LAST week we brought you extracts from the memoirs of York man George Bye, who in the late 1920s ended up in the York workhouse with the rest of his family when his father died.

We left George – now an 88-year-old great-grandfather who lives off Tadcaster Road – as a young boy living in the York Union Children’s Home in Wigginton Road, and attending Haxby Road Junior School.

This week, we dip further into Mr Bye’s memoirs, as published in a magazine article Those Were The Days – Thank God, about a quarter of a century ago.

Easter, 1937 was George’s 14th birthday. He had left school, and was still living at the children’s home.

“I was summoned by the Matron,” his account goes.

“I was given a suitcase and some new clothes: riding breeches, leggings, wellingtons, pyjamas, shirts, socks, etc, and then told I was being sent away to work on a farm, where I would have to remain for two years. The alternative was a Borstal institution for four years. So, it wasn’t a case of ‘will you?’ or ‘would you like to?’… I was going, and that was that!”

He was taken to Piccadilly, put on a bus to a bridge near Bielby, and told to wait there for a Mr Reynolds. “Sure enough, a man eventually appeared on a horse-drawn cart loaded with muddy carrots.”

George lived on a camp bed in an old hen house, with Joe Walker, a boy a year older than him, who was to “show him the ropes”.

“This was our quarters, where, as I was about to find out, I was to sleep after working from dawn until dusk, seven days a week, pulling carrots etc and looking after poultry and other livestock – all for 6d a week.”

He stuck this “grinding existence” for six weeks before deciding to run away. When the farmer and his son took the pony and trap into Pocklington, as they did every Thursday, George took his chance. He legged it for the road with a suitcase of clothes, and was lucky enough to be offered a lift into York. But then he had no idea what to do next.

“I had no money, of course, so I set off to walk to the only place I could think of to go to – No 75 Huntington Road, the Workhouse, where I found myself back in Ladysmith Block.”

But not for long. Once again he was threatened with Borstal if he didn’t go to work on a farm. And so it was that he ended up working for a Mr Bill Kitching, who farmed at Skewsby, near Terrington.

Once again, he absconded. But, with two years still to go before he turned 18 and so was free to make his own life, he was returned to another farm – Brecks Farm, off New Lane, Huntington.

It was a small farm, with 12 milking cows, a bull, some pigs and poultry, two horses, Tom and Violet, but no sheep. George learned to plough with horses. He also remembers harvest time.

“Summertime would often see us haymaking and harvesting until the late hours. There was no overtime pay… but I liked the work.

“Another job I liked was harrowing the grassland, but when it came to harvesting, Farmer Pearson would set up and drive the horse-drawn binding machine himself. It was my job to follow behind, gathering the sheaves as they were bound, cut and ejected, and stack them into ‘stooks’ of eight to ripen off the corn.”

• Next week: the Army, the Salvation Army, and marriage.