Farming, Fighting and Family: A Memoir of the Second World War
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Farming, Fighting and Family: A Memoir of the Second World War
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780750965644 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 10/05/2015 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
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Farming, Fighting and Family
A Memoir of the Second World War
By Miranda McCormick
The History Press
Copyright © 2015 Miranda McCormickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6564-4
CHAPTER 1
Before the War: The Streets
Arthur George Street was, in his own words, 'just a humble tenant farmer' when his daughter, Pamela, was born. Few could have foreseen how her formative years would be affected by her father's unexpected success in occupational pastures new.
Some three years after the end of the First World War, the country was enjoying a period of peace and relative prosperity. This is how, in a later memoir, Pamela described her home town, and her father's status within it:
The West Country town of Wilton, near Salisbury, was a small peaceful place when I was born on its outskirts in 1921. Nevertheless, it could boast two thriving industries: a carpet factory and a felt mills [sic]; while the surrounding countryside – until the depression – supported a third: thousands of acres of productive rented farmland belonging to the lord of the manor, the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House.
My father was one such farmer on this estate. Having, to his great regret, been rejected by the army in the First World War, owing to crippled feet, he had taken over Ditchampton Farm on the death of his own father in 1917.
Arthur's father, Henry Street, started his working life as a grocer's apprentice, and by the time of his marriage to his wife Sarah, was running a grocery shop in Wilton. He evidently made a sufficient success of it to enable him to take on the tenancy of Ditchampton Farm – 300 acres close to the town – and to become an equally successful farmer. As Pamela put it: 'The Streets, as it were, had moved up a peg.' Henry Street was a charismatic, somewhat domineering individual, nicknamed 'the organiser', and it was perhaps inevitable that as a young man Arthur Street – himself a forceful personality – would one day come to blows with him. The second youngest of six siblings, Arthur was born with his feet pointing in the wrong direction. He spent his early years in irons to correct the condition; his consequent immobility obliged him to yell to attract his family's attention, which in turn went on to influence his adult character.
Pamela went on to describe her street forebears as 'solid, honest and hard-working. All were exponents of self-help, perhaps none more so than my father, who had to overcome physical disability.' Her maternal family, however, were something of a contrast:
My mother's forebears were very different. They were the Foyles from the Felt Mills. They might have had the same work ethic as the Streets, but they were mercurial, quixotic, good-looking, proud, compassionate, generous and poor. In my youth I was given to understand that Grandfather Foyle – who died in 1918 – had been the Manager of the Mills; but I came to realise he must have been more of a foreman.
Granny Foyle was the daughter of a well-to-do clothier from Trowbridge. She was doted on as a child and had silk stockings specially made for her. Perhaps it wasn't surprising that her father did not think that Francis Foyle ... was good enough for her. But she was a fine-looking spirited young woman and married him, nevertheless.
They had seven children, two boys and five girls, and lived in what the family referred to as The Mill House. But I suspect the fact that it was little more than a hovel was the reason why the owners of the Mill allowed my grandmother to go on living there after her husband's death.
In 1911 Arthur Street quarrelled bitterly with his father Henry, and to assert his independence sailed to Canada, where he worked as a farm hand – a period to which he later referred in his first, best-selling, book Farmer's Glory, as 'A Canadian Interlude'. The explanation he gave for the row was as follows:
I can see now that it was inevitable that we should come to serious argument as time went on. I was most certainly an insufferable young pup in many ways, as, I think, are most of us at eighteen or thereabouts. Anyway, some two years after I left school we came to the parting of the ways. My idea was that I had become a sort of errand boy between my father and the foreman, and that this was hardly good enough for a man of my qualifications. My father's idea seemed to be that he was blessed with a half-wit for a son ... I said that I was tired of being an errand boy, and wanted a job of my own with some responsibility ... My father said ... that if I knew of a better job, why not take it? Youth's pride being mortally injured, I said that I damn well would, and was rebuked for swearing in addition to my other crimes.
This was not the whole truth of the matter. Evidence came to light many decades later that one of his other 'crimes' was to have got a maid working in the Street household in the family way. Legal and financial arrangements were made between Henry Street and the girl's father for her confinement and the maintenance till the age of 14 of the resulting child, on condition that the maid's family should have no further contact with the Streets. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the young Arthur Street needed to be removed from the scene with all possible haste.
In early 1914, having proved that he could indeed stand on his own feet, Arthur returned home. Despite the hard work, he had enjoyed his time in Canada to the extent that he hoped his father might lend him sufficient funds to purchase some land of his own in the 'new' country. Henry Street refused, and Arthur returned to Canada empty-handed. However one beneficial outcome of Arthur's visit home was his meeting with Vera Foyle and their subsequent courtship. Pamela wrote thus about the Foyle family's reaction: 'When my father started taking an interest in the youngest daughter, Vera, the family was both surprised and flattered; for the Streets had become members of a higher social stratum, however much they might once have been in a lower one ...'
After Arthur's return to Canada the pair continued to correspond. At the beginning of the First World War Arthur tried to enlist in the Canadian army, but was rejected because of his crippled feet. Consequently he made arrangements to sail home and attempt to enlist in the British army. On 18 October 1914 he wrote to Vera:
I can't get into the Canadian contingent owing to my feet and I suppose it'll be the same when I get to England. I'm almost afraid to come home. All the other fellows around Wilton will have gone ... Up till this I've always been able to hold my own with other fellows in spite of my feet at all outdoor sports and this is getting on my mind ... I suppose I ought to be jolly thankful I can do what I can considering they never expected I should be able to walk when I was a baby.
Arthur sailed home a couple of months later. Shortly before his departure he wrote to Vera about the perils of crossing the Atlantic in wartime: 'I'm not worrying a bit about sailing. You see when one is born to be hanged you can't be drowned and the Prodigal Son is sure to turn up alright like a bad penny. I'm sailing on Dec 2 on the Lusitania from N. York ... I'm a bit excited with coming home.'
On returning home, Arthur's worst fears were realised; once again he was rejected for active service on account of his deformed feet. However, with so many members of Ditchampton Farm's workforce called up and his father in failing health, there was more than enough to keep Arthur busy on the land. Yet he was still in no position to support a wife, and a lengthy engagement ensued until the death of his father in 1917 changed his circumstances; Arthur finally took over the tenancy of Ditchampton Farm and married the long-suffering Vera Foyle.
The young couple prospered; in the first years that followed the Great War, farming experienced something of a boom time. The Corn Production Act of 1917 guaranteed farmers a minimum price for their grain, and returning servicemen and townsfolk flocked to buy or rent farming land. This is how Arthur Street described the period in Farmer's Glory:
As all the world knows, the war ended in November, and it was as if a heavy weight had been lifted from the whole country. The reaction to this was that the whole population went pleasure mad. All classes indulged in a feverish orgy of all those sports and pastimes which had been impossible for four long weary years.
And I was as bad, or as daft, or, possibly more truthfully, as criminally extravagant as any one. I kept two hunters, one for myself and one for my wife; and glorious days we had together with the local pack. I went shooting at least two days a week during the winter. We went to tennis parties nearly every fine afternoon in the summer, and in our turn, entertained up to as many as twenty guests on our own tennis-court, and usually to supper afterwards.
He then went on to describe the difference the advent of the motor car made in enabling farmers to seek pleasures further afield, such as taking seaside holidays, and how he took up golf in 1919:
and in 1921 I was the proud possessor of a handicap of eight, which statement tells only too plainly the amount of time I must have spent at the game ...
My world went very well then. I was newly married, and my wife was an ideal playmate. The war was over, for ever and ever, and farming had returned to its old splendour. Farmer's Glory was then a glory of great brilliance. How were farmers to know that it was but the last dazzling flicker before the fusing?
Pamela Street's birth in 1921 coincided with the repeal of the Corn Production Act. Ironically, cheap wheat from those self-same Canadian prairies that Arthur Street had been breaking a decade earlier was now beginning to flood the market. By the early 1930s farming's steady decline had turned into a full-blown depression. As a consequence, in the Street household the hunters had to go; shooting, tennis and other parties were things of the past, and Arthur Street was working hard to stave off bankruptcy. His solution was to terminate the tenancy of one of his two farms and to put all his arable fields to pasture, concentrating entirely on dairy farming. Not only did he become a milk producer, but also a retailer. Pamela writes of this period of her childhood:
The first time I was made dimly aware of the situation was the Christmas of 1928. I was seven years old then and my father gave me a very cheap edition of Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales. Wretch that I was, I remember being disappointed with it because it contained no really good coloured pictures and the print was so small. He had always been generous with presents and I think this one puzzled me, even at an early age.
Then later on, we did not own a car like the parents of the other children I knew in the little town of Wilton ... instead, we had a large van with A.G. STREET, OPEN-AIR MILK written on its sides. In order to save us from complete bankruptcy, my father had changed his whole system of farming, and now, besides getting up at four thirty a.m. seven days a week to milk seventy cows in an open-air milking outfit, with only the help of one pupil, he also started a milk round in Salisbury, putting on a white coat and doing the delivering himself straight after the morning's milking.
How my father was able to manage all this I simply do not know, except that he always had the most enormous capacity for hard work. He worked all day and every day non-stop, and on Saturdays he would sit at his desk and work far into the night, totting up figures in the milk-books; he would then stump up to bed for a few hours' sleep, before the Sunday morning round-up of the cows started the week rolling all over again
Financial hardship was not the only serious problem confronting the Street household during this period. When Pamela was 6, Vera Street fell ill with what was eventually diagnosed as a duodenal ulcer, and following two operations she very nearly died. There followed a long period of convalescence, but Pamela felt that her mother never fully recovered. Into the breach at this point stepped Pamela's cousin Vivi. Violet Boon was the daughter of one of Vera's impoverished sisters, and had joined the Street household shortly after Pamela's birth to help out with the new baby. Having already taken on considerably more domestic responsibilities, she now became indispensable, assuming the role of cook, housekeeper and nurse. During the critical phase of her mother's illness Pamela was sent to stay with her grandmother and aunts; being unaware of the severity of her mother's condition, she greatly enjoyed this period.
Arthur Street struggled on stoically despite all these vicissitudes until one day in November 1929 something occurred which was to change the course of his life, and his family's fortunes, forever. Whilst recovering indoors from a bad bout of flu, an already frustrated Arthur read an article about farming in the Daily Mail, the inaccuracies of which caused his temper to reach boiling point. Vera Street, almost equally exasperated by a husband who had been behaving like a caged lion, threw down the gauntlet, suggesting that if the article were that bad, why didn't Arthur try to write something better? Pamela later described how he rose to the challenge:
She could hardly have made a more sensible suggestion. Using the stub of a pencil and one of my old exercise books, he scribbled out a thousand word counterblast.
He then gave it to my mother to read who told him that if he took out all the 'damns' and 'blasts' and 'bloodies' she thought it wasn't too bad. Quietly, he acted on her advice ...
I suppose my father must have got it typed somewhere, because in those days a typewriter was an unheard-of thing in our house. It was then posted off to the Daily Mail. By return came an acceptance and the offer of three guineas. I think he thought that to earn that amount of money in so short a time, without any outlay of capital or physical energy, was not only a miracle but somehow immoral.
The article in question was entitled 'Handicaps on Agriculture' and began in Arthur Street's typically forthright style:
Most of those who are writing about the present depression are suggesting that somebody or other should do something for agriculture, never that agriculture should do something for itself. A generation of farmers must arise who can get a living as farmers in spite of any Government, rather than with the aid of any Government's intervention ...
Pamela went on to explain what happened next:
So, having tasted blood, having, as it were, tapped another source of income, he 'played his luck'. He was no gambler but he certainly believed in luck. He went on. He bombarded Fleet Street with articles, as well as local papers. He received many a rejection slip but, gradually, his pieces on farming and the countryside saw print, until the editor of the Salisbury Times asked him to write a weekly column, for which he paid my father seven shillings and sixpence, rising to seventeen and six as time went by.
Arthur's literary luck was to continue. One day a piece of his in the Salisbury Times on ploughing caught the eye of a well-known local novelist, Edith Olivier, whom Arthur would later refer to as his 'literary fairy godmother'. The daughter of the former Canon Olivier of Wilton, Edith was evidently something of a force to be reckoned with. Amongst the local residents she had acquired a somewhat 'fast' reputation. Between the wars she became a familiar figure in London literary and artistic circles, befriending such 'bright young things' as Rex Whistler, Stephen Tennant and Cecil Beaton. When not in London she constantly entertained such friends at her home, the Daye House, in the grounds of Wilton Park. Arthur Street described her as 'a rather volatile lady who seemed to dance as she walked'. One day Edith 'danced' unexpectedly into the Street household, waving a cutting of Arthur's article in her hand: 'This is charming, Arthur. You must write a book. I insist.' Completely taken aback, Arthur asked with what subject any book of his might deal. He described the way she answered thus: 'Edith waved her cigarette airily – even when she is sitting down her hands talk expressivley in the language of Editian swoops ... "With the one thing you know something about, of course, farming".'
The seed was sown: Arthur began writing Farmer's Glory that very same evening. When, some weeks later, Edith telephoned for a progress report, Arthur had already written the first three or four chapters. Edith asked if she could borrow them for the weekend as she would be having a publisher friend to stay, to whom she wanted to show Arthur's work. Somewhat reluctantly – Arthur being ashamed of the messy state of his typescript – he took round what he had written so far and beat a hasty retreat. The result was that later that weekend Richard de la Mare of Faber & Faber called on Arthur to say how much he had enjoyed the early chapters, and made an offer to publish Farmer's Glory once it was completed. Though flattered and tempted, Arthur refused to sign a contract then and there, on the basis that he was not prepared to sell something he did not yet have, and would prefer to wait until he could hand in the finished product. But the offer was all the encouragement he needed to carry the project to fruition, and Farmer's Glory was duly published by Faber & Faber in January 1932. Soon afterwards a complimentary review appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, quickly to be followed by any number of favourable reviews in both the local and national press; A.G. Street had become something of a celebrity. He would not allow success to go to his head, however, and carried on with his daily milking and milk rounds, frequently being brought down to earth by the good-natured ribbing of his local farming friends.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Farming, Fighting and Family by Miranda McCormick. Copyright © 2015 Miranda McCormick. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title,Praise,
Dedication,
Author's Note,
Acknowledgements,
Foreword by Max Hastings,
Introduction: When the Music Stopped,
1 Before the War: The Streets,
2 Wilton at War (1939),
3 The 'Phoney War' and Descriptions of 'Dunkirk' (January–June 1940),
4 A Defiant Nation: Nursing, Officer Training and Romance (July–December 1940),
5 A Protracted Parting (January–May 1941),
6 Heartache, Hospital and High Seas (May–August 1941),
7 Desert Life and a Difficult Decision (August–November 1941),
8 'Operation Crusader' (November–December 1941),
9 Capture (December 1941),
10 Unaccustomed Activity and ATS Training (Late 1941–February 1942),
11 Missing in Action (February–April 1942),
12 A Lighter Load, a Hampered Harvest and a Moment of Rejoicing (April–December 1942),
13 American Impact, 'Operation Husky' and an Unwelcome Move (January–October 1943),
14 ATS Promotion and Worrying Events (October–December 1943),
15 The Build-up to D-Day and a Crisis of Conscience (January–June 1944),
16 D-Day, Dramatics and Winter Worries (July–December 1944),
17 The End of the War and an Awkward Reunion (1945),
18 Post-War Life: America, London and 'Operation Farming' (1946–49),
Epilogue: 'Lest We Forget',
Bibliography,
Plates,
Copyright,