Early to Rise: A Suffolk Morning

This is a first-hand account of life as a 16-year-old farm pupil in the early 1930s. In Suffolk, as elsewhere, the tractor had not yet displaced the horse, farms were full of labourers and the working day was long and hard. Hugh Barrett "lived in", received five shillings a week and learned to plough, build a stack, hoe beet and grind the pig food. His accounts of rabbits, rats and plagues of fleas are, like all the book, factually accurate and told with humour. The author sets out to convey "neither the bad old days nor the good old days" - just the year when he earned his first wage, the larks sang and the heavy tasks began to sort out the men from the boys.