Farming, Fighting and Family

by Miranda McCormick

  August 23rd The international situation has got a lot worse.

  August 24th Terrible situation – war peril imminent.

  August 28th The first cubbing meet. Fifield Bavant. Lovely and misty. Daddy and I got up and went in the car. Ian was whipping in as usual and Tim [the Wilton Huntsman] said if there was a war he’d hunt on a bicycle.

  August 29th The crisis continues … it seems very unreal somehow.

  September 1st The war seems to have started. Germany has invaded Poland … Daddy and I fetched the children [evacuees] from the bus from Portsmouth. It was just terrible. Why, why, why.

  September 2nd We have three little girls – all 7. Rosemary Weston, Marian Helyer, Joan King. They are awfully sweet and very good considering the terrible time they must have had. We haven’t actually declared war and this waiting is just terrible.

  September 3rd War, nothing else except that there’s war. It’s just too terrible to think about and everything suddenly seems nothing at all – just a frightful blank as though you might wake up any minute and find it wasn’t … Mrs Helyer [mother of one of the 7-year-old girls] and a baby have come.

  September 4th Sent off all the cancellations to my party … Went to a gas lecture by Mr. Ayres.

  September 5th troops are all over Wilton and the officers want to billet here … It just seems unbelievable that we are at war …

  Owing to its proximity to the military bases on Salisbury Plain, the little town of Wilton did indeed suddenly find itself catering for more than its fair share of military personnel. In the summer of 1940, Wilton House became the headquarters of Southern Command, while Wilton’s main hotel/public house, the Pembroke Arms, was requisitioned as an Officers’ Mess. Pamela later wrote about how the news of war was received at Ditchampton Farm, and what the immediate consequences were:

  On 3rd September, 1939, my mother, father, Vivi and I sat in the drawing-room at Ditchampton Farm and listened in silence as Mr. Chamberlain’s voice came over the air, telling us we were at war with Germany. In keeping with countless other families all over Britain, there was a sudden and dramatic change in our way of life.

  Charlie Noble, our foreman, being a reservist, disappeared virtually overnight; our farmhouse became filled with evacuees from Portsmouth; my father’s income looked liked immediately being reduced to half or even a quarter of its usual amount, as it seemed that most of his broadcasting work would cease. For this reason, by mutual agreement, his secretary [Vivi’s sister Peggy] left to take a job elsewhere, and I became a glorified untrained land-girl cum secretary in her place …

  Despite these consequences, Arthur’s writings during the period testify to his sense of relief and regained pride that Britain was finally fulfilling its international obligations and would no longer be appeasing the Nazis. His views were clearly shared by many other Wiltshire farming folk, as illustrated by the following remark made to him by an elderly farm labourer, whom Arthur met a few days later ‘toddling down the road with his gas mask slung on his shoulders’: ‘I niver thought to come to thease caper, maister,’ he said. ‘But ’tis better so. We cain’t goo on like we bin gwaine on the last year or two. Wold ’Itler’s comb maun be cut.’

  From Pamela’s point of view, the evacuees clearly presented the first problem. Her new bedroom, which she was now obliged to relinquish, had just been repainted in colours of her own choosing for the following reasons:

  As I had been passing through a rather melancholy stage owing to unrequited love, I had chosen mauve walls and grey paintwork, and the whole effect was slightly macabre, but it suited my frame of mind.

  But at the beginning of September 1939 I had to stop being the tragedy queen and give over my boudoir to three little girls from Portsmouth until another bedroom could be made ready for them. They were enchanting children, but they had never seen running water in a bedroom before. Quick as a flash, the leader of the gang filled up the basin and splashed gigantic wet murals all over one wall. The next thing we knew was that the mother of one of them arrived at the back door carrying a baby. We were already full up, but my mother and Vivi had not the heart to send her elsewhere, so she lived with us for quite a long time and was very useful helping to look after the other children.

  In the weeks that followed, the Street household was required to take in not only the aforementioned evacuees, but also two young officers on training duties on Salisbury Plain, and also an official from the Ministry of Mines, which had been temporarily evacuated to the Wilton Felt Mills. Arthur Street wrote, in early November, the following paragraph in his wartime memoir Hitler’s Whistle (a collection of articles published in Farmer’s Weekly and other country magazines during the period):

  The amount of war-time accommodation that the countryside is providing for war-enforced visitors is amazing. Today in addition to its native population the rural scene is filled with soldiers, airmen, evacuated women and children, and government servants galore. For instance, at the moment my own house has somehow found room for a mother and three little children, two billeted officers, and also a government official. The last mentioned now occupies my study, drat him, but his conversation in the evenings almost makes up for this.

  However inconvenient the evacuee programme may have been for country-dwellers, at times the legendary British sense of humour still prevailed, as Arthur Street goes on to illustrate:

  Just now evacuee stories are legion, but this is probably the shortest and best of them all. It conerns a maiden lady who lived in a small house in the country with one maid. One morning the bell rang. The maid admitted the visitor, and then rushed upstairs.

  ‘Please mum,’ she blurted out breathlessly, ‘you’ve got to have two babies, and the man’s downstairs!!!’

  Another immediate consequence of the outbreak of war was the reduction in Ditchampton Farm’s workforce. To compensate for this, Pamela learnt how to drive a tractor and help out generally on the farm, as her entry for 6 September reports: ‘Drove the tractor to help Pop with the oats. The Farmer’s Weekly wrote because they no longer want Daddy – it’s terrible. There’s nothing for him to do except farm and it means we’re more or less — [sic]. Nothing will ever be the same now.’ The next day’s entry was somewhat more optimistic. With the resilience of youth, Pamela wrote: ‘Better day altogether. After all there is something in just having to do things when everybody’s in the same boat … Helped again with the oats.’

  Arthur Street begins his entry for 20 September in Hitler’s Whistle as follows: ‘Now that I do a minimum of sixty hours weekly as a farm hand I find that writing takes a very back seat.’ He describes his workforce at one point during this period as consisting of ‘two old-age pensioners, myself, and my daughter driving the tractor’. They were now occupied with silage-making. Arthur goes on to comment on Pamela’s unladylike language whilst engaged in this hard and unpopular task: ‘My daughter, realizing her limitations, confines hers to uncomplimentary remarks about the tractor in moments of stress …’ Undoubtedly at this time, Pamela, as a novice tractor-driver, had much to learn, as an anecdote she later recounted illustrates:

  I remember once my father leaving me chain-harrowing in a field on top of the downs … for some reason I found it incredibly difficult to … keep a straight line. Nothing one does in the countryside can ever be secret; one’s work is exposed to full view for miles around; sooner or later a farmer on the opposite slope noticed the rather wavering stop-go, stop-go efforts on our side of the valley. It so happened that he had to go into Wilton, met my father and remarked that he must have engaged a new tractor-driver. My father had not left me long, but he was back in that field within minutes. I rather expected a ticking off, but he roared with laughter and proceeded to get up on the tractor and give me a few more hints on how to deal with the situation.

  Pamela also took charge of the weekly wages, a task she found equally daunting, as her entry for 8 September makes clear: ‘Peggy has got a job at the Post Office so handed over the wages to
me and it’s like a nightmare with all the wretched insurances etc.’

  On 9 September Pamela was back again behind the wheel of the tractor, musing about the war situation: ‘Drove the tractor most of the day – cultivating. It also cultivated me … It just seems ridiculous to think we’re at war – there seems no news and Poland’s gradually getting beaten up – it’s awful … hunting seems very far away now.’

  Two days later, Pamela indignantly recorded her views on people who still felt entitled to hunt now that war had been declared and the Street household had other priorities: ‘Phillips [the Master of the Wilton Hunt] wants to keep on the hunt. I think it’s dirty. Things don’t make any difference to some people.’

  Ditchampton Farm’s workforce was soon to be augmented by another, this time four-legged, helper. Once war had been declared, as the last diary entry testifies, all thoughts of hunting were banished from the Street household. Arthur Street sent his hunter, Jorrocks, away to be trained for the harness, a specialised procedure that by no means guaranteed success. Many horses, accustomed to being ridden in the conventional way, did not take kindly to this new form of treatment. Therefore when Arthur Street was telephoned with the news that Jorrocks had graduated with top marks and was ready to be collected, it was with his heart in his mouth that he and their groom-gardener were driven by Pamela the 8 miles to where Jorrocks was waiting, hitched up to their float. Despite the fact that he had not driven a horse in this fashion for over twenty years, Arthur was able to guide Jorrocks home, as he later described in Hitler’s Whistle:

  He then trotted home like a gentleman, and since that day he has hauled the milk, pulled the broadcast during wheat sowing, and done ploughing and all sorts of jobs with no mishap … What he thinks about it I don’t know. He has no notion of what it is that trundles and rattles over behind him, and the position of his ears shows that he is somewhat worried about it. But as we have never let him down before, he reckons that we are not doing it now, and so does his war work like the gentleman he is.

  This reference to ploughing deserves particular mention. For reasons already described, during the agricultural depression Arthur Street put his arable fields to pasture and concentrated on livestock (in his case dairy-farming), urging fellow farmers to do the same. As war approached, this decision was credited with admirable foresight, since the result was a wealth of fertile pasture that could now be ploughed up again for arable use. War Agricultural Committees the length and breadth of the country were soon set up to supervise farms in their respective districts, and given powers to force farmers to plough up their pasture land, since the fourth line of defence for Britain was to become self-sufficient in home produce, in particular cereals that it had now become too dangerous to import from across the Atlantic. At one point in Hitler’s Whistle Arthur Street commented that all over the countryside men on tractors or guiding horses could be seen hard at work ploughing up grassland. Pamela, wistfully remembering the previous hunting season and Jorrocks’ role in particular, wrote the following poem about this phenomenon, which was published in The Field a year later:

  Gone Away

  It’s a lifetime since that season and the cold sharp winter day,

  When they ran from Poor Man’s Gorse, through Holt and on …

  And Jorrocks took those hurdles in the old sedately way,

  And the field came jostling, thrusting, and were gone.

  Gone away some time ago in hats of tin, not silk,

  Leaving only Jorrocks, now in harness, hauling milk.

  Poor’s Gorse lies still this morning, and there comes no Tally Ho,

  From the mist that hangs in patches on the down,

  But something in Ten Acre moves already to and fro,

  And the green field’s melting slowly into brown.

  The sun breaks through the grey sky and the strips of dark earth meet,

  Jorrocks plods on steadily – ploughing up for wheat.

  The day wears on to evening and some heavy drops of rain

  Fall fast upon the newly turned-up ground,

  Men and horses finish and start slowly down the lane,

  By Holt and Barner’s thicket, homeward bound.

  Jorrocks in his blinkers scarcely sees them on ahead –

  In front of him the carter’s coat has changed to pink instead.

  So when a fox next breaks behind the gorse – the usual way,

  And hounds and huntsmen crash through Holt and on –

  Jorrocks will be there, perhaps a little blown that day,

  But he’ll follow gamely after and be gone …

  Gone away! They’ll cry behind the clustered streaming pack,

  But the echo of that ‘Gone away’ will mean they have come back.

  The hunting expression, ‘Gone away’, held a particular poignancy for Pamela during this period of the war. Behind this poem lies the deep sense of loneliness she was by now experiencing, since the crowd of young people with whom she had up till then been mixing had recently dispersed – the young men to go into the armed forces and the young women either into the women’s services or other types of war work. Highlights of this period were unexpected meetings with old friends back on leave visiting their families; as one of her diary entries put it, ‘You seem to snatch at every friendly face.’ On one occasion the oppposite was true. Ian Benson, the whipper-in of the Wilton Hunt, on whom Pamela had developed a lasting teenage crush, was one of the first young men in the district to be called up. Pamela’s last glimpse of him was in a car passing in the opposite direction, about which she noted plaintively in her diary: ‘It was wretched just making do with a wave …’ Worse was to come in early October, however, when she was invited to the Benson household to find Ian on a period of leave, accompanied by an unoffical fiancée. In her diary she wrote: ‘Without exception I think today has been the worst I’ve ever had to go through …’

  Despite her early heartbreak and loneliness, Pamela continued dutifully with her new wartime occupations. Her diary includes entries such as: ‘tractor all morning’; ‘tractored all afternoon’; ‘ploughed a bit’; ‘typing & hectic work’; then on 28 October she announced with some pride:

  Started the tractor & moved on the bail quite happily without Pop! Cecil Beaton wanted to take my photograph on the tractor but at the last minute couldn’t find his camera (Ha!). So I went straight to bed simply streaming cold & stayed there.

  This diary extract requires further explanation. The tractors used on Ditchampton Farm at the time were Fordson Ns. These were the most common workhorses in Britain during the Second World War. The Fordson N was by no means an easy machine to operate, needing to be started by manually cranking the engine with a starting handle. Its transmission system made it somewhat temperamental, and compared to certain rival models it lacked horsepower. Therefore it is to Pamela’s credit that she managed to get the tractor going without help.

  The ‘bail’ was Arthur Street’s outdoor mobile milking unit, which he first began using when he put his arable land to pasture in the late 1920s. It was the brainchild of A.J. Hosier, a farmer in the north Wiltshire village of Wexcombe. Pamela later recalled the exciting day when, as a small child, her father took her to inspect this invention by the man they subsequently dubbed ‘the Wizard of Wexcombe’.

  The society photographer Cecil Beaton (whom the Street family would have known through their friendship with Edith Olivier and her set) had been commissioned at the beginning of the war, for propaganda reasons, to take photographs of attractive young men and women either in uniform or engaged in unaccustomed war work. A photograph of Pamela, on her tractor, would have fitted the bill perfectly.

  Pamela’s diary for the remainder of 1939 continues to be punctuated by references to events abroad, and records how, during those first few months of the war (later described as the ‘phoney war’ before its effects were fully felt on the mainland), life seemed to fall into a pattern:

  September 28th Warsaw has fallen now so that’s that
& presumably we’ll soon get it.

  October 16th They’ve caught a spy at Salisbury taking flics of the Chilmark [ammunition] dump …

  October 30th It’s odd that now we seem to have settled down to the war and the awfulness at the beginning wears off.

  November 4th This war is queer. It’s sort of stale-mate and nothing doing …

  November 9th the war continues in a vague and mysterious manner …

  November 30th Russia has attacked Finland – oh it’s all awful …

  December 13th The war just goes on & on & Russia is fighting Finland & the world is going up in smoke …

  Pamela’s entry for 9 October shows that after a month of catering for the evacuees and the new billetee, life at Ditchampton Farm had evidently become strained: ‘For no reason at all am awfully tired. Everyone is, & Mummy has got so fed up with the refugees and Mr Horton.’ Happily for the Streets, however, the situation was soon to improve, for on 14 October Pamela’s diary states, ‘Mrs. Helyer, Marion & Rachel left’. There had been no bombing of Portsmouth or London at this stage and it was now considered safe for the evacuees to return home.