Extract from an interview with Chris Byatt in 2007
I was born at King’s Buildings in Barkway in 1922. I had an elder brother, Stanley, then myself, and then Ernie. Stanley went into the Air Force and the youngest went into the Navy. I was in the Home Guard.
I worked for Mr. Paul at Biggin. He said he only had two old boys working on the farm besides myself, and he asked me, “Would you like to go into the Forces or stay with me?” He said, “I would very much like you to stop here,” so I stayed with him, and that’s when I joined the Home Guard.
We used to go away at about 10:30 at night and return about 5 o’clock in the morning from the Home Guard, then I used to go off to start work at 6 o’clock in the mornings. I worked with horses—ploughing, harrowing, drilling—and they had binders in those days that threw the sheaves out into the fields to make stooks. Then we carted corn to a stack beside the road and threshed it all out in the winter off a drum. We baled the straw and elevated it if they wanted to make a straw stack for bedding the cattle yards. That’s when I first started there.
When I was working at Ernie Paul’s Biggin, there were no lorries then to take cattle around. An old boy and I were sent down to Trumpington to fetch 100 sheep and drive them down the road to Biggin. When we got to Barley, one of the poor sheep was exhausted. I expected it wanted water, so it lay down at the side of the road. A milkman from Barley, whom I knew, came by and I told him about the sheep, so he picked it up, put it in his little sheep truck, and took it down to Biggin.
Mr. Paul came down then, and on Mr. Dogget’s farm he found a pond at the side of the road where all the sheep went in to drink. We had set off at 10 o’clock in the morning and didn’t get back to Biggin with the sheep until seven at night. In those days we used to drive them along the road like that—with cows as well.