Adding colour to the official Land Army record

 

                                                                            Land Army girls working in a barn

Trying to add colour to my mother's Land Army experience, I turned to the books on my shelves about women's experience in World War Two and books on the Land Army in particular. It will take me a while to get through them all and, in the end, while it will be a useful exercise and give me more background on the women who served on the farms in Britain, it won't be the story of the particular person I'm interested in. In fact the book I'm reading now, The Women's Land Army 1939-1950, seems particularly sparse in its coverage of Hertfordshire where my mother was stationed.

Then I turned to online sources. A search brought up the website Herts Memories which gave me access to stories and articles which would bring me closer to my mother's experience. On the site there was a write up by Margaret Hurst about her time in the Land Army in Hertfordshire. The stories highlighted the reality and grittiness of the experience, from the cockroaches in the kitchen to the scurrying rats as the workers got to the bottom of the threshing pile. Was my mother's experience similar? One of Margaret's memories did strike a chord. She wrote about going to pick Brussel sprouts on a freezing cold day. That brought forth a memory of one of the things that my mother had said, that Brussel sprouts were picked after the first frost. Maybe she too had worked harvesting sprouts for a market gardener like Margaret Hurst had. 

Sources:

Herts Memories - https://www.hertsmemories.org.uk/content/herts-history/topics/world-war-two/womens-land-army/the-womens-land-army-in-hertfordshire

Powell, Bob & Nigel Westacott The Women’s Land Army 1939-1950. Sutton Publishing Limited, Gloucestershire, 2000

Image:

By Nora Lavrin - http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/16311, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53995217