It was a long day. The cows had to be milked at 5 o’clock in the morning and the milk had to be put through the coolers. All the milking was done by hand; they had stools to sit on. The milk was put into milk cans and had to be carried from the cottage, across the path to where my two cousins lived. They used to have to load them onto the cart and take the milk out. The milk was delivered to houses all around Jeffcock Road and Penn Fields. People used to put a jug out on the front step and the can of milk would be carried to the front door and the jug would be filled from a measure. There was a pint measure, a half-pint measure and a quart measure. My cousins would take the milk out for the second round at about three o’clock in the afternoon. It was a hard but good life.

The common looks very different these days; there’s trees everywhere. There used to be just heather and gorse bushes. The gorse bushes used to look lovely in the summer, nice and gold they were all over.