FARMERS faced a busy few weeks when it was time to harvest the potato crop in early autumn.

As the picture shows, women and children were often drafted in to help.

One reader with memories of joining the potato pickers is Dawn Griffis, who lived at Aynho, near Banbury.

During the Second World War, with men away at war and labour in short supply, her school half-term was extended from a long weekend to a week so that she and fellow pupils could go out in the fields. She writes: “We were each assigned to different farmers, and would meet in their farmyards first thing in the morning. “I was always assigned to Joe Watts’s farm. He had a huge hay wagon and his big carthorse pulled it. Going to the fields, we all got to ride inside the wagon, along with the buckets we were going to use to gather the potatoes. “When we got to the field, the women would take the buckets, and place them every so many feet. This was after the rows had been turned over, to expose the potatoes. Then we kids would go to a bucket, and start down the rows filling them as we went.

“When it was full, we just left it where it was, and went on to the next. The women would come along and pick up the full buckets, and take them back to the wagon, where Joe Watts and Derb Ayres would pile them inside it. “We all kept working like this until lunchtime, then we would stop and have a picnic lunch by one of the hedgerows. After we had finished eating, we would take off exploring, until the adults decided it was time to get back to work.

“We would work until the wagon was as full as it could be, then we all piled on top of the potatoes for the ride home. The adults usually walked alongside. This went on all week, until all the potatoes were gathered and safe in the barns.

“The adults said the reason the children gathered the potatoes into the buckets, was because we were closer to the ground, so it wasn’t backbreaking for us - this made perfect sense.”

Mrs Griffis, whose maiden name was Alsford and who now lives in the United States, recalls one year when their mothers allowed them to ride their bikes to the fields.

“At lunchtime, Janet Watts, Cicely-Anne Abernathy and I decided we would be cowboys and ride the pigs in the large pigpen, just as we had seen in the western movies. “The idea was to climb on to the haystacks and when a pig came by, drop down on to its back and ride it like a cowboy.

“All went well until the pigs got scared and started charging all over the place to get us off their backs. Our laughing and whooping didn’t help much.

“Finally, the pigs ran into each other, and tossed us off their backs into the messiest part of the yard. By the time we got to our feet, we were filthy.

“We knew we couldn’t go back to the fields, or home, in this state. So we found an old water butt. The water in it was pretty green, but we thought it was the best we could do. We stripped to our knickers, and ‘washed’ our clothes until they were not quite as bad as before, but much greener. “They were wet, of course, so we came up with the bright idea of tying them to the back of our bikes, and riding up and down the road to dry them.

“By the time we had to go back to the fields, they weren’t quite as wet, but they were very ripe and no-one wanted to be anywhere near us. I am sure we all got a good hiding when we got home, but I don’t remember that part of it.”