Farming and my part in its demise

Our mothers put their names down every year as hop picking season approached, and we poor little soldiers had to go too. They took us by farm Lorries to the hop fields. I remember there being many of those foreign Londoners there as well.

For anyone who has had the opportunity to work, or as in our case play in a hop field, you will never forget the distinctive smell. A smell and stain that lingers for days after the work is done and a smell that makes you want to eat.

My mother and one of her sisters would work a row together, the bin was constantly moving further down the line of hops, trying to keep in front of the pickers in the next row. The early morning dew soaked us as the vines were pulled down in readiness for picking.

I remember running after the tractors as they moved from bin to bin and then on back to the oasts. Us kids had a wonderful time running about and generally making a nuisance of ourselves, until we got a clip round the ear and had to stand solemnly by our mothers pretending to pick hops.

My mother would pack a lunch of sandwiches with huge chunks of bread and cheese, buns and an awful tasting flask of tea. I was so impressed that my aunt who accompanied us would bring cold custard as a pudding, what a treat.

My teenage years brought me closer to work as I earned money straw littering until the strawberries were ready to pick and then the hard backbreaking work started.

During one of the school holidays a cousin and I worked on a farm, potato grading. They put us to work on an old machine to start with; we had to shovel spuds onto an old conveyor belt that took them into a spinning barrel. It was painfully slow; we would shovel and rest for some thirty seconds or so, they warned us not to load too many spuds onto the conveyor, as it would not take the weight.

What the heck after half an hour we became bored with the shovel and the resting so we thought if we doubled up on the shovelling we would have twice as much resting. Not so, the machine gave up the ghost with a horrible grinding noise and, as punishment, they made us work cleaning out the cowsheds.

Later I worked hop training, believe me this is seriously hard work and if you have delicate artist hands like mine, yes I have, not the job to undertake lightly. Women work much faster, work much cleaner and do less moaning; they are welcome to it. They did give me some stick as I tried to work the rows keeping up with them.

In the early years of our married life we lived firstly in a caravan and then moved to a rented house on a farm and a couple of years later decided to buy a smallholding, and we did, but that is a tale for another day.

Ann Widdecombe MP

I remember when Maidstone was surrounded by hops. They would be used to decorate pubs as well as for their original purpose! Everywhere you looked there were fields covered in hopwires and during the picking season those fields were full of people. Then came the 1987 wind storm and suddenly the fields were bare. For all manner of economic reasons farmers did not return to hop growing and now when people ask how my hops are I reply "Both are well." (Ann Widdecombe MP, June 2007)

Good luck with your enterprise.