大象传媒

My mum, Joan Pearson, joined the Land Army from her home in Lee Green, London around 1942. She'd been one of the first on the scene when a school was bombed in south London and the horrific scene she'd encountered added to her need to "do something useful" and to get away from London.

She was a very intelligent young woman who had left school at age 14 because her parents couldn't afford to send her to the grammar school for which she had won a scholarship. Before she joined up she had worked at the offices of Crosse and Blackwell near Charing Cross station. She was capable of so much more than digging spuds, but, the country life beckoned her.

She was billeted at Burley Manor in Hampshire amid some of the most beautiful countryside she had ever seen. Her eye sight wasn't too great and her road sense was even less good, but, there, she learned to drive a lorry and a tractor. It isn't known how many people she mowed down, but she would have done it with a certain style and peels of girlish laughter. She never learned to drive after the war, much to the family's relief.

Out at Burley, she made amazing lifelong friendships , and, in spite of the hard physical work, she had the time of her life. Making hay, digging vegetables, egging on the visiting soldiers all added to the fun. She fell in love with a Canadian soldier who was married with three children. He begged her to go back with him, but she put her own needs second as she always did throughout her life. She said "no" and sent him back to his wife and children. I wonder if they ever knew?

In 1947 my dad, Ronald Rosenthal, had just been demobbed from his Sergeant's role as an aircraft mechanic in the RAF. As mum would often jibe later in life, "he spent 5 years in the RAF and never saw a German", but, he dined out on his stories of Calcutta and Cape Town for many years to come.

Dad had suffered his own broken heart before meeting mum. He was married in Southampton to a girl called Eileen for just four days before being sent out to India with the RAF in 1942. Eileen wrote him the "Dear John" letter whilst he was suffering from TB out there. She had met a Canadian and was less loyal than my lovely mum. Dad would have taken it very badly because he was a wonderfully sensitive man who knew how to cry and didn't need to be macho all the time. I only found out about dad's early marriage when I was 21 years of age - it was one of those "best forgotten" things I guess.

Dad's account of how he met mum in Burley will always make me smile. It was typical of his lovely but peculiar school of tact. This is how he told it....

"We drove my Austin 7 out through the forest to Burley and it was a glorious sunny evening. Old nipper and I went into the pub and there, on the far side of the room, was the most beautiful girl in the world. And there, sitting next to her, was your mother...".

The rest, I guess, is history. Mum and Dad married in February 1948, the same month in which dad's former short-term wife Eileen married her new husband. Mum stayed in Southampton and helped to look after the vegetables in the large back garden of our rented cottage. They had 3 children and enjoyed 40 years of happiness together before dying within one year of oneanother in 1988/9. Burley was always a special place for them both, as maybe it is to other land girls who found happiness and peace there.

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