2 to 19 September 1931

One soon gets the knack of the work, and the only hardships are the standing (we were generally on our feet ten hours a day), the plagues of plant lice, and the damage to ones hands. One's hands get stained black with the hop juice, which only mud will remove, and after a day or two they crack and are cut to bits by the stems of the vines, which are spiny. In the mornings, before the cuts had reopened, my hands used to give me perfect agony, and even at the time of typing this (October 10th) they show the marks.

The water tap was 200 yards [180 metres] away, and the latrine [toilet] the same distance, but it was so filthy that one would have walked a mile sooner than use it. There was a stream where one could do some laundering, but getting a bath in the village would have been as easy as buying a tame whale.

Health was always a problem in the hoppers' camps. Hygiene was primitive to the point of non-existent; food was often very poor - many of the hoppers virtually lived on potatoes, often stolen but sometimes provided by the farmers, and upon food being brought to the hop gardens by London's travelling salesmen. It was never prime quality and was often decidedly neither fresh nor clean, and certainly not wholesome.

There was no piped water, of course, and what water there was either had to be carried quite long distances from the farm well or, more conveniently perhaps, from a nearby pond. There was no guarantee of purity, and a high risk of impurity from either source.