Picking Potatoes After School

During October and November, after the bitter four mile cycle from the school, I'd eat my dinner, then face the job of picking potatoes from the long ridges my father had dug with a spade, in one of the fields during the day. The bigger spuds were put in clamps in the field, neatly covered with clay for the winter, to keep away birds and mice. Sometimes, my sisters had picked them, leaving the poicins for me to be boiled later for pigs and hens in the great pot on the open fire.