“I knew fellas and girls that came from Donegal and they worked on local farms. It was the twelfth of May in Strabane there would have been a hiring fair, and these people would have come round the district every six months to a year.

“Girls came as maids and the work was heinous, heinous. Ye see they had to board there, where they worked. See. If you came from Gweedore, you couldnay go home at night.

“They travelled on the wee Donegal train to Strabane, the craiters, and them with a wee bundle of clothes with them. The wages were about £5 for the six months, or £6 for the six months.

“The girls would have been doing housework and they would have been milkin' cows and they would have been feedin' pigs, and they would have been doing all sorts of men’s work as well.

“The men and women would have been up and working long before dawn and well into the night. There was no such thing as a nine-to-five or an eight-to-six.

“The farmer would have been sleeping in the house and them in the barn or upstairs and if they were inside the house he would have woke them with a rattle of the brush shaft on the ceiling to get them up at five o’clock in the mornin’.”

Billy well remembers seeing adults bent double and toiling in the fields topping and tailing turnips.

“Sneddin’ turnips they were. There was a wee woman - she only died there a while back there at the beginning of the winter,” his voice quietens for a moment, before he continues: “She was hired on a farm near where I lived.

“She was from about Fawney, and she was only a wee woman, at the time a girl of about 16, and she was out sneddin’ turnips in the winter day. And ice and snow on them.

“She was hardy, when she died she was over 90 and she reared over 20 weans. She was hired and she stayed. She married a local man from about here and she lived in a wee house away up in the mountain, she was well hardened to work - it wasnay work at all for they were like slaves (when hired). They were driven. Rain, hail or snow they had to stay out in the fields.

“If you were a ploughman or a horseman the horses had to be brought in if it was too wet for them, but the men would have to stay out or go on a message or dig a drain while the horse was inside eating hay.

“That was because the horse cost the farmer money to buy but the man was worth nothin’ to them,” he said.

Billy himself was affronted to reveal that when he finally began earning money as a mechanic his wages were a meagre five shillings a week.

“Two half crowns in 19 and 41. And I was lucky, because prior to that you had to pay to learn a trade. So my parents would have had to pay, but thankfully it stopped,” he said.