My Mum and A Piano for Patrick!

My Mum and a Piano for Patrick!

I have written several pieces about my Mum who was a very special, but completely off the wall, lady! I have told how my Mum being a single parent with three children meant that we were very poor so there was little chance that we would ever get the opportunity to go on holiday. No, wait, I lie, my sister and I were sent to Dartford on a scheme called the Country Holiday Fund and my brother was sent to Stoke on Trent! Is it me, or does Stoke on Trent seem an unlikely holiday destination to anyone else?

Anyway, back to Mum, as without doubt, the highlight of her year was Hop Picking! Well, it was for Mum, my sister and I. My brother, on the other hand, hated every minute. Once the letter arrived confirming that we had been allocated a hut, the three of us went into rapturous overload. Rapture was very far from my brother’s expression, however. Mum and my sister both liked it because it gave them a chance to earn some money whilst at the same time it seemed like a holiday. My sister was trying to earn enough to go on a school trip to Paris, France. I liked Hop Picking because, being the youngest, I did very little of it! My brother on the other hand had to stay at the bin all day while I rode on the hay wagons and generally ran wild.

When the day came for us to journey to Kent we travelled by lorry, picking up families as we went. Although we weren’t all going to the same farm it wasn’t long before we were having a right old sing song ding dong in true East End tradition so that by the time we got to our farm, which happened to be the first drop off, we were all in high spirits. Our farm had huts on two fields. The first field had just eight huts four back to back and our hut was the end one of the four huts at the front, just off, and facing, the main track. The second field had about twenty huts in a single row and my Nan’s sister, my aunt Lizzie and her friend Tillie had their huts on that field.

Living conditions, even by our standards, were very primitive indeed. Our hut, for example, consisted of a brick built structure with a door but no window, and a corrugated iron roof. The door was a slatted affair that let in plenty of air and chinks of daylight even when closed and the central heating was by way of any accidental heat thrown out by the Tilly lamps once they were lit. The internal arrangements consisted of one room with a table in one corner that looked like it was on stilts, because it was so high, a kitchen chair and what we laughingly called the bed. The bed consisted of wooden poles laid on top of what I think were four brick walls and atop that was a pile of straw.

All four of us would sleep in that bed and we three children would sit on it to eat our meals. Mum had brought, for the bed, what she called ticking and the straw was put in that. Well, we had standards to maintain! We had blankets but no pillows and once when Mum had sent her stuff down by rail it failed to arrive and so we had to cover ourselves with an old mat from the floor. Anyway, it may come as some small surprise to learn that the hut did not accommodate en suite facilities. However, what served as the toilet was halfway down the field and I feel very strongly that someone should have been commended for having the foresight to place it there.

This extravagantly named "toilet" was a metal hut with a tin roof and inside was a wooden structure covering a hole in the ground so giving it the once over with a spot of bleach would have been an entirely superfluous effort. Therefore, its whereabouts in hot weather was of vital, nay, paramount importance. In fact, had I been familiar with the film at that time it would not have surprised me to see Sir Alec Guinness having spent some considerable time in “The Oven” come out blinking in the noonday sun just as he did in the film Bridge Over the River Kwai! Certainly one needed a similar sort of resolve to go in there in the first place.

The cookhouse too was quite something. I loved it! It was a three sided corrugated iron shed complete with corrugated roof. It had a dirt floor and two iron stakes hammered into the ground with a long metal pole resting on the stakes. Two big black cooking pots, the sort Missionaries are usually depicted as being cooked in, hung from the pole. To one side was a pile of faggots, bunches of twigs tied up, and to cook a meal you placed a faggot under one of the cook pots and set light to it. Anyway, to continue, I remember one time The Bind Puller, more of him later, was showing Mum the cookhouse and mentioned that she would be the only person using it as the other families on our field had all brought primus stoves. Mum just said “Seems a pity…when you’ve done all this modernising!”

The Bind Puller always started off friendly enough even asking Mum if she had had a good trip down. She answered “No, I thought that driver was gonna pitch us off the road the way he took some of them bends!” To which the Bind Puller replied “I’m not surprised…he looked cross eyed to me!” Mum just said “You don’t get two good eyes for the money I’ve paid!”

This initial friendliness soon wavered, however, as it became pretty obvious the Bind Puller hated us Londoners and we returned his affection. It was his job to hook down any stray hops left high up on the strings and to pull any really tough binds that couldn’t be done by some of the older pickers. He also measured the amount of hops picked and he did this by way of a basket which held a bushel of hops. However, he would push the hops down in the basket and Mum would do her best to get him distracted while she shuffled them back up again. So, war raged between the Bind Puller and the Pickers as the Bind Puller attempted to exert his authority and the Pickers did their best to outwit him at every turn. It was also his job at the end of the day to call “Pull no more binds!” so then the Pickers would just finish the binds already pulled and this would mean they were finished for the day.

On arrival that first day we did not have to work in the fields as we were given that time to settle ourselves in. However, come the next day we would be expected to arrive on the hop field in the morning about eight o’clock and pick solidly until lunchtime, stopping only to take a drink from the bottle of tea. Then come lunchtime we would sit on the damp clay and eat our sandwiches with hands that hadn’t seen a drop of water let alone soap and smelled very strongly of hops! Hops have quite an unpleasant smell when handled so in the interests of hygiene I did as little of that as possible. Then the Bind Puller blew his whistle and back to work we went finishing at about four or five in the afternoon.

Back at the hut Mum would prepare our meal in the cookhouse and we kids would eat it sitting on the bed as there was just the one chair. Then she would make a pot of tea using milk from the farm and we drank this eagerly from enamel mugs. In the evening, after dinner, the families in the huts behind us would have camp fires outside their huts as they faced down the field and the adults would sit round chatting just by the light of the fires and any Tilly lamps that were lit while we kids wandered about the countryside.

Bedtime was something of an auditory experience as every family could hear every other family and I well remember how often we would be lying in bed in companionable silence until someone needed the bucket. There is nothing more certain to get children giggling than listening to someone tiddling in to an empty metal bucket only to finish off with a fine flourish of trumps as Mrs Firkin in the hut behind ours did quite regularly! When, Mrs Evans her next door neighbour joined in then it was as near to a concert as Andre Reiu could provide today. With no electricity we had to take our entertainment in whatever form it came.

Now, Aunt Lizzie, my Nan’s sister, had a big family and one of her sons used to visit whenever he fell out with his wife. He was not a nice man and as young as I was I knew enough to stay well clear of him. My Mum couldn’t understand why I didn’t like him. She kept telling me that he liked me but I kept telling her that I didn’t like the way he liked me but my Mum never picked up on it and I was too young to articulate how I felt. However, Uncle Johnny went to the pub most nights, probably spending Aunt Lizzie’s hard earned cash. He would come home pretty much plastered but one night an opportunity presented itself to me which proved to be so gratifying it makes me smile with satisfaction even now.

We had heard that the pickers on the farm next to ours had brought with them a piano which they hadn’t taken back with them and it was stood idle in the field because they had finished their fields earlier than us so had gone home. So, all the younger kids, my brother and I included, decided we would go and ask the farmer if we could move the piano to our farm. Mum just scoffed at this idea saying we would never be able to get it along the winding lanes of Kent. We argued that the piano had wheels to which she replied, not wheels, castors! The older kids, my sister included wanted nothing to do with it.

Anyway, finally Mum agreed that we could go with the others and see the farmer. He wanted the thing off his land so was quite happy for us to have a go at moving it. It was quite difficult to get off the field but once on the lane it was easier and with all the younger ones about ten of us pushing and pulling it we managed to negotiate the lanes until we came to quite a bad bend and then we just couldn’t steer it and it ended up in a ditch.

Fortunately some of the older children arrived at just that critical moment and with their help we managed to salvage it from the ditch and started to push it once more. Then in the distance Uncle Johnny could be seen weaving and swaying his drunken way down the lane. When I say down the lane I mean there was a hill. And, as you’ve probably guessed by now, the piano run away from us gathering momentum as it hurtled its way towards the completely insensible and unsuspecting Uncle Johnny until it ran into the back of him with such force that it took his legs from under him and he fell to the ground. All the kids, with one exception, were more interested in the piano than with the prostrate Uncle Johnny and so paid no attention to him lying very still, perhaps unconscious, on the ground, instead continuing to chase after the precious instrument, hoping that it wasn’t damaged in any way. However, I was too interested in seeing that if any damage had been done then with any luck it had been done to Uncle Johnny. But you must understand I am not a vindictive person…as a rule, so I didn’t want him dead…no…not dead…perhaps…but I would have settled out of court for two broken legs!

However, I arrived just as he was lifting his head in drunken bewilderment and saw for the first time what it was that had knocked him to the ground. I couldn’t help but laugh to hear him splutter “Who the ffffuck’s gonna believe I’ve been run over by a fucking piano?” Then I completed his humiliation because I pushed his head back down in the puddle with my foot shouting to the others “Wait for me I’ve just trodden in some shit!” as I pretended to wipe my foot and looked back to see him looking totally bewildered with his Spivey suit all covered in mud! Boy, did that make me laugh! I think he left the next day! Can’t think why!

When at last we got the piano on to the big field everyone looked expectantly at my brother who had rather ambitiously told them he could play the damned thing. So my brother played the only thing he knew how…a little Irish jig. But his public demanded more than he could, at that time, supply. When one considers the struggle we had just getting the piano onto our farm, the other children’s, shall we say, petulance, was understandable. But then things started to turn ugly and so flanked by my sister and I the three of us made our escape back onto our own field before the angry mob baying for my brother’s blood could catch us. I couldn’t understand why they were so angry when it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that we had struggled to get the piano onto our farm just so my brother could practice and practice he most certainly did.

From then on every free moment saw him on the field playing the piano until he could master a few tunes. Even when everyone else was inside their huts because it was absolutely pissing down…the sound of Qua Sara Sara or some such tune came drifting over the fields as my brother did everything he could to master the instrument while doing his level best to fend off pneumonia!

When all the fields had been picked and it was time for us to leave, my brother could knock out a half decent tune and on the last night he played his full repertoire as people sat by their fires listening or singing along if they could recognise the tune sufficiently. Then when it was time for bed he played the National Anthem “God Save Our Gracious Queen” and poor as these people undoubtedly were, they all stood up out of respect for the Monarchy!

Before ending this account I feel I should mention it was the result of my brother’s attempts at learning to play the piano on that Hop Picking visit that encouraged Mum to take on the Grand piano from the Guardian Angel Club when they were looking to chuck the blinking thing out! As I have explained in a previous posting that piano lived with us in our little council house for some time before Mum reluctantly disposed of it. Probably to make way for that other essential item the Cocktail Cabinet which Mum seemed to think no self respecting council house tenant could live without!

To be continued