大象传媒

I worked in a hat shop in Lake Road, Portsmouth. All the staff were called up. I was 13.5 years old when I started work. Due to the air raids, lots of mornings the windows of the shop were blown in, and we ended up with just a small square of window, boarded up each side.
On Saturday mornings, two little girls used to come into the shop and run my errands for sixpence. One night, a loaded bomber was shot down over Portsea, and the litrle girls were killed.
It affected me very badly.
From there, I was sent up to my Aunt's in Bradshott, just ooutside Selborne, and there I joined the womens Land Army.
I would not have missed my time in the Land Army. Although I was a city girl, I quickly started to enjoy the work as it was before mechanisation, and we worked mainly with the horses.
One of the dirtest jobs was threshing the ricks. We were expected to kill the hundreds of rats which dropped all around us. So dungarees tucked into welly boots were a must or the rats would run up inside the dungaree legs.
If my cousins and I had been to a dance in the village hall the evening before, we might fall asleep while having our sandwiches sitting under the hedge or in the ditch, as it was very hard physical work which we were called upon to do.
Once the foreman asked us to cut a hedge. After a terrible shock when he saw the results he said: "I'll never let you bloody land girls touch another hedge. It looks like a rat's gnawed it."
But we soon learned and we worked very hard in the dairy, which in those days always smelled very sweet, of hay, the hop fields, potato-picking-up (a back-breaking cold job), harvest cart, loading the wagons with sheaves and so on. One of our co-workers, Edward Ridley, when the last load was brought in, would shout and throw his rake up into the air, with great excitement because after much hard work it was "harvest home".
Winter jobs were Kale cutting, fozen stalks of kale were very hard to work with and we often ended up with very bad cuts. Dung cart and manure spreading were hard but surprisingly enjoyable jobs and not as smelly as you might think, unlike now, when I wonder what the poor animals are fed on.
One favourite job was taking the horses to be shod at the blackmiths at Selborne, where Clifford Tarr would do his skilful work. The first time was very scary, as the horse was huge but very placid. The carter, with a grin on his face, threw me up on the back of the mare, and then smacked its rump and I galloped all the way down the hop garden, but luckily it knew its way and it came to a dead stop outside the forge.
I met my future husband while I was working in the Land Army, and never returned to Portsmouth to live, although I often missed the pictures, the dances and being able to swim in the sea at the end of our road, Jervis Road.
My husband Sim Rushton was collecting the hop bags, called surplases, when his horse, Blossom, stopped dead. She would not move. Sim got down from the cart to investigate only to find that one of our gypsy families who came to pick hops every year, had left a baby asleep under the hop bines out of the sun. Somehow Blossom knew.
However, another time was not so good when the rim of tghe cartwheel ran over a kettle. The old gypsy lady chased Sim alll up te hop garden with a stick saying "Oh dawy he's run over the kittle!"
Everybody loved hop picking and the gypsy families who used to come to Selborne weree salt of the earth people. They would fight and sometime things went missing, but they were colourful and fun.
Also everyone believed that the smell of the hops was the best cure for whooping cough, and it seemed to work.

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