Owen worked with Norfolk turkeys in the traditional way long before the days of Bernard Matthews.
Hello Ole Partners,
There’s not much going on in the garden this time of year but there are a couple of things you can attend to.
Prune apple and pear trees. Aim to take off around 10-20% of the whole canopy and try to take out a bit of old wood each winter to stimulate new. Try to keep the tree’s centre open which will allow more light in to ripen the shoots and fruit. Plum and cherry trees are best pruned in July by the way.
Give your lawn a final raking to remove debris. If you have recently dressed the lawn with hormone weedkiller do not place the debris on a compost heap. If you haven’t already done so use a good garden fork to aerate the lawn by inserting the prongs to their full depth all over it.
Good Christmas presents for gardeners include sturdy gardening gloves (you can never have enough pairs), a kneeling pad, garden twine and plant labels. Personally. I never liked receiving seeds as I preferred to choose my own.
We are coming up to Christmas so I thought I would tell you a bit about working in the Norfolk turkey industry. In my day poultry rearing provided a much needed income stream for many families, including mine.
The Attleborough turkey sale took place every year in October. My two uncles, Snowflake (Ernest) and Arthur, reared turkeys and took 100 or so to the sale. These birds would have been too large to sell easily at Christmas so they sold them on and bought 100 smaller ones instead to rear to sell for the Big Day’s lunch table. The turkey sale took place on what is currently the site of the St Edmunds Care Home in Surrogate Street and the auctioneers were the now defunct local Attleborough firm of Salter Simpson. The sale day was treated like a Bank Holiday among the farming community.
As a young man I used to go with my father Elijah to help pluck Christmas turkeys for various farmers. I felt I was privileged, as a relative newcomer, to be allowed to ‘stump’ (remove the short feathers) of the turkeys. For nigh on 24 years, starting in 1959, I went to Manor Farm at Wattlefield to pluck Christmas turkeys. Bernard Matthews had hardly started in business then. The latter part of the time, the late 1970s/early 1980s, I earned £4 per hour which was a right good wage for the time. My earnings paid my rates [council tax] for the year and made it well worth doing the extra hours on top of my regular day job as a shepherd. Sadly, though, I don’t recall ever receiving a free turkey as a reward for my labours!
Another job was to find the turkey eggs which were laid up at the farm’s edges. These could be placed under sitting hens and hatched. This required lots of hens so the price of a good hen rose and gave the local cottagers who had a few to spare extra income. Local gamekeepers pushed the price of a good sitting hen up even further as they wanted them to hatch out their gamebird eggs. Being a good shot and - although licensed to kill game legally - a very proficient poacher, I was always happy to know the gamekeepers had plenty of young birds coming along for me to ‘acquire’ for our casserole pot!
Elijah was a professional poultry plucker and was always overwhelmed with requests at Christmas to kill and pluck his neighbours’ poultry. Once plucked he would hand the birds over to my mother Florence who prepared them for the oven. It was my job, as a child and teenager (the late 1930s) to put them in my little handcart and deliver them back to their various owners. Some would give me a tip of a few old pennies and, bearing in mind that in those days one shilling (5p today) would buy a huge amount of sweets, I was always well set up for Christmas and beyond.
This extra seasonal income allowed my parents to buy me and my younger brother Alec a few additional Christmas treats. My mother never wasted anything and would carefully iron the festive wrapping paper our presents were in ready to reuse the following year. I suppose today she would be seen as a recycling Queen.
In later years at Christmas time I also used to go down to the local Bunwell butcher's shop, run by my relation by marriage Graham Lorne, where I was in charge of the turkeys. I dressed the birds with Pat Wells and Robbie Thorpe. As Graham's daughter Teresa recalls "There was always a lot of laughter, banter and shenanigans". Happy days indeed.
These are challenging times for all of us and, for some, they will be very hard indeed. I wish you all the Merriest Christmas possible and I hope we have a much Happier New Year.
Until next time, moined ‘ow yer go.
Owen
(First published in the Wymondham Magazine, December 2020)
Comentários