My mother, Joyce, was in charge of my brother, Michael’s pushchair and he was aged 9 months. We had set off from home in Essex and travelled to Victoria by train and the second part of the journey into Kent involved travelling by steam train. Queenie met us at Selling station and we then walked to our hopping hut which was to be home for the next week. We continued going hop picking until I was about 10 years old and so I used to miss the first week of each new school year.
Joyce would go down to Selling by car a few days before picking began and having collected Queenie on the way, she would prepare the hopping hut for occupation. The huts were built from grey breeze blocks with a corrugated roof, so Joyce tacked clean, old sheets to the walls where they met the ceiling and rugs were spread on the concrete floor. There was one small window.
Setting up home in a hopping hut
The bed was a crude wooden frame with a slatted base and it was in the back-left corner of the hut. Clothes were hung from nails fixed into the wall opposite the foot of the bed and there was a relatively wide plank of wood along the length of the bed which served as somewhere to sit inside.
All her life Queenie had slept on a feather mattress rather like the mattress toppers of today and this was placed on top of a horsehair mattress. She did not deviate from this combination when staying in the hopping hut. The four of us slept in it together and to me as a child it felt like sleeping on a cloud. I vividly remember lying in bed, my mother and grandmother sitting on the wooden edge of the bed with their backs to my brother and me, hearing them chatting in low voices while we were warm and comfortable in our feather nest.