The Telegraph "Land Girls" Report - 8 August 1998

Dig This !

Rachel Weisz, Anna Friel and Catherine McCormack are the beautiful heroines in a new film about the Women's Land Army. But the life of the women who were digging for victory in the war against Hitler was far less glamorous. Rose Shepherd reports on the very modern Land girls

SOMEWHERE outside Taunton, towards the end of the morning, the weather turned ugly. At Tiverton Parkway, the rain came down in sheets. People put up their newspapers and ran for the shelter of the station canopy. Cars with dipped headlights went by blearily.

This was, I thought, just as it should be. Greenpoint Films was down here on location, on a farm, to make Land Girls, a screen version of the novel by Angela Huth. The cast and crew would have been up at 5am, they would have been on set at first light. They would have been drenched to the skin, frozen to the bone, up to their necks in muck and manure - much as the Women's Land Army would have been. If it was verisimilitude they wanted, they were getting it in buckets and spades.

Huth's novel, published in hardback in 1994, anticipated our rekindled interest in the Second World War. The paperback edition was reprinted seven times in 1995 alone. Ruth Jackson, then with the international film sales company Majestic, now executive producer at Greenpoint, and producer Simon Relph had been quick to spot the book's potential. A screenplay was swiftly commissioned and shooting began in early 1997.

It should find us still in a mood of retrospection. The land girls' daughters' daughters, for whom the last war is truly history and so quaint, will be in thrall to the romance, as well as to the kit - the familiar uniform of fawn shirt and breeches, cropped green sweater, hat, armbands, tie - that androgynous look that is paradoxically so very sexy.

This, at any rate, was the producer's hunch, and he was encouraged in it, he said, by the enthusiasm of the three young actresses who play the land girls billeted together on a West Country farm. Anna Friel, familiar as Beth Jordache in Channel 4's Brookside, plays Prue, a sexpot hairdresser from Manchester. The luminously beautiful Rachel Weisz, whose films include Chain Reaction, Stealing Beauty and Amy Foster, is Ag, a Cambridge graduate, and at 26, horribly burdened with virginity. Catherine McCormack, dubbed 'Mrs Mel Gibson' from her role in the movie Braveheart, is the self-confident, middle-class Stella, while Steven Mackintosh, who lately starred with Friel in the television series, Our Mutual Friend, plays the lucky farmer's son, Joe, who scores the hat-trick. The women all leapt at the roles, apparently. They adored the outfits, the hair, the make-up.

In real life, Benshayes Farm, near Bampton, Devon, is home to racehorses. The livestock for the film - pigs, chicken, cattle - all had to be brought in; they were extras. A flock of doves, meanwhile, symbols of peace, preposterously white against a monotonous background of brown, had apparently just appeared. They maddened the sound crew with the creak of their wings as they rose up out of the hay and fluttered around the rafters of the barn.

The actresses were required to take a crash course in milking, mucking out, ploughing. They needed to be proficient at these tasks, to perform them effortlessly, so that nothing should get in the way of the real business of filmmaking. And for the crew to suppose that they would be too delicate, too fey, too, well, actressy to get their hands dirty, was to indulge the same prejudices as confronted some of the original land girls.

Everyone, on this foul day, seemed in surprisingly good humour. A note on the call sheet, the day's ordinance, might suitably have been addressed to the Women's Land Army. It read, 'David, Simon and Andrew would like to thank you all for your fantastic efforts in the most appalling conditions. Your perseverance in the face of every adversity has been truly amazing. . . Thank you.' The director David Leland that is, with Simon Relph and Andrew Warren, co-producer.

Later, I looked on as they shot a defining moment between Joe and Stella. A smouldering gaze, a fleeting kiss. Aching, yearning, 'Very throbful' as a Mills & Boon editor once expressed it to me.

Leland was insistent that the film should reflect the hard work of the Women's Land Army, who toiled from dawn to dark in the most dire circumstances, and - although this is not strictly a war movie - that we should feel the reverberations of war. For the land girls in the Forties, after all, and especially for those in Kent, in 'Hellfire Corner', in 'Bomb Alley', a harder rain than this fell from the sky.

Thus, we see the girls herding cattle, ploughing, harvesting potatoes, emptying the swill and mincing the mangolds. Thus, a salutary reminder that fields don't have flush loos - and that we've all got to go sometimes. Thus, too, several somewhat clunking reminders that there is a war on. 'Today,' it is announced at the village-hall hop, 'Japanese planes have made a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour. Japan has declared war on America. The Yanks are in on our side.' No one says, 'Huh?' or 'Come again', or 'Where in hell is Pearl Harbour?' It is almost as if they already knew. Spooky!

For six weeks, the little town of Dulverton, 'Gateway to Exmoor', was wafted back in time to 1941. Some 200 extras were drafted in. Gerald Down from Simonsbath landed the part of the ageing farmhand, Ratty. John Nash, a reporter with the local gazette, got into a chalk-striped suit for his minor role as a clerk in the recruiting office. Huth herself, and her 16-year-old daughter, Eugenie Howard-Johnston, both feature briefly. The Scout troop, who led the film's 150-strong Wings for Victory Parade through the streets, had been in a fever of excitement to meet the lovely Anna Friel.

For the film's purposes, the town hall played host to a dance that allowed Prue, Ag and Stella to shrug off their uniforms, to glam up and shine. The three being among the few who had dressed for the occasion, appeared more glamorous than ever beside their uniformed counterparts. The 'victory roll' hairdo in particular proved very flattering: it does something wonderful for anyone with cheekbones.

Young women in land army clothing solemnly partnered one another; pensioners in full Forties fig made stately progress round the floor, as Ag and a rugged Canadian airman made a brave bid to pass off the worst ever chat-up lines: 'Golly, you're not a Yank are you?' 'Look, I'm Desmond. Don't I know you? Aren't you Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile?', Prue hit it off with doomed airman Barry.

Between takes, the scene out on the streets was surreal. Dulverton's comely young librarian, in land army breeches and green sweater, moved along the crowd with her video-camera. She said that people, caught up in the drama of it all, kept coming in, trying to make cash donations to the 'Spitfire Fund' advertised on a poster, one of the props.

The rector, the Rev Anthony Appleby, had regretfully turned down the part of a vicar: his Mothering Sunday commitments just would not permit it. The servicemen, proxy actors, with their hair neatly shorn, looked so young, just boys really. But then, that's what they were, just young boys.

'Very authentic' was the consensus among those members of the Dulverton population whose memories went that far back. A very serious attempt was being made to tell it as it was. And yet. . .

My old auntie, if ever she saw me with a book, would ask, 'Is it a fiction or a love?' Land Girls the novel is very much a love. Still more is Land Girls the film a love: the picture focuses closely upon the developing relationship between Stella and Joe.

Neither film nor book tells the broader, in some ways more compelling story - the one about all those little girls, lonely, exploited, exhausted, far from home. Admittedly, there is an occasional strong whiff of all this, like dung on the morning breeze, but it is not what the pieces are about. They are, after all, fiction. For a more comprehensive, factual account of the WLA experience, Nicola Tyrer's They Fought in the Fields, subtitled The Women's Land Army: The Story of a Forgotten Victory, is the book to turn to. It is a wonderful book; it made me cry.

The WLA had to prove itself all over again in the second war. The estimable Lady Gertrude Denman, a pioneer of the Women's Institute movement and first chairman of the Family Planning Association, who had been involved in organising the land army in 1917, had the task, at 55, of pulling the organisation together once more. In June 1939, under her inspired if eccentric direction, the WLA was reborn.

Just a third of the British diet was produced at home at that time. Import supply lines were vulnerable to attack by German U-boats. UK farmers were urged to 'dig for victory', to plough up their pastures and grow food for home consumption. But who, if not the WLA, would till the soil, or sow, or reap, when the fit young men were gone for soldiers?

By the outbreak of war in September 1939, 17,000 volunteers had enrolled in the land army, a force that would number 80,000 at its greatest and would, over the 11 years it lasted, involve a quarter of a million women. Before the end of December, jobs had been found for 4,500, who were to endure the bleakest winter anyone could remember.

Deceptive recruitment posters of glowing, suntanned land girls cuddling woolly baa lambs, suckered in the idealistic, many from the industrial cities of the North, who were drawn to the open-air life. With a minimum age of 17, many land girls were naive, untravelled, unworldly, from sheltered backgrounds. One, Linda Shrigley, a land girl from 1943-47, reports in Tyrer's book that, until she joined the WLA, she had never even been on a train. She stood just 4ft 10in, yet went on to drive an excavator, and enjoyed it.

The girls had a wage of 28 shillings a week before overtime (equivalent to £32 today) and they handed back half of that for board and lodgings. While some, like our trio, were well received by the farmers and their families, even to being treated like surrogate daughters, and were heartily fed, others were shockingly misused, suffering isolation and depression, even going without pay.

The luckless ones found themselves in homes more primitive than the honest, Spartan farmhouse evoked by Huth, with earth closets and no running water, subsisting on bread and dripping, beetroot sandwiches, cold tea. One land girl billeted on an elderly carter and his wife relates how she was fed an ungastronomic pudding made of bacon rinds in boiled suet cladding - while the host family sat down to their meat and two veg.

About a third of the WLA were eventually put up in hostels, presided over by matronly wardens. Here, they were at least assured of the basic comforts even though the ethos was that of a boarding school. Some were lodged with pennypinching landladies, who sent them out each day with meagre rations, and expected them, against all regulations, to do housework or to babysit at night.

Subject to curfews, locked in, locked out, the land girls had much to complain about. Yet they seem to have been the least complaining of any workforce, and so completely did they vindicate themselves, that, when the WLA was finally stood down, the National Farmers Union expressed dismay.

The girls caught rats. They dug ditches, thinned turnips in the drizzle, picked Brussels sprouts in biting frosts. They mucked out byres and threshed corn, hefted 15-stone sacks of oats and barley, took the bull to the cow, castrated the pigs, silencing the sceptics who said that it couldn't be done by mere girlies. 'We did work hard,' said Jean Procter, who was a member of the WLA throughout the war, in Cheshire and Warwickshire, and who founded the British Women's Land Army Society in 1964. 'We drove great big dredging machines that went in and did the rivers so the boats could go up and down. Then you mustn't forget the timber corps. They were in the sawmills, they made the pit-props and telegraph poles, the fencing, and they made the coffins for the boys. There was no larking and jumping around, I assure you.'

At the highest and lowest level, land girls were discriminated against. They worked alongside conscientious objectors and prisoners of war and, since their interests were not enshrined in the Geneva Convention, routinely worked longer and harder than these men. They were banned from forces' canteens and the YMCA, were resented by jealous local women, unwelcome in pubs unless in the company of a man. When the war ended, they alone, of all those who had served their country, received no post-war gratuity.

Even the to-die-for uniform was not all it might have been. The land army greatcoat, commissioned by Lady Denman, designed by Worth, was much admired ('it's all that can be desired, and looks it'), yet the double-breasted, six-button overcoat with big pocket flaps and epaulets, currently on display at the Imperial War Museum, would flatter no one. And, while the actresses, all probably size eight or 10, appear quite stunning in the corduroy breeches, something in the outfit starts to go badly wrong when you get above a size 12 and it did absolutely nothing for anyone broad of beam.

Then, faithful though the costume department has been to the original uniform, the real thing was not such a universal snug fit. 'I was barely five-foot-one when I went in the land army,' says Jean Procter, 'and I got a uniform for five-foot-seven. The bottoms hung down to my knees and the top would be up under my bust.'

The most enduring myth about land girls - that, at best, they were incorrigible flirts, and that at worst they banged like a barn door - is, according to Tyrer, born of a mix of malice and wishful thinking. The subversion of the slogan, 'Back to the Land', as 'Backs to the Land', is a mischievous calumny. Sure they loved to let their hair down, and even after a day's work had the energy for dancing. Sure, they loved to shrug off their uniforms and get into their glad rags (there is a lovely image, conveyed by Tyrer, of four land girls, in a hostel, sitting side by side on the rim of the bath, staining their legs brown with builder's sand). But, says Jean Procter, you were doing well if you went to two dances a year. 'If you were lucky there was a dance in your area around Christmas, but there was nothing much else, especially if you were in the wilds, because the trains were knocked off, and the buses were knocked off. If you were on a private farm you went to bed at half-past nine. The hostels closed down at 10, and lights were all out by half-past. I do think the hostel girls had a better time of it. I know it sounds piggy to say this, but from what I heard of it, they had the company, they danced, they sang, they used to do each others' hair, they talked about boys and everything else.'

Talked about boys, yes. But what else? It is true that the war brought with it not just greater freedom, but a powerful sense of urgency between couples who were forced to part. The wartime song, 'We'll meet again', is a powerful intimation of the fear that this might not be so, and there would have been passionate leave-takings.

Still, Tyrer is sceptical of the land girls' raunchy reputation. 'Britain in the Forties was an extremely formal society, with a degree of consensus about convention - among others, that sex before marriage was wrong - that is unimaginable today. Most romantic encounters stopped short at what used to be called petting.'

Nevertheless, there were undeniably some young women in the Prue mould, with a more free-and-easy approach to extra-marital shenanigans, and a small minority wound up on temporary leave in special hospitals. There they had their babies, gave them up for adoption, then went back to hoeing the spuds. It was principally, it is alleged, the American GIs who had their wicked way with the land girls, because they had money, and because girls unused to alcohol were susceptible in drink. (The white Americans, this would have been, by the way. Appalling as it now seems, the WLA were forbidden by the 'War Ag' to associate with black GIs, a prohibition they widely resented.)

But despite all, the land girls were to remain loyal to the memory of these hard years. Jean Procter remembers that when she set up the BWLAS with a view to tracking down old land army chums, the press took up the story, and they turned up by the coachload. Today, the BWLAS has about 2,000 members around the world.

One of the most affecting truths about the land girls is that many of them lost their hearts, not to handsome soldiers or dashing fighter pilots, but to the English countryside - to nature. Mrs Procter recalls 'the almost incredible smell of the bell-clear morning air just before daybreak when the whole world feels renewed. It is part earth, part leaves, and part something beyond words - but it has this scent that is so special you feel you can grow on it.'

For the past 33 years the society has campaigned for full recognition of the land army's contribution to the war effort. 'They are trying to say that we were civilians, but we were not civilians. We were neither one thing nor the other. There were four uniforms: the Wrens, the WRACs, the WRAFs and the Women's Land Army. They took all our clothing coupons off us. We were billeted, given a railway pass and sent to another place. We didn't sleep in our own beds like the munitions people. We couldn't leave the job without a tribunal. People are just beginning to understand what we did.'

Mrs Procter expresses concern that the movie, Land Girls, could undermine the cause. 'I would like people to remember, when they see it, that it is not the truth. I think Angela Huth's descriptions are marvellous, but the story is fiction.'

I don't believe she needs to worry. Admittedly, the mud never sticks and knitted, porridge colour underwear would have given better service than the silky numbers in which our heroines disport themselves in the chill air. But the film will at any rate raise the profile of the land girls - although whether it will serve to awaken us to the debt we owe to all those women, or will merely launch a craze for a new land girl look, time alone will tell.

'Land Girls' opens in September. 'The Land Girls' (Abacus) by Angela Huth and 'They Fought in the Fields' (Sinclair Stevenson) by Nicola Tyrer are available for £6.99 each from Telegraph Books Direct (0541-557222). Postage is free to any UK address