HAVING read and heard for the last months and years the stories of our starving and bankrupt farmers, struggling in spite of multiple subsidies, I find it difficult to grasp how sad this all appears.

I was born on a farm in 1921 -- a hill farm of 154 acres run by my father.

I was one of five brothers, but there was never any mention of subsidies.

We all worked hard, with the boys having jobs to do before school and after.

And school was several miles away -- down lanes, over fields, brooks, through farm yards, and woods.

We thought this was the way the world was. My father, I don't suppose, knew what a subsidy was. Your living had to be worked for.

At 14, I left school to begin a life of work.

Because I had four younger brothers, there was no living for me on my father's farm, so I had to go to the hiring fair at our local market town to queue with other male school-leavers and wait to be selected by the farmers and their families to work for them on larger farms. The fair was held in Welshpool in mid Wales. Farmers, with their sons, wives and daughters, inspected us, discussing our possibilities in front of us.

They did not actually squeeze our muscles to test our strength, but did practically everything else.

My first hiring fair ended with me being offered one year's work at four shillings and six pence a week, plus bed and food.

This I gladly accepted. I was now "grown up" and working for a living. I still remember how I felt "somebody."

These farmers, of course, worked for their incomes and had never heard of subsidies.

So I was a farm worker from the age of 14 until at 18 I escaped into the army --just in time for six years' war.

So, I am afraid, I have precious little sympathy for the "starving and bankrupt" farmers of today.

And this business of them joining with factions blockading places for political points makes me even less sympathetic.

After 12 years in the army, I came to Blackburn, where I have lived and worked ever since.

I have never drawn a day's dole in my life.

I do not ride around in a Land Rover or BMW, as most subsidised farmers do.

I will never reconcile my memories of hard-working men making a living without subsidies, etc and the present-day scenes of complaints and calls for more and more subsidies.

JOHN LEWIS, Douglas Place, Roe Lee, Blackburn.