大象传媒

During world war two most people were in full employment either in the armed forces or doing jobs that were important to the war effort.As a result casual labour was in very short supply and when harvest time came around the ministry of food asked the Education Minister if some of the children from the senior schools could help.
The school that I attended answered the call and quite a lot of us volunteered to go down to a very large fruit farm in Suffolk.We had to be in good health,willing to work hard and had to own a bicycle which was needed to get us around the different fields,main farmhouses where we had our meals and the farmhouses where we slept.
On a lovely summer morning we all arrived at the railway station,wheeled our bicycles into the guard's van and then settled down in the carriages for what to many of us was our first journey on a train.When we arrived at our destination we were given a meal and taken to our accommodation which was clean but very basic by today's standards and we had some of our own teachers to supervise us.
Next morning we reported for work and after having breakfast in a very large dining room at the main farmhouse we were taken to the fruit fields.We picked raspberries,red and blackcurrants and other soft fruits.The regular farmworkers picked damsons,plums and apples which needed to be picked by climbing ladders.
The sun semmed to shine everyday for the next two weeks and we had a great time,we weren't allowed to eat any of the fruit but it was on the menu every mealtime,in fact we got fed up of stewed fruit and even today it is not my favourite pudding.
In the evenings when we had washed and changed we got on our bicycles and rode around the country lanes enjoying the scenery.Most nights our journey took us to the Airforce Base where we used to stand outside the fence and look at the enormous four engined bombers that had their engines warming up to take them on a bombing mission over Germany.The planes would fly off later in the evening and return in the early mornings when we were sleeping .
Some mornings when we were working in the fields we would see some of the planes coming back with one of the engines destroyed or part of a wing or tail plate had been shot away and the body of the plane riddled with schrapnel.We would cheer these brave airmen and pray that they got back to the airbase safely and we realised the signicance of the words of the wartime song "Coming in on a wing and a prayer".
We all enjoyed our two weeks picking fruit,meeting different people and we looked upon it as a holiday rather than a part of the job of feeding the nation and we were very reluctant to come back home.We did bring back memories,some of them sad but most of them good that we can recall all these years later.

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