What A Sight Fore Sore Eyes

A Memory of Bubwith.

I was a farm hand at Whitley Bridge and was for that day a tractor driver. My job was to pull a trailer down a row of rhubarb roots which had been pulled out onto the surface. Mr Huddleston employed girls on his market garden farm - they'd total at least sixty girls & the majority of them were just turned sixteen. Their job was to use a pitch fork to lift the rhubarb roots onto the trailer on which I was the driver of the tractor. THESE girls were not dressed for the job. They wore very very short mini skirts, and every time they bent over it was a sight for sore eyes. My order of the day was for me to sit on the tractor seat and never get off it. I wished that I'd done exactly that! But seeing that there was a spare fork at hand I got off the tractor and uprooted some of the roots myself. I know, shame on me; confession time, I had been so taken by all these girls showing off their coloured knickers, I just wanted to have a better look. Anyway I began to fork up the roots and to view the girls, when I simply brought the fork down without looking. Seconds later I felt pain in my big toe. The tine of the fork had penetrated through my wellington and through my big toe where the tine had come out through the other end. I pulled the fork out and felt blood filling my wellington. Having taken my welly off it was plain to see that I was in a mess. Just then the Foreman had come on the scene in his Land Rover and seeing the damage sort of laughed and then said never mind and took me down to the Huddleston's farm house, Farm House! It wasn't a farm house at all It was a mansion where the Foreman knocked at the door and a Butler answered it and took charge of the matter in hand. He took me to the scullery and bathed my wound. It was then that a further surprise came when he told me that a car was awaiting to take me to the hospital - I was taken there within a Rolls Royce and was treated as if I was family to the Huddlestons. Huddlestons had hundreds of thousands of acres of land throughout Whitley Bridge and also West Yorkshire, and yet Mr Huddleston only had the farms simply as a hobby, He actually owned a fleet of sea-faring liners and other merchant liners. If it were not for the fact of me having that accident I would never have been able to have had a ride in a Rolls Royce or have a meal cooked good enough for a queen - that concludes my memory of Whitley Bridge

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