking them until the apples fell off. We would go back to the hut and dip these sour apples into a tin of condensed milk. I was sure this was nectar. Then of course there was butter and sugar or syrup on your slice of bread.
The best for me was a slice of gravy dripping. This was the fat and the juices out of the pan that the joint of meat had been cooked in. When it was cold it went hard, so you could use the knife to move the hardened fat to get to the gravy dripping and then the hardened fat was spread over this.
We were also given lumps of fat off the meat to suck if you had a bad chest and cough. 'It'll grease your chest', we were told it would make you better and 'Shift the muck off your chest'.
Once a week we would walk to the town, two miles away, to watch the local 'flicks', our slang for the cinema. This would be an old projector that you could hear turning and it would keep breaking down. The film would break or burn, then have course all of us 'Londoners' would scream and stamp our feet until it was mended.
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