Essex Land Girls (11 page)

The pony was called Gypsy, and Mary tells of him struggling in the winter to climb a steep, icy hill – until she ‘took off my own socks and shoes and put them on the horse’s hooves, which worked’. She said that she ‘would love to do it all again’ and felt like she ‘had died and gone to heaven doing that milk round … and loved Gypsy. I was so happy. Everyone was so friendly… in Pebmarsh, you wouldn’t know there was a war on.’

Babs Newman

‘Farmers would tell the hostel [at Takeley] how many girls they needed, and the lorries would take us to different farms.’ You could spend the days in a variety of ways: ‘Hedging, ditching, potato picking, pruning fruit trees, chopping and hoeing sugar beet … milking.’

For Babs, the ‘hardest work was threshing’, but the ‘best time was harvest when the farmer and his wife gave us jugs of cider and lumps of cheese … bread and dripping sandwiches for lunch made by the warden at the hostel. The food was quite good, but there was only one bathroom and always a queue.’ She mentions the ‘scramble for the bathroom’ when arriving back ‘hot, tired and dusty’.

She has lovely memories of ‘cockneys, wonderful company, singing in the fields … Tea, coffee, bread and cheese were brought out by the farmer around 5 p.m. during harvest’ and the regular hostel dinner seems to have been ‘stew and dumplings’.

Margaret Penfold

‘Open back lorries collected us at dawn [mainly from Halstead billets], and I never saw a farmer! I was dumped in a field with sandwiches and a flask until teatime … I think we were allowed a few extra ounces of cheese … we had to use hedges or haystacks to hide behind if we needed relief’ which seemed to involve dispensing with ‘the mac, the belt, the breeches, and the underwear’!

The work varied from ‘field work to market gardening, picking potatoes, pulling and trimming sugar beet, hedging and ditching’. At one farm in Boreham, she ‘learnt to drive’ so she could do milk deliveries. ‘There was no dairy herd’ which meant no milking, but milk ‘was delivered in churns and had to be bottled and sorted into half pint bottles and smaller [one third of a pint] for schools’. Her favourite memory is of ‘delivering milk to Danbury and other villages, with hardly any traffic’.

Edna Green

While at Graveleys near Hartford End, Edna reminisced about how ‘wonderful’ it was:

… [to] be part of that tiny village … greeted that first morning by the old local shepherd, Rushie, an old clay pipe in his mouth, an old cap on his head, a crook in one hand and an old sack tied around his waist. He was moving his flock to new pastures where the fresh green grass was plentiful for his pregnant ewes; soon it would be the lambing season and for this gentle man it meant weeks sleeping in an improvised shelter in the corner of a field, keeping the lambs safe from hungry marauding foxes. It was all so new to me. I had never seen anything like this before; the only time I had seen so many live sheep was at Romford cattle market … I collected eggs, looked after chickens and pigs, took the horse to the blacksmith … Ethel [the other Land Girl in the billet] didn’t stay very long so I worked alone on the farm.

But the company of ‘Bob, the old redundant farm collie’ kept her from feeling lonely, and she particularly ‘loved old Blossom, the shire horse that was used for the ploughing’ and who she ‘harnessed up for the hard day’s work in the field’ with the help of ‘a tasty titbit for her’ kept in her dungarees. At Hudson’s Nursery, Waltham Abbey, she worked with ‘girls from Silvertown [East London] to Southend’ mainly in the greenhouses ‘growing tomatoes’ but also in ‘an orchard of apple trees’.

Iris Richardson

Enjoyed the variety and the physicality of ‘pulling mangels, picking sprouts, pea and potato picking’ at a variety of farms in ‘Canewdon, Paglesham, and Shopland’ working with girls mainly ‘brought in by lorry’ from a ‘hostel in the Rayleigh area’. Harvest time meant ‘overtime because of the stooking and the hay-making, which had to be done on hot days. This was very satisfying.’

Iris Richardson (née Smith) looking happy. (Courtesy of Iris Richardson)

Lillian Woodham

Billeted in Ockendon, Lillian worked local farms with Land Girls mainly from Romford and Upminster. She remembers five years of hard work, mainly with ‘Mr Offord and his son who had two agricultural farms’ where she enjoyed ‘working with the horses, ploughing, guiding them with reins, leading them in tumble carts, helping to feed them and keeping them clean’. Although she:

 … learnt to use the tractor, I was very nervous and didn’t want to do it … when the farmer asked me … I hadn’t driven anything at that time. He stood on the back and told me what to do. I managed on the straight lane but when we came to a corner, I could not find the courage to turn the corner.

As with others, she remembers working in the frost and snow, ‘cutting cabbage and picking Brussels sprouts from their stalks which were covered in ice. By the time we had finished we had to break the icicles off the bottom of our coats.’ A lot of time was also spent:

 … packing boxes of radishes, spring onions, parsnips, beetroot and potatoes ready for loading on to a big lorry to reach the London market by 4 a.m. on a Monday morning, which usually meant working weekends … [another] weekend job, when we started at 7 a.m. and finished at 4 p.m., was harrowing the fields after the potato pickers to make sure none had been left behind.

She seemed proud of the fact that she was ‘the only one to throw cow-dung on to the rhubarb’, something the other girls avoided.

Eva Parratt

There is a personal account of Eva’s experiences written for her family, which refers to working for the WLA at Maypole Farm in Layer-de-la-Haye and in farms at Fobbing and Corringham, among others. While billeted in the hostel at Peldon, Eva wrote of ‘sawing huge trees down by hand, clearing hedgerows and digging ditches … Ditching was a specialist job – three spade widths at the top and one at the bottom.’ An account of one harvest reads:

The corn was cut with a cutter and binder which made sheaves of corn which were then thrown out on to the field in lines. Usually, the binder was drawn by a horse or maybe two horses, sometimes an early tractor. The Land Girls then picked up the sheaves and stood them into stooks, about three or four sheaves on each side, propped up together … when dry, the sheaves had to be loaded on to a cart and carried to where the corn stack was to be made. The loading on to the cart had to be done in a special way … I stood on the cart and the men pitched the sheaves up with a pitchfork … then we had to hold on tight as the cart was drawn by horses to where the stack was being made [especially hazardous when they came across a water furrow].

A WLA wedding, with Eva Parratt one from the left. Joanna Round, warden at Peldon hostel, marries Sub-Lieutenant Michael Tritton at St Peter’s, Birch, in October 1942, with a Land Girl guard of honour. The
Essex Chronicle
recorded wedding gifts including an armchair from the ‘War Ag’ and a beauty box from the Land Girls. (Courtesy of the Rosemary Pepper collection)

Ivy Cardy

Like so many, Ivy remembers the hard work ‘in fields, digging out the trenches, driving a tractor, threshing, ploughing with horses, hoeing, and hedging’ at farms in Clacton, Wivenhoe and Holland-on-Sea and a nursery at Little Wheatleys, Rayleigh. Among the farms in this area were sunflower farms, which were a bit different. Apart from the shared dislike of picking sprouts in the cold, Ivy also disliked ‘picking rhubarb in the fog’. She was up at 5 a.m., picked up from her billet (a hotel in Clacton) by lorry, dropped off at that day’s farm, and dropped back again at 5 p.m.

Ellen Brown

Now in Canada, Ellen recalls her experiences in Essex very well:

At Wood Farm, in Galleywood, Mr Cottey had a dairy herd and an arable farm … the only thing I had ever grown before was tomato plants on our air-raid shelter in Leyton … now I was working with just a few farmhands, schoolboys and local girls growing potatoes and sugar beet. I had to learn to milk some of the 24 milking cows and how to use the milking machines. The milk was cooled and put into churns which were picked up twice a day in the summer, but I was too small to reach the churns and had a special step built for me.

There was one other Land Girl there to teach her the ropes, but she left soon after Ellen arrived, and she had to deal with the farmer who ‘was tough with high expectations. I walked out when he upset me and went back when he asked me nicely … and I stayed until the end of the war.’

Although there was not really a ‘typical’ day, it began with:

 … no breakfast, only tea, before milking the cows, washing the machinery and sterilising the equipment. Then breakfast and preparing a sandwich for lunch. A lot of field work including stooking, and I had to feed kale to the cows … the worst job was cutting down the frozen kale in the winter … this was when the cows had their babies … there was less dairy work in the summer as I was needed in the fields …

And she recalled that:

The first time I saw a field of wheat, I thought it was spring onions.

I only lost the herd on one occasion. I took them to Galleywood Common where there were grazing rights, but I fell asleep and they were all gone when I woke up. I went back to the farm to report them lost and was sent back to the Common where I found one or two, and someone on a tractor pointed me in the right direction. They were outside a field of other cows looking in at them. I used a stick to herd them but they knew the way and seemed able to tell that it was time to go … I usually worked seven days a week although I could sometimes get a train home after milking on Saturday and get back for the Sunday evening.

Elsie Haysman

My first job was on Wallasea Island, sometimes working with a large horse who pulled a cart of hay or vegetables. There were lots of girls picked up by lorry and we worked different farms every day … I remember working Lifstan Way, too, when it was farmland [now swallowed up by Thorpe Bay developments]. There you could see the train passing, and soldiers on board who would throw chocolate out of the windows for us …

She remembers working ‘on Foulness Island and at Rayleigh and at a tomato nursery in Hockley’ where she also ‘pruned apple trees’. Although Elsie recalls ‘tying a sack around my waist’ for the potato picking:

The work was mainly with crops or chickens … with some heavy work such as ploughing and digging ditches … The first time I used a tractor, I shot straight through a chicken run, and the farmer got a bit upset … I didn’t like killing chickens.

Remembering another dramatic moment, she spoke of the ‘bonfires at work, especially at the end of the day, to get rid of the rubbish. But once we built it too near to an old tree, and it burnt to the ground, the flames burning too bright for the black out.’

Vicky Phillips

As she had been evacuated, Vicky ‘was not homesick’ during her WLA years but was not impressed by her ‘room with only a candle to do my make-up’. Having wanted to work with horses, she also wasn’t at all keen on her ‘first job [at Bradwell-juxta-Mare] … mainly tomato growing, though I did have to take the old shire horse to be shod sometimes, driving bareback, and using a gate to climb on his back’. Although she did spend some time at a farm with a riding school in Surrey, Vicky recalled ‘rat catching for the War Ag, loaned out to different Essex farms including Wallasea Island, [earning] 2
d
a tail’.

Winifred Daines

From Plaistow, Winifred spent most of her five years in the WLA in farms around Braintree – ‘as many as four different farms in one week’ – billeted in private houses. She did ‘milk a cow once, but [wasn’t] keen’ and also learnt to ‘drive a Fordson tractor … nothing to it, just go and stop’ though she admits she ‘ended up in a ditch a few times’. Apart from the more usual farming chores, she also remembers ‘white-washing a cowshed [at Hatfield Peverel] with young Vincent teasing me’ until she ‘chucked the brush down’ and his brother took her for a drink as some kind of apology. Then there was ‘cleaning out ditches’ and travelling on ‘muddy sugar beet lorries often with seats that moved when they went round the corner’. One chore when she got to ‘Martin’s Strawberry Farm’ was not what she anticipated: she had travelled to the farm with a ‘tarpaulin with poles and buckets’ on board which the farmer was not expecting, unless it was ‘your toilet’. And it was. She and two other Land Girls erected it – ‘it took ages … and the first person to use it, it collapsed on them, although it was designed for privacy. Well-intentioned but not used.’