Members of the Women’s Land Army harvesting beets, circa 1943.
Country journeys As part of their Diamond Day celebration, Eastern Region NWR members heard from speaker Sue Stennett about how her experiences as a young woman in the rural Lincolnshire of the sixties differed from those of her parents and grandparents. When Betty Jerman wrote of women “squeezed in like sardines in suburbia”, she obviously wasn’t thinking of those in the farming communities that I grew up with but, although not physically squeezed in, they too had to deal with the assumptions of others about how their lives should be conducted. For far too long it was thought that women’s brains couldn’t cope with intellectual thoughts, both by men and by quite a few women. My great-great-great-great-grandmother, born in 1751, was somewhat unhappily married to an increasingly dour Quaker Minister, who banned music in the home and thought all art frivolous. This is part of a poem she wrote to a friend: Alack the poor husband how woeful his case, Who marries a woman of genius and taste! Instead of a pudding you would make him a poem; Forgetting perhaps the observance you owe him; Be writing an elegy, an ode or a sonnet When you ought to be making a cap or a bonnet. Instead of attending affairs in your kitchen And minding your business of darning and stitching, Perhaps you’d be reading some book so bewitching. So, you see, I wonder if women haven’t always found domesticity alone frustrating! And suspect that, although your 14
NWR Magazine 1960–2020
amazing organisation was only formed 60 years ago, women have sought the friendship of others with whom to discuss and share experiences throughout time, as she clearly did. I was born in 1946, and was therefore 14 when NWR was founded. My brain then was just full of trying to get out of doing homework, spending time with my pony and being excited about the new music of the time. I’m sure my mother would have joined an organisation such as yours if she had had the time or the energy. Born in 1919, Mum was 18, and her sister Marjorie 12, when their mother died in 1937. Their father was an engineer in Ceylon who visited his family every five years. He had come home at my mother’s request when she realised how ill my grandmother was. Were it not for an amazing PE teacher at her high school, I feel Mum might have had a very different life. She was very good at games of all sorts and it was the games mistress who took her for her interview at Bedford PE college. Three years later, before starting to teach, she volunteered for war work in the summer holidays and was put on a farm near Lincoln, to help bring in the harvest. At the end of her employment the boss said to her, “Please come and see us tomorrow, we have something for you.” She cycled four miles out to South Carlton to be given a jar of jam for her six weeks work – would they have done that to a man? However, her reward was not just the jar of jam, she had also met her future husband. He was soon to join the army and any thought of marriage had to be put off for another four years.
City girl Mum had to adapt to pumping water from the well In fact, his parents disapproved of Mum: she lived down the hill in Lincoln and was the daughter of an engineer, while Dad’s father was a well-respected doctor and they lived in Minster Yard with maids and a chauffeur. Yes, times have changed! Mum taught at Howell’s School for Girls in Denbigh, North Wales. Her best friend was fellow teacher Rosie, a Cambridge geography graduate – although she had to wait until 1998 to receive her full degree. As a university graduate, she was paid £226 per annum, and Mum, with her college qualifications, £183. Out of this, both paid £70 a year for board and lodging. Rosie, who was to become my godmother, was the first teacher at the school to be allowed to stay on and teach after marriage, and Mum the second after her marriage in 1944. Both, however, had to leave once pregnant. My dad had been brought up to inherit money but, by the time he was demobbed in 1946, the money was largely gone. He spent a year at agricultural college before becoming a farm
