My gran is eighty seven and grew up in horse drawn days, they used to work on the farms in Kent in the summer doing picking work. Like most Travellers they stopped somewhere permanent during the winter because Travelling was hard. Nan's family had a plot of land at Ash Tree Lane, Chatham where they lived for most of the year, she told me what life was like there.

 

There was a big row of us, there were the Smiths, Beaneys, Potters, Pickets, Eastwoods, Arnolds, Noolans, Butlers. We all had back gardens, toilets, down the back were stables for the horses. We lived there so many years, we knew everybody. The council, we had to get off, when they found you a house you had to get off, you had no choice, they all went one by one. We had some good times a up the Ash tree, weddings, parties anniversaries. I'd prefer to be up there, on the bank - that's me.

We used to make a bed up in the shed of a night time, everything was packed away and over the years we gathered another caravan and that was for the boys - there was five girls and four boys. We had a stove in the caravan but when we moved away to work we used to have the fire outside with a big pot on, kettle boiling outside, table outside.

All our food went in one pot, all your vegetables, you had meat pudding, sultana one, then you had your cabbage, potatoes, carrots, peas in a little white net. My mum used to have a long skimmer to skim everything out and that all came out exactly as it went in, nothing mashed and it was a very healthy life and if I had my life over again, I would do it all again.

We worked hard on the land and come winter time we used to pack up work on the farms and we'd go out selling flowers in an arm basket. Pushing a pram with pot plants in or little ferns - whatever we could get for a living. We used to go out with a horse and cart selling logs, I used to drive the horse, people used to have fires in their houses then and used to burn logs, today it's all gas and stuff.

When I got married we travelled all round Norfolk, Suffolk, Kings Lynn, all round that way. We used to do tree felling, carrots, onions, potatoes, strawberries, sugar beet - the hard work - pulling the sugar beet, shaking it, laying it down get up the next morning and pull the tops off. Them days was not like today, take it from me, it was a hard life but a very healthy one, a good life but a hard one, but we pulled through.

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