大象传媒

Joining Up

I joined the Women鈥檚 Land Army in March 1942 as soon as I was 17 - all the other Services required one to be 17 陆. It was three weeks before I received any uniform other than a pair of gumboots which I already had, it was quite difficult to find appropriate clothing to wear at that time. Replacements were always extremely difficult to get, and very often we would have to make do with very split Wellington boots and breeches before replacements were finally sent. At last, a parcel arrived with my kit - two pairs of dungarees, one pair of breeches, two pairs of long socks, two shirts, a Land Army tie and hat, warm greatcoat and a sturdy pair of Church's shoes. When discharged three years later, it was rather a sore point that my sister was given 96 clothing coupons from the ATS whilst we received just 6, enough for two pairs of stockings! In addition the Land Army were not allowed to use Forces Canteens at railway stations or elsewhere, so our meagre pay of 16 shillings a week before deductions did not go far. One week I recall receiving just 6 shillings and sixpence, after a whole week of very long hours.
My first posting was to Leighton Bromswold in Huntingdonshire, to learn tractor driving and general farm-work. I had met my room-mate, Barbara, at Kings Cross station, and we travelled down together. The first morning Mr. Picton, our employer, took Barbara and myself down the steep hillside of the farm to meet three other landgirls, who were not living in like us, but who used to cycle in from Woolly hostel, three miles away. It was bitterly cold as Mr. Rose, the foreman, showed us how to riddle potatoes dug out of the large clamp which had been earthed up for their storage, tossing out the small green ones and those which had gone bad. Barbara was sacked within a fortnight and despatched elsewhere, as she would persist in smoking out of our bedroom window and visited the Green Man pub in the village. Mr. Picton鈥檚 family were strict Plymouth Brethren and found smoking and drinking totally abhorrent. The other girls pitied me for having to live in, because the only music allowed in the house was Mr. P playing hymns on his mouth organ. Later on, when I bought a small wind-up gramophone, I could only play it out in the fields with the cows!

Working on the Farm

One day, Mr Picton had set me rolling one of the fields with the spadewheel Fordson tractor, but he never showed me how to stop it. Up and down I went working the rows, but at one stage, I turned too fast in the headland, and drove the back wheel up onto the crossbar, breaking it. Heart in mouth, I rushed up to the farmhouse but he said quite nonchalantly 鈥淥h I can soon mend that in the workshop鈥�, and did. Later I used the Fordson a lot and sometimes the John Deere tractor, which he usually drove; Mr. Rose鈥檚 young son would use a yellow caterpillar crawler for ploughing. In the first few months on the farm, I think my favourite job was haymaking. On one occasion, my friend Florence and I both had our carts loaded up, ready to return to the farmyard, except that we had to turn the carts round on the side of the hill. As we did so, both carts skidded sideways, I just came off on top of my load of hay, but Florence鈥檚 load was already roped to the cart, so she landed on the hard ground, and was knocked unconscious. I ran up to the scullery and tried to pump water, which refused to come out quickly, so had to rush along to the village pump to draw some to bring her round.

Other jobs on the farm entailed much stooking (in those days, all corn was cut in the fields, then stooked and later built into the attractive stacks that one only sees now on old postcards or pictures). The sheaves of wheat were much heavier than those of oats or barley, and one of the older labourers was an expert at building a really good stack, leaving a 'pitchhole ' for us to heave the sheaves back to him over our heads until the stack reached the level for its top thatching. The reverse was the case when the noisy threshing machine would visit the farm and we would throw sheaves down into its dusty great mouth. Bags of wheat quickly filled at one end, to be collected up onto a trailer for despatch to the barn, and as the stack grew lower rats would begin scrambling out in all directions to be chased by farm terriers and boys with sticks. I particularly disliked the fat 鈥渉arvest spiders鈥� with crosses on their backs, the farm lads would take great pleasure in dropping these down our necks when opportunity occurred.
One day I had to use Beauty, Mr. Rose's favourite mare, for using the horse-rake on a hilly 60-acre field as two of the other horses, Flower and Janet, refused to work it all the time as it meant a lot of uphill work on every fourth side. Beauty was renowned for bolting through every gateway or on the drill (with Mr. Rose swearing hard at her for this) and particularly when we were threshing, for she loathed the noise of the huge machinery. On this occasion, she terrified me by bolting downhill on the rake with me trying desperately to clutch the tiny bucket seat beneath me and only a rein to cling to, she wasn't even wearing back traces. Finally we slithered to a halt with her nose deeply in the hedge and old Mr. Hale (at least 80 years old) in the field next door came tearing round to see if I was still in one piece.
Other jobs entailed cleaning out the calf sheds and stable, before transporting the manure out to the fields for muckspreading, how ones shoulders ached after a day spent like that. One very wet week when nothing else could be done I was sent thistle-podding the 60-acre field wandering up and down and chopping away at the roots.
Some weekends I would cycle into Huntingdon, eight miles away, and on one occasion all the Land Girls in Huntingdonshire had to meet up to be inspected by Queen Marie of Rumania, who was living in exile in England at that time. It was nice to have an opportunity of meeting and comparing notes with others even though we were not allowed to meet up in a Forces canteen.
After about eight months, my mother wrote and asked for me to be transferred to a hostel, as she felt it was so lonely for me on my own, and I found myself at Sawtry hostel on the Gt. North Road between Huntingdon and Peterborough. This was rather grim at first, as I was the only Londoner at that stage, with 39 Yorkshire mill girls from the toffee factories of Leeds, Bradford etc. Two of them had lost fingers in the machinery of same. I was fair game with my London accent for some months but eventually we shook down together. We did a lot of potato setting and later picking, and this was very hard work as we were on our normal pay, but working with the fen women who were on piece-work so they drove us very fast all the time. Later, we were assigned to hedge-cutting and this was good, as we could rake the snow off the previous day's fire and toast our sandwiches on hayforks. These sandwiches were quite revolting, made with beetroots and the horrid yellow margarine which was used in wartime, which looked and tasted like cart grease. They improved a little with toasting, although the hedge-cutting was not without its price; I got septic cuts in every finger, from the blackthorn twigs, as we were not issued with work gloves!
At the hostel, we slept in double bunks, very hard wooden ones at first, but these had to be changed to mesh when the mattresses became damp, and there were three wood stoves down the middle of the hut for heating. In the other section of our hostel, we held dances every other Saturday, until the Pioneers, who guarded the POW camp down the road, stole our radio, which took us a long time to replace. One night, we had to lock ourselves in, when a prisoner escaped, but later he was found to have drowned himself in the septic tank. As the Italian POWs in their thick hairnets and waved hair were transported to work in a covered lorry, they used to jeer at us for having only an open truck for transport to our farms.

In 1943, the Americans arrived at Chicksands and Alconbury and things started swinging, with rock and roll dancing, and rows of drinks set up on tables in the three local pubs when one good pianist would regularly attend.

Things were in very short supply at that stage of the war, another Londoner and I used to hitchhike home for weekends whenever we could, often carrying with us a rabbit by a piece of string round its feet, and brown paper round its middle. This was a real treat for our families, as we knew they had to put up with severe rationing of meat. I remember on one occasion, my mother had managed to buy me a metal dog鈥檚 comb, as when our local shop in the village had finally managed to produce a consignment of plastic combs, we all rushed to buy one, only to find it break in half on first usage, they were totally useless. Elastic for knickers was also extremely poor quality.

Rat-catching

After a while, we had the opportunity to volunteer for rat-catching and ten of us set off for a fortnight's training in Wiltshire. Food was so very short at this stage of the war, and the rats so prevalent, they had to be dealt with. Poisoning was mostly by zinc phosphide which was very effective, but occasionally when they became poison-shy we would have to change to arsenic which was much slower. We were issued with gas pumps and Cymag powder, which gave off cyanide gas to be used where poison was impossible, such as under barn floors and holes in inaccessible places. We used oatmeal as bait, it would be laid on two days a week on their runs, then a day left free before the poison was added and we picked up the dead rats on Fridays, when the week's total would be taken off to Huntingdon incinerator. The largest pickup we ever recorded was 575 huge rats, and we only reckoned to find one in five, so that farm in Hammerton was seriously overrun, not surprising at all as the farmer stored all his grain loose in the loft over the barn. We gassed under the barn floor, digging out the young in nests and squeezing their necks, then I went on my own up into the loft, to deal with the traps we had laid in the corn up there. I had a nasty moment when, after hitting one rat on the head, I found it had not been killed, it turned and looked at me and for a second I thought it was about to spring, but fortunately it turned again and I was able to kill it. We had warned the farmer to keep his cats shut in on poison day but he did not do so, and there were four dead cats to be collected as well!
I was taught to drive though, which has always proved useful to me in the last 60 years. The first van I learnt on was an aged Morris, which had no rubber left on its tyres (one day I had to mend three punctures using cycle patches, and water from the dykes where we were working to locate the holes), and the floorboards were so rotted one could see the ground beneath. In addition, there was no handbrake so one of the girls had to put a brick behind one of the wheels when we stopped. Next came a Ford van, and finally a Hillman whose canvas back rolled up like the Army ones, but this proved such a brute to start, I had to drain the engine every night and refill it with hot water each morning. Even then, after a huge amount of effort with the starting handle, we sometimes had to call the local garage to tow us a few yards to start it.

I find it very amusing, to compare the modern Health and Safety precautions with the complete lack of safety equipment and training which we had. Last year, my builder told me he was going into Pest Control, but he said he had to wait for his uniform to arrive. The modern uniforms consist of a full set of overalls, with a mask for eyes and mouth etc. The equipment we had in 1944 was a little different! Our only tool was a long spoon to use with our tins of Cymag powder. In the local Isle of Wight paper a while back, I read that a tin of this had been discovered on a local farm, and a real fuss was made about its potential potency. Life was not surprisingly a little cheaper under wartime conditions, we were regarded as fairly disposable, and even the jack for changing the wheel on our van had to be placed beneath the axle, so we were really lucky the van never crashed down on us in the process!

When VE day arrived, all the Land Girls, other than our group of rat-catchers, were given the day off to go up to London to join in the celebrations. We were very upset with our foreman, who insisted that the poisoning programme would be affected if not continued at the right time, whereas we thought it would only mean that the rats were hungrier on poison day. We had to cook for ourselves also, the staff having also been given the time off. However quite early in the morning, one of the girls fell into a dyke in the Fens and had to be brought home to change. On our return Bob, the foreman, and others had joined up with a group of farm-workers and we all settled down in a Fen pub for a cider-drinking session and a jolly sing-song, so quite a good time was had by all, in spite of never being able to catch up on the vast celebrations going on in the city, apart from subsequent films of same.
A few weeks later, I had to return home to our local Ealing hospital for an operation for a 'grumbling appendix' as the doctor thought it could become acute sometime, when I was a long way away from civilisation. I took two months off in all, then returned to the hostel for about another six weeks,. and then applied for a discharge, as others were doing at this stage of the war. This was given rather reluctantly by the Land Army authorities, but after a full three years, I felt it was time to meet up with other members of my family whilst they were at home, and to get some training for work in the future. I had enjoyed all the experiences of the last few years and developed a great love for the country as well as feeling that it had been a useful job.

Eda (aka Gina) Kenyon (nee Standing)

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