大象传媒

After being an onlooker for a fair amount of the Blitz, I chose the Land Army, having loathed my boarding school the mere idea of the Women's Services appalled me, and childhood memories of country life appealed.

I was not fortunate, health-wise, having to leave the dairy farm which I really liked, having an allergy to cattle, and the Timber Corps because a childhood broken collarbone soon made it obvious that swinging an axe or a hook were quite impossible for me.

I ended up in a "market garden" so called, really only the large vegetable gardens of one of the local "big houses". There had been a staff of three or more men, but ended up with the "head gardener" and myself. We did infact sell some vegetables and fruit. I had a delivery round every Saturday with a large wheel barrow, pushing it through the wood I once slid down the dip on my backside, but managed to hold on to the handles and never lost so much as a potato!

The owner of one of the neighbouring "big houses" kept free-range wallabys, one of which got loose and jumped over the rabbit-proof fence and ate out the central growing point of all the cabbage plants I had set the day before. In those days if you had an estate such eccentricities were only your due, just as well it was wallabys and not wolves or wildcats.

We were in what was known as "doodlebug alley" -most of them flew over to do greater harm further on. We did have one crater in the middle of a field and a tractor driver's curiosity led him too near the edge so that he and the tractor ended up in the bottom of it, which was, as neither he nor the tractor came to any harm, a long-standing local joke. Another demolished an isolated cottage, but both tenant and dog were out at the time, so little harm was done.

I cannot claim to have contributed much to the "war effort" but we all had to go where we were sent. Calling it a market garden allowed the owner of the house to keep her gardener, who, incidentally, was the only one who understood the central heating boiler. As he was over age for the forces, knew nothing but gardening- at which he was an expert, and he worked very hard at his Home Guard duties, perhaps it was just as well, but I would have preferred to have had a more active war. It was, after all, a different world.

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