Text 1: Picking stones in the October holiday, by Bethan Jeffreys

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

In parts of Scotland, the October school holiday is still known as the tattie holidays, because for generations children spent it lifting potatoes. These days the potatoes are lifted by machine. But at Kinnaird Mains, a farm near Forfar, the machine still needs people, and some of those people are fifteen.

The harvester is a huge, rattling contraption the size of a small house, dragged up and down the drills by a tractor. Potatoes, soil and stones are shaken up onto a moving belt, and four pickers stand on a platform on either side, pulling out the stones and clods before they reach the trailer. One of them is Ellie Grant, who is spending her holiday here for the second year running. She is wearing two fleeces, a waterproof, and gloves that were once yellow.

‘The first day, you think you’ll never get the hang of it,’ she says, raising her voice over the engine. ‘Everything goes past so fast. Then your eyes just learn what a stone looks like.’ The work is cold, muddy and relentlessly repetitive. By the end of the week, she admits, she was picking stones out of her dreams.

The rules are strict. Each school-age worker needs a council permit, with hours and tasks restricted by local rules. Here the fifteen-year-olds work no more than thirty hours a week, with regular breaks, training and adult supervision on a platform designed for pickers. The farmer, Alasdair Gilfillan, keeps a laminated copy of them on the tractor door. He pays the teenagers the same hourly rate as his adult pickers and feeds everyone at lunchtime from a van that sells bacon rolls. ‘I couldn’t get the crop in without them,’ he says. ‘And I like to think they learn what it takes to fill a bag of chips.’

Ellie is saving for a laptop for college, where she hopes to study engineering. She also says, slightly embarrassed, that she likes it: the banter on the platform, the huge sky, the satisfaction of a full trailer at dusk.

Back at school on Monday, her friends will compare holidays. Some will have been to Spain. Ellie will have the muddiest boots in the year group and two hundred pounds in the bank, and she does not seem to mind which story sounds better.

Text 2: The children of the field gangs, by A Special Commissioner

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This newspaper report was written in 1866, when children in some farming districts were hired out in groups called gangs to work in the fields.

At six o’clock on a raw February morning I stood at the end of a village street in the fen country and watched the gang assemble. There were thirty-one of them: some women, some great lads, and a good many children, the youngest of whom, a little girl in a man’s coat tied about her with string, could not have been more than seven.

The gangmaster, a heavy man with a stick, counted them as a drover counts sheep, and they set off walking for a farm five miles distant. The children trotted to keep up. Several had no stockings, and their boots, where they had boots, were split and stuffed with straw.

Their work, when they arrived, was the picking of stones and the pulling of weeds from the wheat, which is done bent double, in the mud, for ten hours, with a half hour for dinner. The fields are flat and open, and the wind comes across them from the sea without hindrance. By noon the smaller children were wet to the waist and blue with cold. I saw the gangmaster strike one boy across the shoulders for straightening his back.

For this a child of eight earns fourpence a day. I asked one mother why she allowed her children to go. She looked at me as if I were a fool, and said that fourpence was fourpence, and that the children must eat.

The school stands empty in the village for the greater part of the year, and the schoolmaster told me that he has boys of twelve who cannot write their names.

I do not blame the poor mothers. I blame a system which takes the youngest and weakest and makes them labour like beasts, and I ask whether the farmers of England, who sit in church on Sunday, know or care how their wheat is weeded.

Both of these texts are about children working on the land.

Compare:

• what the writers say about these children’s experiences of farm work
• how the writers present these experiences

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