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A Land Girl's Life
BURDON, Pauline
A Land Girl’s Life
Newport: [c. 1994]
A blue card flat bar file (23 x 35cm approx); containing 221 typed A4 pages; pp. [i], 221, [ii]; the final two pages handwritten on the back of scrap paper and held by a paperclip; the remaining pages contained in provided metal clasp; the covers rather heavily sun faded, creased and torn in several places; two overlaid stickers; one with the author’s name and heavily faded title, the other printed with the author’s address; second address label to p. [i] contents page, handwritten corrections and additions throughout in pen and pencil, but mostly to the first few pages; occasional pages photocopies; some rusting from the metal clasp and paperclip bleeding onto contents page and inside cover; the majority of the pages clean and bright, with some light corner creasing.
The unpublished autobiography of Pauline Burdon, an amateur ornithologist and later land girl, who recounts her childhood growing up in the countryside in Wales (Haverfordwest, Little Milford and Newgale) in the 1930s, her love of birds, and her bemoaning of the developments in modern machinery “There are too many of us now, and too many cars”, she writes, “the car has brought us freedom of movement, but it has also become one of the main destroyers of those old freedoms that we could still enjoy until the end of the Second World War”. She writes of her publication of her bird studies in numerous papers and journals from a young age, and “with rumours of war in all the newspapers, people seized on the wholesome story of a young person’s love or nature as respite from dread”. As a teenager, she speaks about her friendships, and her teenage years smoking woodbines, before Chapter 3 heralds the beginning of the war and ‘The Coming of the Land Girls’. She describes hosting soldiers at home during the first Christmas of the war, the attractiveness of the men, and her family hosting the first groups of land girls, who were recruited to ‘lift potatoes’. At seventeen, she herself joins and helps with the harvest at her friends the Lockleys. Comparing life as a Land Girl to life at University, she describes the farmers’ perception of her “No doubt I was a great curiosity to them as the first land girl, probably the first of the species they had ever seen” and the physical labour of milking cows on a daily basis, as well as other dangerous work such as sawing with no protective clothing, killing pigs and hunting rabbits. She describes the starchiness of the uniforms and the parade at ‘War Weapons Week’: “Here we all were, a sizeable group of women, come into town for the day from the cowsheds and poultry-yards… it was a visible demonstration of the network that had been organised on a nation-wide scale to replace the fighting men. It bonded and encouraged us”, and she learns how to drive a tractor. She meets the writer Leo Walmsley and his family, as well as the ‘poet and intellectual’ Stephen Spender, who she notes ‘was good-looking in a mother’s-boy sort of way’. She observes the changing seasons, and learns how to swear in Welsh. A whole section on page 186, (where she confesses her feelings for a fellow farm worker named Jock) are crossed through with ‘deleted’ written, and page 200 is cut at the bottom. The pages end in January 1945, before the end the war, with the last two chapters noted in the contents as being ‘Not included - typing incomplete’.
A well-written and insightful work, providing a first-hand account of life in the WLA.
BURDON, Pauline
A Land Girl’s Life
Newport: [c. 1994]
A blue card flat bar file (23 x 35cm approx); containing 221 typed A4 pages; pp. [i], 221, [ii]; the final two pages handwritten on the back of scrap paper and held by a paperclip; the remaining pages contained in provided metal clasp; the covers rather heavily sun faded, creased and torn in several places; two overlaid stickers; one with the author’s name and heavily faded title, the other printed with the author’s address; second address label to p. [i] contents page, handwritten corrections and additions throughout in pen and pencil, but mostly to the first few pages; occasional pages photocopies; some rusting from the metal clasp and paperclip bleeding onto contents page and inside cover; the majority of the pages clean and bright, with some light corner creasing.
The unpublished autobiography of Pauline Burdon, an amateur ornithologist and later land girl, who recounts her childhood growing up in the countryside in Wales (Haverfordwest, Little Milford and Newgale) in the 1930s, her love of birds, and her bemoaning of the developments in modern machinery “There are too many of us now, and too many cars”, she writes, “the car has brought us freedom of movement, but it has also become one of the main destroyers of those old freedoms that we could still enjoy until the end of the Second World War”. She writes of her publication of her bird studies in numerous papers and journals from a young age, and “with rumours of war in all the newspapers, people seized on the wholesome story of a young person’s love or nature as respite from dread”. As a teenager, she speaks about her friendships, and her teenage years smoking woodbines, before Chapter 3 heralds the beginning of the war and ‘The Coming of the Land Girls’. She describes hosting soldiers at home during the first Christmas of the war, the attractiveness of the men, and her family hosting the first groups of land girls, who were recruited to ‘lift potatoes’. At seventeen, she herself joins and helps with the harvest at her friends the Lockleys. Comparing life as a Land Girl to life at University, she describes the farmers’ perception of her “No doubt I was a great curiosity to them as the first land girl, probably the first of the species they had ever seen” and the physical labour of milking cows on a daily basis, as well as other dangerous work such as sawing with no protective clothing, killing pigs and hunting rabbits. She describes the starchiness of the uniforms and the parade at ‘War Weapons Week’: “Here we all were, a sizeable group of women, come into town for the day from the cowsheds and poultry-yards… it was a visible demonstration of the network that had been organised on a nation-wide scale to replace the fighting men. It bonded and encouraged us”, and she learns how to drive a tractor. She meets the writer Leo Walmsley and his family, as well as the ‘poet and intellectual’ Stephen Spender, who she notes ‘was good-looking in a mother’s-boy sort of way’. She observes the changing seasons, and learns how to swear in Welsh. A whole section on page 186, (where she confesses her feelings for a fellow farm worker named Jock) are crossed through with ‘deleted’ written, and page 200 is cut at the bottom. The pages end in January 1945, before the end the war, with the last two chapters noted in the contents as being ‘Not included - typing incomplete’.
A well-written and insightful work, providing a first-hand account of life in the WLA.