Turf Digging

"I went to school till I were twelve, and then I left. Sometimes I worked, and sometimes I di'n't, and somehow the time soon rolled away to my seventeenth birthday. Then I struck out for myself a-doing a bit o' turf digging. By turf digging, I mean, of course, digging up the peat in blocks to burn for the fuel. We called each block o' peat a 'cess', though I can't find that word in no dictionary.

I hired half an acre o' land, and I expected to get a hund' ed thousand turf from it, near enough.

Now turf digging were a very difficult job for a new beginner, but one o' the old hands come and put me right occasionally, and I got on fairly well. By the time it were night I had dug about seven hundred. For an old experienced hand it were reckoned a good day's work to dig two thousand turf".

Read more on Page 27 in Fenland Chronicle