Good morning all and welcome to my second week as Pope Adrian the Meagre, which is a huge promotion for me from being a humble altar server.
To continue on from last week when I told you about my early childhood, after my Grandfather passed away we moved to a small town nearby on the edge of the Green Belt. We lived opposite a golf course, which fostered my interest in the game, although at that time membership would have been too expensive. Our plan was to jump over the fence and hit a ball up and down some of the fairways with an old club we'd found.
The area was surrounded by woodlands, where we would play (unsupervised) after school and during the summer holidays. There was a farm nearby, where (when I was twelve) I got a job during the school holidays picking potatoes and bringing in hay bales. It was hard physical work (as that first summer was very hot and sunny) and all for the princely sum of half a crown per hour (12� pence in modern money). I only got that amount by lying about my age - saying that I was fourteen, otherwise it would have been two shillings per hour! In those days, farming methods involved a lot of manual labour, whereas today most of these tasks have been mechanised.