Another detested species was the wood pigeon, described as the ‘food growers’ enemy No. 1’, which was notorious for plundering newly planted crops of peas, beans and corn. One experiment seemed to justify the farmers’ hostility. A sweepstake was held on the number of grains of barley a single bird had swallowed: the highest guess was 722, and investigation of its crop showed that the answer was 711. In November, when flocks had begun their seasonal migration from north to south, Country Life was again in an aggressive mood: ‘It is more than ever necessary this winter that an attack should be made on the flocks of migrant wood pigeons which have already begun to come in.’ The best method, the article recommended, was for the National Farmers’ Union to organize country-wide shoots in the afternoons, when the birds were flighting into the woods to roost. Even the starling (‘a most unpleasant bird’) attracted the magazine’s wrath: by January 1940 flocks were said to be making an unprecedented assault on holly berries, and were almost as great a threat to agriculture as other ‘feathered pests’.
As always, from time to time curious incidents were reported in farming journals. On one grass airfield a swarm of bees settled on a wheel chock underneath a fighter. The mechanics working on the plane panicked and started the engine, trying to scare them off; but when they found that the bees remained unmoved by the noise, they calmed down, switched off and continued their maintenance. In the middle of March a calf was ‘born underground’ in Cornwall. A terminally pregnant cow had been standing in the farmyard when the ground beneath her gave way, and she fell fifty feet into an old mine working. Next day she was found partially buried, with a newborn calf by her side, and neither of them any the worse.
Life on a wartime farm was brilliantly evoked by Xandra Bingley in her memoir Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, a headlong narrative of the author’s early days, almost all in the present tense, set in a decrepit smallholding high on the Cotswolds above Cheltenham. Bertie is her father – explosive, loving, mostly away in the army; May is her mother – wonderfully capable and compassionate, as ready to release gas from a bloated cow by driving a needle into its stomach as she is to shoot pigeons or comfort Xandra when she breaks an arm; Mrs Fish, with her orange ringlets and an ungovernable thirst for gin, is a neighbour who comes in to help. Crisis follows crisis. Horses escape; the farmhand cuts off two fingers with the circular saw; the police arrive hunting a murderer. One extract must suffice to give an idea of May’s character:
She has an accident when her car hits a black bull on a narrow road near Guiting Power … She drives into the bull head-on and breaks his front legs. She gets out of the car and kneels by him, and her hands feel his broken bones as he tries to stand up and falls.
She sits on the tarmac and rests his heavy head in her lap and she strokes and strokes his face and says … I’m sorry … I’m so sorry … In the dark I didn’t see you … Why were you in the road? Where were you coming from at nearly midnight? Try to lie still my darling. Before long someone will find us. Sooner or later the pain will go. She sings … There is a green hill far away … without a city wall … Where our dear Lord was crucified … he died to save us all.
Just before sunrise a lorry stops and the driver stands over her and says … Those Yanks do him … all over the shop they are, going like the clappers.
My mother says … No … I did. I saw him too late … Will you go to a telephone box and dial the Hunt Kennels … Andoversford 248 … they’ll be up and about … tell them where I am and tell them to send a winch lorry and a kennelman with a gun.
The milkman says … You’ll be half dead of cold … and my mother says … He keeps me warm … be as quick as you can.
The kennel lorry arrives and the kennelman in black rubber boots and a brown overall says … You can slip out from under him … then I’ll get to work.
My mother says … I’ll stay put where I am … he’s been through a lot tonight … he’s very brave.
The hunt kennelman says … He’s carrying a mountain of flesh … and kneels and puts the gun to the bull’s black curly-haired forehead.
My mother says … May his spirit for ever rest in peace … for the sake of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.
The gun fires and the kennelman says … I’ll lift his head … Out you come … You going far?
She says … Only another seven miles … I thought at first he must be Zeus … He was a god and a black bull.
The kennelman says … Master will be pleased … hounds can live off his flesh for a week.
For May, and for all the other country housewives working day in, day out to sustain their households with primitive equipment, there was little entertainment to be had. But one great morale-booster was the radio. In the mornings and afternoons the half-hour programmes of continuous Music While You Work had the same soothing effect on rural housewives as on women toiling in factories, where productivity increased sharply for a while after each broadcast. Another infallible solace was the voice of Vera Lynn, the nation’s best-loved singer, who received a thousand letters a week begging her to sing ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘You’ll Never Know’ and other favourites. (When rationing began to bite, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was sometimes parodied as ‘Whale meat again’.)
Children’s Hour, broadcast from 5 to 6 p.m., was also immensely popular. Under the direction of Derek McCullough – ‘Uncle Mac’ – the programme achieved an audience of four million in 1939, and young listeners eagerly awaited his invariable valediction, ‘Goodnight children, everywhere’. In the evenings people out in the sticks crowded round their Bakelite sets to hear BBC news bulletins. The readers always identified themselves, to prove that Lord Haw-Haw or some other obnoxious interloper had not taken over the microphone: ‘Here is the news, and this is Bruce Belfrage reading it.’
A farmer’s wife living at Thornton-le-Moor in Lincolnshire, eight miles from one town and nine from another, gave a dispassionate account of how she adapted to wartime exigencies and was, as she put it, ‘plodding away very happily’. She sent postcards to order her groceries, which were delivered once a fortnight by van, along with her allowance of paraffin. A baker left bread at a neighbour’s house. Newspapers arrived by post, at least one day old. Movies were ‘out of the question’, but she got books from the local library, and belonged to a club with twelve members, each of whom bought one book a year and passed it on after a month, so that at the end of a year all volumes came back to their original owners.
Village halls became hives of activity, used for numerous purposes. At Trumpington, near Cambridge, the hall was let to the local Education Committee as a canteen for school dinners. Evacuee children from St James’s School in Muswell Hill, north London, had a classroom there and held a Christmas party in the building. The British Legion and Women’s Institute opened a canteen for soldiers from nearby camps. Outside the hall was a National Savings indicator, with a moveable seagull showing how much the village had raised. In 1941 the ARP unit set up a feeding centre in the hall, in case of enemy attack, and the Brigade Headquarters at Anstey Hall, near Trumpington, used the building for dances, causing (as a local report put it) ‘inevitable problems’. Dances were held on Saturday nights (tickets 1s), and on 18 November 1944 (the day street lights were turned on again) a reception was held after the wedding of Percy and Mabel Seeby – she having come to the village as an evacuee.
The passion for dancing spread all over the country. Frank Mee, who grew up during the war in Norton-on-Tees in Co. Durham, and ‘lived for dancing’, was told by his father that, given some music, he’d ‘dance on the roof of the pigsty’. He remembered how ‘every town and village had a hall where dancing could take place’, and reckoned that later generations had ‘no idea what part the dance halls played in keeping up morale’. The bigger halls had orchestras, the smaller ones three-piece bands, a gramophone, or sometimes only a piano.
In the small