MEMORIES OF STRAWBERRY GROWING Sheila Fermor Clarkson

'Above all else Mereworth is an active farming village. An astonishing percentage of the English commercial strawberry crop is grown in the village. A summer visitor will not fail to notice the heavy scent of strawberry on a still night …`

Robert Earl

Strawberries were more labour-intensive than apples and so my father employed, Peg (Mrs Weller), Dora (Mrs Marsh) and 'Silvey' (Mrs Dot Silvey) on a semi-permanent basis. Peg stayed with my father for almost 25 years and was the star performer. She always picked more strawberries than anyone else and the best sample. She never spoke unnecessarily, but always had a good sense of humour.

Strawberries needed a lot of attention. They were also greedy and my father reckoned they always took something, which was difficult to replace, out of the soil. Before planting a field of strawberries he always applied 30 cwt of shoddy (wool waste), 10 cwt of organic fertiliser and 3 cwt of Nitro Chalk per acre. 'Maidens' or first year plants were planted by machine; when they matured, runners were cut from them by hand; they needed strawing to keep the ripe fruit clean, and after the fruit was picked, the straw had to be burnt off. Like the fruit trees, they too, were prone to disease. Aphids was one disease I remember and Miss Joan Buttfield came from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food to give advice. Among the varieties, my father grew, Huxley was my favourite. By 1960 he was growing five acres of Rearguard strawberries, three acres of Vigour and four acres between them of Red Gauntlet and Cambridge Favourite.

They even provided work in the winter in the form of making wooden picking trays to hold 10 x 40z waxed punnets. Each strawberry picker took two picking trays on to the field which, when full, filled a 20-punnet tray for sending to market. My father imported wood from Portugal for these trays and collected it himself from Dover docks. This meant that Peg, Dora and Silvey were kept on at the end of fruit picking.

Once the strawberries were ready for picking in June, my father and brother John used to drive to West Malling Aerodrome, Snodland and Tonbridge to collect about 30 additional pickers. My father would allow no children on the strawberry field. Each mother contributed towards the wages of a mother who looked after all the children in a fenced off 'compound' complete with toilets at the back of the buildings.

It was hard, back-aching work, but the pickers always had a laugh together and the extra money always came in useful. My mother used to look forward to 'doing the booking' and she, too, was on the field by 8 am, with one of our old, leather school music-cases packed with flasks of tea, cheese and chutney sandwiches and home-made buns. She stood by a tarpaulin-covered trailer hitched to the tractor ready with her maroon, hardbacked, foolscap book and biro to enter the number of full punnets as each picker brought them in. She and John had picking trays ready with empty punnets in exchange for their full ones to save time.

Everyone had a joke with 'Mr Fermor' as he walked up and down the rows turning over plants with his walking stick to make sure the strawberries were being picked right - only the ripe ones of a good size, no leaves and each strawberry to have a short stalk unless they were being picked for jam. Then the pink hull or core had to be left on the plant. Occasionally someone picked a 'rough sample' which was unacceptable, but that was rare. It did happen once when a man picked two 'rough samples' but he didn't stay long enough to pick a third. Most soon learned that only the best sample would be good enough. As the rate paid, was piece-rate so much per punnet and not by the hour - there wasn't time to eat many strawberries.

By about 3.30 pm everyone was ready to drop, especially if it had been a hot day. There was no shade on a strawberry field. The loaded trailer was then driven into a cool shed by the buildings to await collection. In the early days the strawberries were sold on the open London market with a canning and jam contract with Smedleys at Paddock Wood towards the end of the season when the fruit was smaller. However, in the 1960's my father had a contract to supply Sainsbury's Supermarkets.

After tea, on every day of the strawberry season, my parents sat at the kitchen table adding up the day's totals for each picker and making out tickets for the markets or contractor. At the end of the week, my father took a cash analysis for wages to the then National Provincial Bank at Swan street, West Malling. Wages were paid weekly and sealed with pay slips in small, brown wage packets.

It was a gruelling time even with good weather, but if storms or too much rain ruined the fruit, then all the hard work of the past months was virtually wiped out. My father said that each strawberry season aged him ten years. Even today, more than thirty years later, I cannot pick strawberries in a field, without the whole of that era of hard work flooding back.

As Rudyard Kipling wrote in his poem LICHTENBERG:

'Smells are surer than sounds or sights

 To make your heart-strings crack - `