Forge Farm

A Memory of Goudhurst.

Just found this site while looking for Chinley which I believe is close by.
Forge Farm memories of the fun times we had as children hop picking with nan and gran-dad, dad and mum, aunts and uncles and of course my siblings. At that time the farm supplied student teachers for the children's education, no one went as we were all too busy playing or fishing in the pond in the middle of the common.
Home was a corrugated iron hut, very basic, the bed was made from timber poles with slats laid across. I remember we always took a large cotton mattress case with us and it was our job to fill this with straw supplied by the farmer, if you have never slept on a straw mattress it was always warm. Because there were so many of us the farmer allowed us to take away a section of the joining iron sheet to make two huts into one and put in real glass windows.
Cooking was over an open wood fire in the cookhouse, you never went hungry in the country, there was always something to eat, be it scrumpt or poached or caught in Bedgebury Lake, the lake on the common is still there.
Picking the hops was the job of the adults with nan in charge, we were employed if we were around to pull the vines down from the wires, nan's hands used to be a blur when she was picking, or was it because we were children, when the tally man came around she would insist that she shook the hops to get as much air into them as possible (they were measured by the basket) so more air meant less hops to each basket, therefore more baskets. Dad always got a job in the oast house drying the hops and then pressing the hops into the large sacks called pokes. I would be riding on the tractor with Wally (how did his name pop into my mind) who showed us how to make clothes pegs and wooden flowers. We continued picking at Forge Farm for many years and just recently I took my niece to see where her dad, my brother, (who has passed away) spent many summer weeks. Upon returning home to Peckham and going back to primary school we would be put into a class that they thought was appropriate, we always caught up with the lessons but had a much richer education because of going hop picking.

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