Chalkies World

For many years I had tried to find a part time job to supplement my pocket money of fifty pence per week, which was probably about the average at the time. I had tried all the newsagents, the pop man and the milk man without joy. At one point I thought that my luck was in when I was allowed to cover for a friend paper round whilst he was on holiday, I was always on time doing a great job, however, never was I offered the job permanently at any time.

 

I even went to the local farms and a few local shops asking for work without any joy whatsoever. One Friday tea time, however, whilst in the house on my own the door knocker went and I answered to find the milk man collecting his weekly fee. I asked again and this time to my surprise he said there may be a job going on the local dairy farm and he would find out for me. Not holding out any hope I continued on as usual and forgot all about it. A few days later on returning home from school, my mother informed me that a member of staff from the farm, situated just behind our house on the other side of the field about 30 degrees to the right of the Beacon, had been around to our house and asked me to get in touch. I got my trusty bike out and pedalled as fast as I could to the farm whence, I asked for Mr Wright.

 

Jimmy Wright owned the local dairy farm and always seemed a jovial friendly type of person, he was getting on by now and about sixty years of age I guessed. This farm had two large battery hen buildings, along with a thriving milk home delivery business. One of the lads that had worked there as a child had been taken under Jims wing and was now farming pigs on his land. Jim would not charge Bally for the land but would expect a little help around the farm when needed. Bally was one of a long line of kids that Jim would help over the years and once you had a job there as a kid you could expect a future somewhere around the farm once you were of age to leave school.

 

 

A couple of years older than me was Mark Bardsley who worked there, I knew his brother Dean better as he was more my age and also worked for Jim. By the time he was twenty he was well into business and worked for himself removing rubbish for people. I am sure that Jim financed his pick up truck and I know for sure that as Jim was levelling his land out that the rubbish collected was disposed of for free by dumping on Jims land.

 

In Recent years I hear that Bardsley sold out his skip hire company and now lives in the lap of luxury. Another employee was a lad called Grinsell, now I am sure that he had some kind of help from Jimmy Wright, he has also recently sold out his skip and haulage company. These were just a few of the lads who had benefited from the start in their working life by being employed on old’ Jimmy Wrights farm. Here I was, employed by the very same man and sure for a good start in life in a business of my choice aided by Jimmy Wright benevolence.

 

As a very young child I remember our milk being delivered by horse and cart and many times I had been with my dad to feed the old shire horses whom pulled the milk carts. Although well retired by now, the horses still grazed on Jimmys land. On arrival at the farm I knocked on the very bland door on the very bland and run down looking farm house, to be greeted by a not such nice man that I had never met before, he was quite offish, however, found Jim for me and I was shown around Jimmys empire.

 

I was given a guided tour of the farm, the barns, the dairy sections, the machinery and the chicken sheds. The chicken sheds were massive, about two hundred feet long , very noisy and very very smelly. In the chicken sheds there was three rows of three tiers of caged hens back to back at angles. The chickens were crammed in about six to a cage and each cage was about a foot or so square, the chickens were mostly bald and didn’t look very happy with their lots. These cages had to be at angles bcause the floor on the cages was just square mesh allowing the piss and shit to simply fall into the base of the chicken sheds.

 

The base of the chicken sheds was some twenty foot below where we walked, it was just a mass of runny shit. This shit I realised months later was cleaned out by simply opening the doors and allowing it to run out and down the fields at the back of the sheds. No wonder that every few months we would sniff a horrible smell in the air around the area.

 

After the guided tour I was asked if I would like a job, I happily said yes when do I start?

 

I started about thirty minutes after school the following day. We were allowed thirty minutes after school to enable us to get changed and would work til seven in the evening. My job was to collect eggs from the trays in front of the hens, to help me to do this I had a trolley and a pile of large egg trays. I was the only egg collector and I had to cover both sheds before I could finish. At first, this was easy and I quite enjoyed it, as time went on I started getting bored with the tedium and also developed an allergy to the atmosphere in the sheds.

 

The job itself was pretty easy, however, it was not for the squeamish, as you would often come across the odd dead bird, I was always finding eggs that had no shell but simply a soft squidgy outer membrane holding them together. This was caused by a deficiency in the hens food and I am sure that the surroundings didn’t help.

 

At weekends I would work from six in the morning until about mid afternoon, these weekend hours formed the lions share of my wages. I would earn £1.50 in the evenings and £6.50 each day of the weekend and school holidays. We were expected to work every day and all day each weekend and school holidays, bank holidays included. It was frowned upon to take any time off and this added to the downside of the job. I was determined to stick it out though because for one the money came in handy and for two I wanted Jimmys help when I left school.

 

Being chalkie, however, meant that things were not going to run smoothly. My allergy got worse and worse and it was getting impossible for me to continue to work in the chicken sheds. This made it difficult for Jim as this was the main reason that I was employed by him. Jim decided to let me work on the egg sorting machine instead, meaning that I was inside a barn with three old women. We would take it in turns to either load the eggs on to the conveyor, have our heads under a black sheet where a light shone through the conveyor to allow us to watch for cracked or substandard eggs. At the other end of the conveyor we would catch the eggs and place them in trays and subsequently one of us would put them into the large farm fresh egg boxes that were shipped of to the egg wholesalers.

 

When I was not needed in the sorting room, Jim would take me off on to his land with his surveying equipment and we would act out jims fantasy of planning for his next building. I had no idea what we were doing and I am not sure that Jim did either. All I remember is that I was not impressed walking around a muddy field in the rain, getting very cold in the process. With all these problems, especially my allergy, my time at Jims farm was short and my chance to be Chalkie the young entrepreneur subsidised by Jimmy wright was no more.