WATCHING the BBC’s Wartime Farm the other week was a reminder of my own boyhood experiences in agriculture.
  The programme showed children helping to harvest hedgerow herbs for the UK pharmaceutical industry which the war had deprived of the imported plants used in medicines.
  This was not slave labour by any stretch of the imagination. The kids got paid and, considering wartime food rationing, were relatively well fed for their trouble.
  Back in the early 60s, we young members of the Tunners clan would also throw ourselves into harvesting activities - in our case pea pulling.
  During the summer holidays, word would get round that a local farmer was to turn up in town with a lorry in such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time and we would join the eager queue of women with our rusty buckets and packed lunches.
  We would clamber up on to the back of the truck and endure a bumpy ride along lanes and through fields until we came to the designated crop of peas.
  But our young arms, knees and backs weren’t seriously up to the job. Our pea-pulling would probably last a couple of hours at most and usually involved eating a good proportion of the crop.
  We would cash in our early pickings – for two or three shillings a sack - and then sit and eat our jam sandwiches while watching the women pullers at work. I suspect some learned their harvesting skills as Land Army girls; their sense of camaraderie, too, which involved gossiping, singing and telling rude jokes designed to embarrass us youngsters.
  We kids never completed a full pea pulling shift yet still managed to earn a few shillings each. We would load our buckets with ‘gleaned’ pods that had been missed in the first picking and set off home on foot – bellies still aching but with the joy of hearing two-bobs, sixpences and three penny bits jangling in our pockets.