The escapade was triggered off during a Saturday night dance at Burnley Empress Ballroom, Lancashire, England when a young man told me
how his friend had earned a small fortune in East Anglia the previous
autumn on a fruit picking holiday. According to the joker it had been
so lucrative a venture that his mate had purchased a car with the
proceeds. My friend Jean and I couldn’t wait until cropping time came
around.
The mad adventure took place in September 1954, 18 months prior to
Bill Haley setting the music scene on fire with the movie Rock Around
the Clock, and triggering off a whole new genre of dance music.
Romantic crooning was the order of the day that autumn and during this
particular month the lyrics of Little Things Mean a Lot, No 3 in the
UK charts and sung by Kitty Kallen, were wonderfully sentimental. Al
Martino, who holds the unique record of having provided our very first
UK No 1 (two years earlier) was in 16th place with Wanted, but the
lovely Doris Day was being greedy: she’d three tunes in that Top 20
simultaneously, my favourite being Secret Love.
An English star was in second place to
Sinatra, who held the No 1 slot
with Three Coins in the Fountain, the charming and handsome David
Whitfield. His rendering of Cara Mia, came with the backing of the
Mantovani orchestra. Around this time I saw him perform live in
Blackpool and afterwards he came into the foyer to sign our autograph
books. He certainly was handsome, deeply tanned, with lovely blue
eyes, but surprisingly short in stature for someone with such a
powerful voice.
As members of a cycling club, pedalling long arduous miles up and down
the Pennine hills of northern England was second nature to us but once
we’d hit the unaccustomed flatness and monotonously long straight
roads of the fenlands, especially in fixed gear, we almost ground to a
halt. By the time we arrived at the agricultural camp it had been dark
for years.
The place had housed Italian prisoners during WW2, which had only
ended nine years previously, and the Nissen huts had been converted to
single-sex dormitories, a dance hall and a large social club. For the
opportunity to earn rich pickings we had paid the sum of £2.10.0 for a
week’s bed and board, which was modest even by the standard of those
far off years. I fell asleep that night dreaming of a Morris Eight car
like my dad’s with leather upholstery and orange indicators that
flicked outwards from the sides of the car after the fashion of tiny
wings.
The summer had been abysmal and consequently the demand for picking
fruit exceeded the scant supply of fruit adorning the trees and
bushes. In desperation the following morning we boarded one of a
clutch of lorries bound for the canning factories. If nothing else, we
needed to earn our beer money.
That day was spent on the assembly lines where I was given a long
leather strap with a wooden handle at each end. As the red hot cans
came sliding down onto the table I’d to throw the strap round the
required number of the cans and pull the handles together until the
strap was taut enough to lift the whole lot off the table and into a
vat. By the end of the day I left the factory with 14/6d and arms like
an orangutan.
After breakfast the following morning we cycled furiously along the
lanes looking for orchards for nothing would induce us back into that
canning factory, not even starvation. As we rode along I was so busy
sneaking sideways glances at gangs of young men who were gathering
potatoes that I didn’t notice a hole in the road until it was too
late. Apart from a lump on the head I had a buckled front wheel. Our
wanderings paid off, however, and we were taken on at 2/6d an hour
picking Victoria plums and Worcester apples and because I was the most
agile I was chosen to climb up into the trees.
I have never forgotten the stomach gripes I got with scoffing the
apples and plums - not that I was a fruit fan, more that I was
constantly hungry through arboreal activity and the nightly dancing in
the social club. Indeed, we had a box in the centre of our dormitory
where everyone put their fruity ill-gotten gains. Throughout the night
the communal groaning and wind releasing was deafening.
As the week wore on the Morris Eight slipped into Neverland and on the
last day I noticed that my tyre had sprung a hole where the brake
block had been rubbing because of the wheel buckle. I could even see
the inner tube. Clearly I couldn’t ride far before it burst, but tyres
didn’t come as cheap in East Anglia as the sub-standard ones that were
available in our neck of the woods and I simply couldn’t afford a
brand new tyre.
There were no motorways in England back then but a main artery ran
near to where we were staying. I am appalled now when I think of our
naivety; how the two of us cycled off in our ultra-short shorts to the
first transport café on the A1, outside of which were two kipper
wagons with Aberdeen, Scotland printed on the side. We cadged a smelly
lift as far as east Yorkshire and cycled towards Leeds into the
setting sun. I put the money for the tyre to one side ready for the
next day and we scraped up enough cash for a cheap B & B and seats at
the Odeon cinema.
They were showing The Eddie Duchin Story featuring Tyrone Power who
died a slow death to Nocturne in E Flat. We cried a lot, not just for
Tyrone and because of the haunting music, but for the car dream that
was shattered, my holey tyre and two young potato pickers who would
find another couple of fruit-plucking females immediately.
Whenever I hear Nocturne in E Flat or, more rarely, Kitty Kallen I
know that it will trigger off the dream in which I race up the A1 in
my Morris Eight with its rock-hard suspension, at 38 miles an hour,
with a box of kippers on the back seat. There is a handsome young man
thumbing a lift and carrying a card which bears the word Aberdeen and
I pick him up. Not surprisingly he looks a lot like Tyrone Power, only
a good deal healthier. We find a field somewhere near Ferrybridge,
east of Leeds where the lorry drivers dropped us off that day and we
make a fire on which to fry the kippers. As if by magic two bottles of
Mackeson Stout appears (alongside bakelite beakers) with which to
wash them down. The rest of the dream will have to be left to the
imagination.
More than forty years after that holiday I was dangerously, and quite
accidentally, near the camp. Half expecting the place to have
disappeared I just had to make the detour out of sheer curiosity. It
is the only time in my life I have found something that remained
exactly as I remembered – even the Nissen hut curtains hadn’t changed.
The biggest surprise of all was that it was still up and running as an
international agricultural camp. It had that Sleeping Beauty quality
of a time stood still like it was only yesterday that I had been there
- ridiculously young, wet behind the ears, and a champion of lost
causes.
© Maggie B Dickinson
Maggie B Dickinson is a freelance writer who lives in North West
England and is still a fan of the late James Dean.
She has written for magazines, websites and radio on travel, humour,
long-distance footpaths, history and literature. During her
fellwalking days she researched and produced the material for a
booklet on packhorse routes, entitled Early Trackways, for Pennine
Heritage Trust.
In 2005 her essay "A Coat of Paint" was published by the writers'
ezine AbsoluteWrite in the US anthology "Stories of Strength", the
proceeds of which go to the disaster relief charities involved with
Hurricane Katrina victims. In the spring of 2007 a US anthology
"Voices of Alzheimer's" will contain an essay she has written from her
own experience of caring for her late husband who suffered from
early-onset dementia.
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