Making Hay

'Memoirs of a Land Girl'

We spoke to Maud Shire, a resident at Hill House, about her two-and-a-half years spent in the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War. Maud originally tried to sign up when she was 16, but had to wait a year before she was old enough. She was accepted after passing an interview and the medical with flying colours.

“My mother wasn’t too happy,” she recalls. “She had suffered with her health and had relied on me to essentially bring up my younger siblings, so she would have preferred me to stay.

“I was extremely excited when I learnt I was going to become a Land Girl, but also quite nervous. First my uniform arrived: a green jumper, gaiters, stockings, a hat, brown brogues, dungarees, a polo shirt and a pair of wellies.”

Maud then travelled from her home in Blackburn, Lancashire, to Whimple in Devon, where she underwent two weeks of intensive farm training alongside other Land Girls.

“I remember we stayed at a huge Georgian house. I thought it looked very grand indeed. It was a nice place to live and included a games room with a table tennis table and a dart board, and I was sharing a bedroom with five other girls in bunk beds. My roommates and I decided immediately to pool all our makeup – one of them came from a very wealthy family so we were only too happy to have access to her far more expensive cosmetics!”

After completing her training, Maud was sent to a dairy farm in Upottery, and she soon found that the accommodation left a lot to be desired.

She remembers, “I heard a scuttering behind me on my first night. I lit my candle and saw mice crawling all over my pillow. My room was above the dairy and there were holes everywhere for them to get in. I remember spending the night trying to kill them with one of my wellies.”

The farm had 30 cows, all of which needed to be milked by hand. Maud seemed to get along with all the cows, but one in particular was her favourite, which everyone on the farm came to call ‘Maud’s cow’.

“Every day she would hang back at the gate next to me whilst the others filed through into the milking parlour,” she recounts. “I was very upset when I found out that she was going to be sold. I begged Mr Edwards, the farmer, to keep her, but unfortunately it was a done deal.”

However, Maud was not so enamoured with all the animals. One bull, named William, was particularly terrifying. He was a huge Devon Red and Maud had the unenviable job of letting him out of his shed where he was tethered, so that he could drink from the trough in the courtyard.

“He would charge out of the shed,” she says, “heading straight for the gate at the far end of the field, and he would rip it off its hinges on a regular basis. While he was drinking, I would climb the ladder to the top level of the shed as I didn’t want to be anywhere near him. When he was done, he would come in snorting and scraping his feet as though he was about to charge. Even Mr Edwards was scared of him, and I was very happy when he decided to sell him too!”

Mr Edwards replaced William with a much younger 15-month-old bull, which he brought home with the local hauler after having been gone all day.

She recalls, “It was obvious to both me and Mrs Edwards that they had both had quite a lot to drink, so it was up to us to help them manoeuvre this new bull into its shed, with only candles and storm lamps to see where we were going. He kept leaping up into the air kicking out its back legs, and it was very funny to watch two grown men chase around the field after him!”

One of Maud’s favourite times of the year was hay making day. “Mrs Edwards would put on a great spread,” she recalls, “with lots of food and plenty of cider.

“I’m not a big drinker but I did overindulge myself a bit one evening and had a bit too much to drink. Mrs Edwards gave me the lamp off her bicycle, as opposed to my usual candle, so I could see where I was going when I went to bed, but I spent most of the night trying to blow it out and cursing under my breath when it wouldn’t extinguish!”

Maud eventually left her job as a Land Girl to get married, though she did return to the farm for a while when Mr Edwards was taken ill and needed someone with experience to help.

Many years afterwards, Maud wrote a book about her experiences, called A Country War: Memoirs of a Land Girl, published in 2007 under the name Micky Mitchell, which she was known as at the time.

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