By the summer of 1941 it was hoped to raise the total of recruits to the Women's Land. Army over the last war figure of 16,000. Here E. M. Barraud, who was one of the first thousand, tells the story of her first six months on the land.
One September morning my employer led me, with what I now know to be mutual doubts, out to his orchards to start picking plums; and there he left me, with a completely uncontrollable ladder, two picking baskets and a pile of empty half sieves. I had no idea of the lay-out of the farm, and when he disappeared into the blue, I felt more alone, lost, desolate and incompetent than ever in my life before . . Apart from anything else, I have a horror of heights, and ladder-heights in particular!
Astride a horse.
I can laugh at that day now, but at the time it was almost unmitigated horror. I nearly killed myself lugging that ladder about. I could never find the right place or angle in which to set it, and when I had managed to coax it into position, as soon as I set foot on it; it lurched ominously, with creaking and cracking of branches. I had no idea how many baskets of the wretched plums I was expected to fill, or by what time. But the real sore spot is that, in my ignorance, and working alone, I did not know for a week that it was the local custom to take half an hour for lunch at ten a 'clock-and when it came to Friday night, and I found out, I hadn't the nerve to charge my employer for those five half-hours!
It all seems' a very long way off now, now that I am a hardened farm hand. In the second week a new terror lay in wait for me, my first handling of a farm horse. A man fell out of the harvest field, and I was put on to lead loaded carts back to the rickyard and empty ones out to the field. Then I was roped in to pitch sheaves down in the field. Then to help with the stacking. Those were the days when every fresh job, meant a fresh set of unused muscles to ache, till I began to think I would never come to the end of the pain, and be able to say, “Now there isn't another inch of me to discover." Because no sooner were my arm muscles fairly tough than they gave me the job of horse-raking through the stubble, and I got it in my legs, so that when at last I dared to climb down from the seat I found I could not stand. (It was that day when I first had to stable my horse, and ended up, after a hectic twenty minutes, with his collar round my neck and the harness a glorious tangle-at my feet.)
Summing up those first two or three weeks, I can only say that had anyone realised how utterly ignorant and inept I was, I might never have survived. As it was, it was taken for granted I could do this and that and, to save my face, somehow I managed to do it! I hasten to say, however, that there was no lack of friendly help and advice when I did ask for it. I have the deepest gratitude for all the patience everyone has shown me as I have been learning. But I have always preferred to learn by "watching points" rather than by asking questions, and in the rush of those harvest days I was allowed to give full rein to my preference. My farm is one of some 200 acres, mainly arable wheat, barley, oats, beans, potatoes, with just enough cows to supply the house and one or two cottagers with milk, and some couple of dozen calves running on, upwards of fifty pigs, about seventy head of poultry and some thirty rabbits. At first I had nothing to do with stock: a young German refugee trainee attended to these, with occasional assistance. Early in November, when the harvest work; proper was really at an end, and i began to wonder how soon I, in common with the other already dwindling team of harvest workers, should be "stood off," and what would happen then, the German boy found he was not suited for farm work, and left. I shall not forget that bitter November morning, when I was half-way up my legs in water, wrestling with a hedge and ditch which had not been touched for three years, and my employer came down to tell me the boy had left, and ask me if I would take on the milking. It meant I had my chance to go "on the staff." I started milking that afternoon. Within a week I had charge of the feeding of the calves, poultry and rabbits, and the shadow of being "stood off" on wet days was lifting rapidly. My proving handy with a saw and hammer banished it for good. I did not have one day at home all through the winter.
Martha Ferris, once a shop assistant.
London friends wrote to me, "I suppose there is not much doing on the farm this weather." Not much doing? Hedging and ditching (one of my favourite jobs), muck carting, all the concentrated high-speed work of threshing and chaff-cutting, artificial manure distributing, fence repairs, barbed wire work, dressing wheat, barley, oats, thatching, and all the other endlessly different tasks that crop up in the farming year. And in October my employer wondered, Could I manage the tractor? He worked with me for an hour then strode away and left me to go on ploughing a ten-acre stubble. Since then I have done my share of ploughing and drilling and harrowing and rolling, too. I am afraid I laughed a little bitterly when I heard a broadcast about the training of Land Girls how they were given I don't know how many hours technical instruction, etc. I laughed still more bitterly though there was some triumph in it, too when I heard a Dorset farmer enumerate some of the jobs you couldn't ask a woman to do. I had done them all! And the triumph was definitely on top next morning, when my employer commented on the broadcast, and our foreman added, "Ah well, master, we've got one in a hundred!” Well, there it is, the record of my first six months. I still say to myself, "Gosh, you're being paid to do this!" Because, having beaten my typewriter into a ploughshare, I know i shall never now be able to bear going back.
"The Land Girl"
Paddy Coleman exchanged typewriter for tractor.
06-28-2008, 01:30 AM
