Corduroy Days

Description

In September 1939, a week after Britain declared war, a 17-year-old trainee hotel receptionist joined the queue in a Scout hut in New Milton, Hampshire, and asked to sign up for the Women’s Land Army. The recruiting officer looked at her slight frame and asked whether she was sure. Her employer laughed and gave her a month. As it turned out, the land didn’t want her yet. Farmers were still turning women away, and she would wait nine months before a farm took her on.

When the call finally came in June 1940, it brought a pair of corduroy breeches, a wage of 27 shillings and sixpence a week, and a dawn bicycle ride to a small farm at Sway, on the edge of the New Forest. The next four years are the story told in these pages, and Jo Duggan Rees tells it with a reporter’s eye for the detail that matters.

She hoed kale alone on the far side of a field while Spitfires and Messerschmitts fought overhead in the Battle of Britain. She got stuck in a tin bath during an air raid, put a dairyman’s brand-new van into a ditch, climbed over a bull that refused to move, and drove a milk float behind a pony that liked to bolt. She ploughed with a tractor so old that it took a four-foot length of iron pipe to start it. And when a 75-pound pulley wheel fell twenty feet onto her back, she ignored the specialist who told her to give up farm work and went right back to it.

Behind the comedy is a valuable record of the details that official histories leave out: the clothing coupons a uniform cost, hot baths allowed only on Fridays, farmers who doubted that any woman could hoe, billets that nobody would offer, and respect earned slowly, one furrow at a time. The book also brings to life the people of wartime rural Hampshire, from cowmen, gypsies and a New Forest huntsman to strict landladies and young airmen. She writes about all of them with affection and honesty.

It is a love story as well, in fact more than one. There is a first romance in the moonlit woods of the New Forest and a meeting with the man she would marry. Above all, there is a young woman’s lasting love of the land itself and particularly the New Forest area of Hampshire.

The Land Girls never learned to march in step. At a services parade in Lymington, the only order their representative gave was a gentle “Come along girls.” But they helped to feed a nation at war, and this book is a fitting salute to them from someone who was there and proudly wore the corduroy.