Farmer's Girl
$2.50
By STEPHEN DAYE PRESS
IN late October of ‘39, Miss Harland, a London office worker done out of her job by the war, answered this advertisement: —
WANTED. Intelligent woman, age thirtyish, aide to drive car, to help run farm. Experience unnecessary. Particulars from . . . Ashacre Hall, Norfolk.
A few days later she was established on a tractor-worked diversified farm of a thousand acres, running its errands, learning its routine, keeping the records of its fifty-cow dairy herd and other livestock, serving as bookkeeper of the large-scale market gardening that was its chief source of income, and being taught to oversee from thirty to fifty regular laborers plus hordes of seasonal ones. The result is a detailed and very pleasantly written two-year chronicle of an English farm in the special conditions of war. It has a limited interest to the American who enjoys reading about country living in England, an almost unlimited interest to those of us who, having a practical acquaintance with American farming, inevitably compare and contrast the English methods at every point. Hardly any non-technical book in existence can be a more crushing answer to those who imagine (as Miss Harland herself frankly did up to three Octobers ago) that farming means “little more than putting corn into the ground and waiting for it to come up.” W. F.