Free King's Cross Kid by Victor Gregg

to see any tide marks.’ When we returned to the shed she gave us the once over: ‘I’ll scrub the pair of you tonight, you’re not getting away with that cat’s lick.’
    The only thing I remember about the breakfast was the horrible concoction that went by the name of porridge. It was even worse than I had experienced at the Shaftesbury, and nowhere as good as our mum’s. However, the porridge was followed by big trays of fried bacon, eggs and beans and as much bread as we wanted. Everyone helped themselves; not a crumb was left on the trays. Then, hunger satisfied, it was off for our initiation as hop-pickers.
    The morning mist had cleared and, with the sun shining, the dew slowly dried off. Down to the lines we trooped. The smell of the hops was by now overpowering. I was sent off to find brother John who had disappeared in the general mêlée. It took me a full hour and when I finally located him he was sitting under a small tree crying his eyes out. He had got himself lost. When I returned him to the arms of my anxious mum, she said, ‘Keep your eyes on your brother, Victor, it’s the sudden change. John carn’t cope like you.’
    There were about a dozen of us in our group sitting on stools around a long bench. On top of the bench there was a big long sack. There was a farm worker with a long pole whose job it was to pull the lines of hops off the wires that they grew along and on to the table. As the lines came down to the table some of the branches got entangled with the hair of those women, like Mum, who had not covered their hair with a scarf. On that first day plenty of time was wasted while the women tried to untangle their hair from the vines. Those far-sighted men and women who had managed to escape this predicament were now busy picking the hops off the vine stalks and filling the sacks with hops and making sure that no leaves went in.
    At about eleven in the morning a whistle was blown and everyone stopped. Mum propelled me and John to the food shed where a light lunch had been laid out by the farmer. Bread and cheese and a sort of salad. ‘Don’t show me up by gulping yer food down like pigs.’ That was our mum telling us not to be greedy. Everyone helped themselves, no one counted how many slices of bread and cheese you had, and after about twenty minutes we were all back at the bench slaving away at the hops. There was another break in the afternoon and then slog on until the overseer blew his whistle signifying the end of the day’s toil. Then we trudged back through the fields to the huts or sheds, where we had a wash before sitting down to whatever dinner was served up. As soon as dinner was finished, Mum gave us our orders: ‘Go into the woods and get some firewood.’ This was for the pot-bellied stove; everyone was doing the same thing because the only possible way to get rid of this sort of sticky dirt was with lashings of hot water. Our mum’s list of what to bring had included the biggest kettle you could get hold of.
    Once we’d got the wood, Mum set about boiling the water, and there we were, me and my brother John, stark naked, while Mum set to work on the grime we had accumulated in the course of our first day’s work. By the time she finished the long bar of Sunlight soap had shrunk by half: ‘And don’t get dirty like that any more or it will be a repeat performance tomorrow.’ There was no way that John and I wanted a repeat of that torture so we swore to our mum that we would keep ourselves clean in future
    By seven in the evening some of the men were already on their way to the village pub while the rest of the group sat around a big campfire. John and me had never experienced anything like it, with the smoke getting in our eyes and the sparks from the huge fire leaping up into the night sky. The women spent the evening gossiping about the day’s goings on and then Mum brought out her mandolin and another man fished out an accordion and the evening came alive to the