Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  Presently he fell in love with Joan Boulting, a slim, dark Land Girl with a boyish figure and her hair in ‘a little cupola of a bun’. She never wore the regulation breeches, which were ‘all corduroy bum’, but brown linen jeans. He thought her ‘a neat, lively little parcel of a girl’, and when he saw her driving one of the big tractors, he ‘trembled to think that anything so powerful should be in the charge of anyone so slight … It struck me from time to time that I was rather near to wishing myself a Fordson tractor.’ In summer, when the girls went into shorts, he was ‘sharply shaken by this view of Joan Boulting’s lean brown limbs’. When another of the girls took off her sweater, a colleague, Ralph Tarbox, ‘pawed the ground like a stallion and neighed brilliantly’. At harvest time, particularly, sexual tension simmered in the fields and rickyards, and the air was as thick with innuendo as it was with dust and flying chaff.

  Apart from the Land Girls, nobody liked the Conchies much. As they moved from farm to farm, soldiers who confronted them called them ‘fucking yellow-bellies’, and demanded to know what they were frightened of. What was the matter with them? Why did they refuse to fight? One farm bailiff, who had ‘a sort of lazy, loose viciousness towards Conchies’, was scarcely less offensive. As they struggled to manoeuvre the trusser – part of the threshing equipment – he remarked, ‘I’d like to put you through that, and then the prisoners of war.’ Then to a Land Girl: ‘Shouldn’t bend over like that, love. Not with these Conchies around. But they wouldn’t know what to do, love, would they?’

  In spring the Conchies sowed the fields by hand, scattering the seed as they swung in arcs. In late summer, when they cut the corn on headlands with scythes, the ‘inert weight and wilful sway of the long blade’ grievously endangered their unprotected shins – ‘They’ll have all their damn legs off, the way they’re going.’ Experts kept coming to stare at them: equipment officers, authorities on drainage, specialists in ploughing, specialists in the maintenance of tractors, in the use of pesticides and fertilizer … Bert would be summoned to what looked like a board meeting in the middle of a field, only to report, ‘More bloody papers.’

  Like many of the Land Girls, Blishen developed a particular hatred of sugar beet, whether he was hoeing it or harvesting it in the fields or taking it to a factory. ‘The sun beat down and we knew a fresh dimension of boredom,’ he remembered as they hacked away with their hoes, and a newcomer to the team observed gloomily, ‘Goes bloody on and on.’ Beet became ‘like a delirium’ in Blishen’s mind, and he worried that someone would make him count the roots, ‘millions upon millions of them heaped in lorries, in railway trucks, in great storage bays’. How he would have hated the beet singling competition organized by the British Sugar Corporation at Coupar Angus in Fife, for which there were fifty-four entrants, two of them women.

  With constant exercise he grew so fit that he was able to handle two-hundredweight sacks of wheat without trouble. His first attempt simply felled him. ‘There was a horrid sensation as of a sack having gone straight through me and out the front. Then I was a heap of bones and jelly on the ground.’ But in time he got the knack of settling the sack at exactly the right spot high up on his back – and with that he could go on carrying all day.

  Slowly the seasons moved on. He got a new mate called Bernard who believed that the war had been caused by ‘the opposition of electrons’. Italian prisoners arrived wearing green caps, crying ‘Carissima!’, chanting ‘O sole mio’ and throwing billets-doux out of their lorries – a development not at all to the liking of the Land Girls, who set out both ‘to sharpen and to thwart’ the newcomers’ interest in them: ‘They would posture, stare, sing boldly. They would call out encouraging remarks, and then, among themselves, and loudly, discuss their contempt for the prisoners.’ To Blishen it seemed that the girls had a huge hatred of strangers: their instinct was to close ranks, even against Americans, and at times he felt that the fields were ‘full of harpies’.

  When it came to German prisoners, you had to be careful: if they waved at you, and you waved back, the guards might threaten to arrest you for plotting an escape. One girl, Peggy Chapman, appealed so strongly to a German called Christoph whom she met at threshing time that he made her a handsome needlework box from salvaged wood – the lid from birch, the sides from sycamore and the base from pitch pine. A geometric inlay on the lid incorporated mahogany, walnut and sycamore veneer – altogether a rare labour of love.

  Ten

  In the Woods

  What will the axemen do,

  when they have cut their way from sea to sea?

  James Fenimore Cooper

  In 1939 the Forestry Commission, created by Government Act of 1919, and presented in 1923 with 120,000 acres of Crown woodlands, was already a large organization. But most of its equipment was still old-fashioned, and, as on farms, horses still played a large part in timber operations. The thirty-ninth edition of Webster’s Forester’s Diary and Pocket Book, which gave the names and addresses of more than 2000 foresters, recorded that ‘five horses will haul on ordinary roads about 150 feet of timber at 3 mph. A tractor will haul anything up to 220 feet of timber at 6 to 10 mph and will cover forty miles per day … With a long haul in the woods, where a tractor cannot go, and a short haul on the road, horse transport would undoubtedly be cheaper.’

  News of the urgent need for timber production soon crossed the Atlantic. In September 1939 the Newfoundland Government created the Newfoundland Overseas Forestry Unit, and during the next five years 3500 volunteers came to Britain to work as fellers and loggers. Crisp instructions from Captain Jack Turner, the officer in charge, sent them on their way:

  When you get instructions, carry them out at once. When the man in charge of your group tells you to do something, do it – don’t argue about it … When a lot of men have to be moved a long way in a hurry, there is no place for debating societies.

  Food, transport and accommodation were free, but the men earned only $2 a day, or $12 a week, and had to provide their own clothes. Each had to sign an exacting Form of Engagement, of which the first clause promised:

  I shall work faithfully, industriously and efficiently in any work that forms part of a logging or sawmill operation in the United Kingdom and obey the orders of foremen, superintendents and other persons in charge of operations and generally behave in an orderly and law-abiding manner.

  The term of the engagement was ‘for the duration of the present war’. The volunteers were not allowed to join ‘any unit of H.M. Armed Forces’, and if any man’s conduct was less than satisfactory, he could be ‘dismissed forthwith’. If incapacitated by illness or accident, he would be returned to his home in Newfoundland free of charge.

  The first of the loggers arrived in the bitter cold of January 1940: tough guys, they went straight to work in Scottish mountain forests with their axes and cross-cut saws, building log huts to give themselves temporary shelter. In the woods at Ballater on either side of the River Dee they were soon felling 3000 trees a week and hauling the trunks out to a sawmill on sledges. They lived in camps – the first at Dalcross, in Inverness-shire – and over the next five years established seventy more camps and sawmills, closing old sites and opening new ones as areas of forest were cleared. A postcard sent home by one of them, Raymond Rogers, carried a photograph showing a cluster of single-storey huts and bore the official caption ‘Ministry of Labour Instructional Centre, Cairnbaan’, on the Crinan Canal in Argyll; but the sender described it as ‘one of our camps’. ‘I am enjoying myself to the full,’ he wrote, ‘only where we are now is more or less an isolated spot. Very few people except four miles away there is a “bonnie wee” village as the Scotch people say, and there are only a few people living there.’

  Help in the forests came also from Down Under. In response to a request from Whitehall, the New Zealand Government sent over three companies of men from the Corps of Engineers – 645 fine specimens, who had to be single, under thirty-five, physically Grade One and at least six feet
tall. They brought with them techniques and equipment well ahead of those available in Britain, and, besides felling thousands of trees, built new mills all over the south – at Bowood and Grittleton in Wiltshire, Hungerford in Berkshire, Basing Park in Hampshire, Wickwar in Gloucestershire and many other places. Formidable workers themselves – they cut down 2000 beech trees in three months – they were not impressed by the equipment in British mills, or by the refusal of Forestry Commission officials to cool circular saws with water. One exasperated New Zealander was reported to have let fly at an opposite number:

  Now look here, mate. If you turn forty-eight-inch diameter circular saws at a thousand rpm spindle-speed, and feed them at two-and-a-half inches per revolution, and butt one flitch after another so that you are cutting timber all day instead of cutting wind, you are going to have bloody hot saws which will fly to bits unless you run a film of water on the cutting surfaces all the cutting day.

  The New Zealanders had one special admirer in the form of Queen Mary, who several times visited them at work. She was fascinated by the accuracy with which they could fell large trees directly onto the mark they had set, and she was deeply interested in their names, telling them that Thomson, without a ‘p’, probably meant that a man’s ancestors came from the Scottish Lowlands. After several visits to working sites, she invited officers and other ranks to tea at Badminton House, where she was living in Gloucestershire; but when she suggested that, in view of the heat, the men might like to take off their tunics, only half responded, because the rest were wearing nothing underneath.

  British forestry organizations became alarmed by the inroads the war was making into the nation’s timber stocks. During or just after the First World War some 450,000 acres of trees had been felled, and now woods were again being cleared at a drastic rate: by the spring of 1945 the Minister of Agriculture, Robert Hudson, estimated that no more than a million acres of woodland were left in England, most of it young or second-rate. Conifers planted in 1920 were far from mature, but big enough to make pit props – and both the Commission and private owners began to get an unexpectedly early return on capital. Landowners with little regard for the look of the country also took advantage of the demand, and felled hardwood trees growing in the middle of their fields or in the hedges.

  Some of the work was done by schoolboys sent out to forestry camps: in 1941 900 boys of fifteen or over were paid to weed and clean young plantations, as well as to cut and peel pit props. Older boys were allowed to fell small trees and do snedding – the removal of low branches in plantations.

  Toiling in parallel with men and boys were the Lumber Jills, who, as members of the Women’s Forestry Service (a branch of the Women’s Land Army), worked in woods and plantations with no less skill and energy than their equivalents on farms. They learned how to handle heavy axes, sliding the upper hand down the shaft to increase the momentum of each stroke, and to use long, cross-cut saws, with one girl pulling on either end as they felled trees and cut them up for pit props, railway sleepers or telegraph poles. Like farming, forestry always meant hard labour. Cross-cut sawing, exhausting even for men, demanded tremendous stamina from girls. In one yard, even though the circular saw was driven by a steam engine, water for the boiler had to be hauled by horse and cart from a standpipe three-quarters of a mile away.

  The girls also managed horses for timber extraction, and turned their hands to charcoal-burning and other woodland tasks. At lunchtime in winter, when it was snowing, they built bonfires with small branches and baked potatoes in the embers as they sat round eating their sandwiches. Rosalind Elder, posted to Advie, a small village in Strathspey, learned all the skills and lived in wooden huts, lit by Tilley lamps and heated by wood-burning stoves. Several of the girls were injured, but she and her comrades became ‘well-seasoned lumber jills’, able to hold their own with ‘any man in the woods’.

  After a year in the WLA, seventeen-year-old Pamela Richards went to work in the Timber Corps at Oakhampton, in Devon, where she was billeted at a house out in the country and had to walk home at night past an American camp. Although small and slight, she soon became adept at felling trees with a 7-lb axe; but one day she got hers wedged in a trunk just as her neighbour yelled ‘Tim-BER!’ – too late. The neighbouring tree hit Pamela’s, and nearly killed her.

  Maggie Dixon, a Lumber Jill sent to Shropshire, found herself sawing pit props in a gang that included a Russian from London and a beautiful Lithuanian girl who won the Most Lovely Eyes contest at the local fête. When heavy rain turned the woodland floor into a bog, a railway track was laid, and a small engine appeared, together with some trucks. Her friend Marjorie volunteered to drive it, and Maggie became her mate. Then Americans arrived, ‘preceded by horror stories from other parts of Shropshire, where many girls had had babies by these better dressed and richer men’. Here, however, they were very well behaved, ‘especially the black ones who were good dancers and very pleasant’.

  Another spirited and resourceful Yorkshire lass, Barbara Beddow, worked in many parts of the kingdom. In 1939 she married a boy she had known at school. When by cruel chance he was killed by a cross-Channel shell which landed in a barracks in Dover in September that year, she joined the Land Army – to her mother’s horror – and was sent to the Forestry Training College in the Forest of Dean. At her first job at Fearby, in North Yorkshire, the village wives were ‘very suspicious and not at all friendly’, and locals regarded her and her fellow girls as ‘beings from another planet’. In Markington she stayed with a family whose mum was having fun with army lads: someone wrote to her husband, who came home and chased her with Barbara’s axe.

  Next, on the Swinton estate, she did timber-measuring, and lodged for a while on the bank of the River Yore, in a beautiful house owned by a woman who suffered from sleeping sickness, but nevertheless was a man-eater. ‘Her men ate all our rations,’ Barbara remembered, ‘but she had a boat on the river, and we had many midnight parties.’ Promoted to forewoman-in-charge, she was sent to the New Forest to find and extract a shrub called alder buckthorn (Rhamnus frangula), which in peacetime was worked by gypsies. Having settled into digs in Carlton, she was given a hut as an office, and placed in charge of twelve girls sent straight from home, who worked in an open-fronted wooden shed, soaking the bark off buckthorn branches and drying it on sheets of corrugated iron heated over fires. Sacks of bark went off to be made into Cascada segrada (a natural laxative), and the wood was turned into best-quality charcoal for the manufacture of gunpowder, particularly for use in time fuses, because of its even burn rate. In their off-duty moments the girls watched herons fishing and went rabbiting with ferrets.

  Married again, Barbara returned to Yorkshire, to work at Foggathorpe, in the East Riding, and again she was given an amazing amount of responsibility. She and her colleagues walked to work and clear-felled two twelve-acre woods – but, as she said, ‘it was only small stuff, so the girls managed’. She had no supervision except a visit from a manager every three months, and although she had never been given any financial training or done office work, she had to manage her team’s pay. When money came through the post office, she placed it in a bank account and handed it out as appropriate.

  Some of her tree-fellers, who were on piece work, could not read or write, but they could always calculate their earnings to a penny. They also understood the use of pit props and larger timbers in the mines, and knew that straight softwood trees like larches, marked with a circle of white paint, were to become telegraph poles, thousands of which were needed to carry telephone lines to new military camps and airfields, or to obstruct farmland on which enemy gliders might try to land.

  Looking back on her career in the forests, Barbara concluded that some older citizens saw the Lumber Jills as a threat, bringing a challenge to their own young people, and that younger people were jealous of the girls’ itinerant autonomy: ‘We were probably seen as a bit wild and a bit too free.’ Whatever people thought of them, Land Girls and Lumber Jills
emerged from the war not just physically robust, but mentally and emotionally strengthened as well. They had seen what they were capable of, and had gained a new outlook on life.

  Women took on many other jobs which they would not have dreamed of tackling before the war. Those who became volunteer ambulance drivers as members of the ARP needed strong nerves, for they were required not only to drive with masked headlights during night raids, but also to clear up the remains of people caught in bomb blasts. After minimal training, which often concentrated on double-declutching (but no formal test), they went on duty in pairs: a driver and her attendant, another woman. Theoretically they worked in three shifts – eight hours on, eight hours on standby (reporting for duty if the sirens sounded) and eight hours off; but in practice air raids made mockery of their schedules and they were sometimes on the go for days and nights on end.

  Their vehicles, kept under corrugated-iron shelters, often in school playgrounds, were large saloon cars with the rear bodywork cut off and replaced by a canvas hood which could be rolled back: they carried no medical equipment, and their sole function was to ferry injured people to the nearest casualty station or hospital. Whenever a major air raid began, each crew drove out of town to a prearranged rendezvous in the country, often a garage on a main road, to await orders. They were not supposed to pick up bodies, but if the mortuary ambulance was fully occupied, they often had to wrap corpses in their blankets and take them in – and then clean out their vehicle. Their work was particularly tough in winter, when snow was lying and they needed chains fitted round the rear tyres to negotiate hills: they were not allowed to drive with chains on tarmac, and one woman remembered having to fit them and take them off seventeen times in a week. Not all the hazards that beset them were natural: investigation of a boiling radiator once revealed that children had topped it up with sand.