 |
| George "Happy" Kester, Joe Kester's son and my best friend.
| |
|
 |
| George "Happy" Kester.
| |
|
 |
| Sid Badcock from Toft.
| |
|
 |
| Kibble Porter, assistant manager. He lived with his wife and
daughter in the thatched cottage shown in one of the Hardwick photos, at
the bend of the road, by the fruit pickers' camp. He must have pruning and had his feet wrapped
up with bags over his rubber boots.
| |
|
 |
| Kibble Porter.
| |
|
 |
| Bill Preston from Toft. Bill was an Irishman and butler in a stately
home before he married one of the maids and somehow ended up in Toft
and on the farm.
| |
|
 |
| Jack Marshall.
| |
|
 |
| A sketch made in 1949 near the farm's water
tower, looking away from the Toft road (East).
| |
|
 |
| A rough cattle yard between stacks of grain near the
water tower, looking toward the Toft road (West?)
| |
|
|
When we thrashed those stacks with a 1909 steam engine driven
thrashing machine, the millions of mice ate up all the strings and we had
to scoop the remnants up in fruit sieves, including the mouse droppings.
Everything inside was chaff. This again was routine, as some stacks were
not thrashed for years and bred only rats and mouse. We used to have all
our dogs around and by the afternoon they were so full of mice that they
ate only the babies and were too tired to kill more rats. My dog, Candy,
used to kill the rats and just left them lying , except the ones that put up a
fight. Those she took and buried. Barney Coxall's
dog Nippie - he was quite a character. Once we were sitting on a full
sprayer with Barney, on a deeply rutted, muddy road. Nippie was running
around in circles and fell into one of the ruts right in front of the sprayer's
wheels, which ran over him right across the waist. We screamed and
George stopped the tractor. We ran to Nippie , still pasted into the rut. He
stood up shook himself and jumped around happy as can be.
|
|
 |
| Still the same area.
| |
|
 |
| This is the last one of the cattle yard by the water tower.
| |
|
