Island Life Magazine Ltd June/July 2011 | Page 82

INTERVIEW “I was fined £30 – nearly 10 weeks wages - and put on probation, which meant I had a criminal record." As a youngster he worked evenings and weekends on a local farm, before the family moved to Bromley. So it naturally came as something of a surprise to his careers master in a London suburb school when Howard announced he wanted to be a farmer. He had already acquired his love of farming, and at just 15 took up a farming apprenticeship in the Kent countryside in an environment he described as like ‘Darling Buds of May’. “I lived in, earning £3-5shillings a week for working 47 and a half hours, and often overtime with no extra money, but it was a wonderful life. I enjoyed it so much, especially when the hop pickers came down from London, and the evenings were spent playing guitars and eyeing up the girls.” Then, with a wry smile, he admitted: “I blotted my copy book a couple of times during my three-year apprenticeship. I got to know a young girl, who was at a nearby 82 www.visitislandlife.com borstal school for young offenders next to the farm. She did a bit of work there, and we gradually took a shine to each other.” In fact he and ‘Agnes’ became close friends, so much so that in the dead of night he helped her escape from borstal, dressing her up in the farmer’s wife’s clothes and hiding her in a chicken house, before loading her into a lorry full of strawberries. But the lorry was stopped on the way to London and Agnes was caught. Howard never was, even though he was prime suspect! Then on New Year’s Eve 1958 Howard decided to take his boss’s truck for a spin without permission. At the end of the road he piled it through a hedge and demolished a 20ft greenhouse before escaping with only shock. “It meant a trip to court, but my boss came along and spoke up for me, and said he wanted me to stay on. That is hard to believe after doing such a terrible thing. “I was fined £30 – nearly 10 weeks wages and put on probation, which meant I had a criminal record. So a few years later when I decided I wanted to go to Australia on what was then the £10 travel scheme, I was told I