David Cooper on Harvest

My name is David Douglas Cooper and I was born in Tooting in South West London in 1940. My dad was a policeman in that area so we were based there.

We lived there through the war, through the bombing. We were bomb damaged at one time and evacuated to Suffolk, which is where I first got hooked on farming.

I was only three or four years old but there was harvesting and hay-making going on around me and farm animals were quite close by.

I thought that was wonderful compared with living in an air-raid shelter in London.