Geoff Phillips on Haymaking

We went haymaking and then they had the pickup balers so you done a time with the pickup balers and you found all the ins and outs of that so you knew what was what and in those days they put a bale sledge on the back of the baler that you stood on and you would stack them in a heap of six or eight bales and you’d just slide them off them and you had them in the heaps but the hard part was when you came to pick them all up and put them on the trailer because it was all done with a prong in those days or a pitch fork, whatever you call them today.

It was all done by hand in those days and that was the hard work of it but you just done it because there wasn’t nothing else. They used to cut it with the old grass cutters, the old finger mowers and yeah I did that as a nipper.

You were sent out to cut 15, 20 acres with the old finger mower and just did it and never thought nothing about not doing it; it was good fun, yeah. When it was baled I suppose it would take, I don’t know, a couple of days perhaps, yeah and you’d stack it all in the barn. But now they’ve got all the machinery and they don’t have the hard work like that but we done it and I used to pitch those bales when I was 15 with the men and you never thought nothing about it really.

It was just how life worked and yeah, it was good fun really because you had a gang of chaps see.

You don’t get them now, you get one man does whatever today but you had five or six of you, it was always a lot of silliness going on and it was a good bit of fun.