Women's Land Army
Back up vocals of the Flist, yours truly has struck solid chocolate, or gold, or iTunes forever refilling gift card, and streaming mega video with no buffering delays. Srsly.
In 1942 Susan and Lucy and their two brothers are evacuated from London because bombs are raining down on them. This is the real deal Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq thing. London is rubble and burning and I can’t even imagine. Their father is in North Africa (probably around Libya maybe? Ironic much?) and their mother is working - wiki says that 80-90% of women were working outside the home by the end of the War. So, the kids are sent to the country to be safe and stay in the house of Digory Kirke. Now, at first I got a really skeevy vibe off it, yk? A bunch of kids going to the creepy old house of creepy old guy?
And then, something strange begins happening. What, Jessica asks? DANGER DANGER!! Gran Su gets vague and writes about Lucy acting peculiar and telling lies and then Edmund, their younger brother (who sounds like an absolute shite at first) gets involved. I got really worried that it was something creeptastic with Digory. BUT, phew, Gran Su writes:
As the Professor presented it to Peter and me, Lucy is mad, or lying, or telling the truth.
Lucy is not mad.
Lucy never lies.
Therefore, Lucy must be telling the truth!
So nothing skeevy. He's helping them and telling Gran Su and Peter so what if Lucy is strange? She's not crazy, she's not lying, so it has to be true, right? Don't you love that logic? It's their problem that they can't t understand and believe her, and not that something is wrong with Lucy.
But what is going on? Following the same logic, I figured that if Digory was behind whatever it is that Lucy might be (but isn't) lying about, they wouldn’t go to him, would they? Still, Gran Su doesn’t say what it is and it must be pretty strange because the alternatives are that Lucy is crazy or lying.
And then Something happens. Something BIG.
I thought, again, maybe something really creeptastic with Digory, but that made me sad and from the journal, that’s not it at all. Gran Su writes:
Since our return, the Professor has been wonderful. He understands as we never believed possible. Still, we all long for what once was, and feel a terrible cruelty as if we are being punished. The Professor assures us this is not true and I so wish to believe him. He has invited a friend to come and see us and she, too, understands as he does.
So they went somewhere and came back and that made them sad? IDK
The friend who comes to visit is Miss Polly Plummer. Actually, she’s totally a Ms. so I’m just going to write her as Ms. Polly Plummer. She’s the one who was the suffragist? I can see really easily where Gran Su got that awesome streak of being a pain in the ass to anyone determined to hand out badness and woe.
This was in one of the files with Polly's name.
It’s a recruiting poster for the Women’s Land Army. Now, think about it. During WW2, most of the men over age 18 were in the military in way or another. England is an island and they’ve got Nazis to the European coast and anything else imported is coming across the Atlantic and getting sunk. No Fiji apples from New Zealand or red grapes from Chile or bananas from Costa Rica or American wheat or corn. No chocolate!!! The English have to grow their own food or starve and all the men and farm workers are fighting in Africa and Asia. They recruit women - 100,000 “Land Girls” -- to work on farms and those women feed all of England.
The Land Girls get paid less than male farmhands, of course. Polly was in charge of 40 or so Land Girls at a hostel and worked herself. She organized the women into work parties and drove them around in a “lorry” [that’s Brit-speak for a truck] to local farms where they would plow fields, pick potatoes and beets, bring in the hay, milk cows, castrate pigs, shoe horses, and kill rats. (Yes, kill rats. The Land Girl would ride around on a bicycle with a can of arsenic!)
So, whatever it is that had Gran Su and Lucy so down, Polly picks them up in her car and they go off to hang with her and the Land Girls. I found a picture of this, and I wonder if that’s what she picked them up in?
Cute, huh? It makes me jealous, you know? It’s 1942 and according to Wiki, women in the UK only got the vote in 1928. Ms. Plummer is motoring around the countryside in a car of her own and I can’t do that yet!
Gran Su wrote:
Lucy and I were as exhausted as any day in N. Our fatigue was most welcome, the result of doing good work, with wonderful women, in service to our country, to feed our people, that we might prevail against tyranny. It was then not so very different from what we did every day in N. We lived in a place where even Kings and Queens counted potatoes to keep a nation fed, we were dirty and bloody to the elbows, and Lucy’s feet were never clean.
Polly was so very right, and I am so grateful to her. This is work which we oversaw and at which we toiled in N., and it is no less important here. The two are so related, for the hardship of the War here trained us for the work to be done there and the work to be done there honed the skills we need here. Needs and the work to meet them exist everywhere and we are called to perform it.
We stayed with Polly and joined the Land Girls as they brought the hay in. I had forgotten how scratchy and dusty forage is for horses and cows! The girls were wonderful and we ate sandwiches with them and drank cold tea from canteens and the cheese and jam tasted as hearty as anything we had ever had in N. It was not as fine, to be sure, but the company was gay and we sang in the truck on the way home from the fields.
Sounds like the bus trip to a tournament, doesn’t it?
Oh, and that bit about how they are as exhausted as any day in "N." I don’t know what N is. It pops a lot during this time in Gran Su's notes and diary and it sounds as if they were sad about it and Ms. Polly Plummer and the Professor are trying to be positive and helpful. I suppose it might get irritating -- I know I get pissed when mom always says, when life gives you lemons, bake a pie. But, that's what I'm trying to do, since I am stuck here, and that's the sort of person it sounds like the Professor and Ms. Polly Plummer were.
Also, Gran Su wrote that a lot of people in the towns didn’t trust the Land Girls. They were living on their own, they had gorgeous tans (no SPF 50 sunblock!), they were earning money, and in the winter they wore too many clothes and in the summer, too little. I love that last bit. The girls had these heavy brown pants and green sweaters (they call them britches and jumpers) and in the summer, the Land Girls turned them into shorts and halter tops. Hilarious. Scandalous. I love them all.
Though, it makes me sad, too. Why do women get so down on other women for being strong and working hard and running their own lives? Why isn't that a good thing? Why can't we support one another? Maybe the older women didn't like these fit, hard working women running around in halter tops with tans, but all the men are at war, so why does even that matter? And even that shouldn't matter, right? If Naomi were reading, she'd comment about the feminist thing here, but I think I'll go for a run instead and imagine that I'm waving at Land Girls out in the fields.
Gran Su concludes:
It is impossible to be bitter when I see the example of Polly and the Professor. Returning from N. was not the end, but rather is the beginning of a great calling.
So, Gran Su ended up adopting the life, lemons, and pies philosophy, too.
Here are some pics I found in the file of the Land Girls who were in Polly’s hostel.
look at that racy top!!
These Land Girls are holding DEAD RATS!!
Peace and love my back up vocals of the Flist. These ladies are cool.
Next entry, Running
In 1942 Susan and Lucy and their two brothers are evacuated from London because bombs are raining down on them. This is the real deal Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq thing. London is rubble and burning and I can’t even imagine. Their father is in North Africa (probably around Libya maybe? Ironic much?) and their mother is working - wiki says that 80-90% of women were working outside the home by the end of the War. So, the kids are sent to the country to be safe and stay in the house of Digory Kirke. Now, at first I got a really skeevy vibe off it, yk? A bunch of kids going to the creepy old house of creepy old guy?
And then, something strange begins happening. What, Jessica asks? DANGER DANGER!! Gran Su gets vague and writes about Lucy acting peculiar and telling lies and then Edmund, their younger brother (who sounds like an absolute shite at first) gets involved. I got really worried that it was something creeptastic with Digory. BUT, phew, Gran Su writes:
As the Professor presented it to Peter and me, Lucy is mad, or lying, or telling the truth.
Lucy is not mad.
Lucy never lies.
Therefore, Lucy must be telling the truth!
So nothing skeevy. He's helping them and telling Gran Su and Peter so what if Lucy is strange? She's not crazy, she's not lying, so it has to be true, right? Don't you love that logic? It's their problem that they can't t understand and believe her, and not that something is wrong with Lucy.
But what is going on? Following the same logic, I figured that if Digory was behind whatever it is that Lucy might be (but isn't) lying about, they wouldn’t go to him, would they? Still, Gran Su doesn’t say what it is and it must be pretty strange because the alternatives are that Lucy is crazy or lying.
And then Something happens. Something BIG.
I thought, again, maybe something really creeptastic with Digory, but that made me sad and from the journal, that’s not it at all. Gran Su writes:
Since our return, the Professor has been wonderful. He understands as we never believed possible. Still, we all long for what once was, and feel a terrible cruelty as if we are being punished. The Professor assures us this is not true and I so wish to believe him. He has invited a friend to come and see us and she, too, understands as he does.
So they went somewhere and came back and that made them sad? IDK
The friend who comes to visit is Miss Polly Plummer. Actually, she’s totally a Ms. so I’m just going to write her as Ms. Polly Plummer. She’s the one who was the suffragist? I can see really easily where Gran Su got that awesome streak of being a pain in the ass to anyone determined to hand out badness and woe.
This was in one of the files with Polly's name.
It’s a recruiting poster for the Women’s Land Army. Now, think about it. During WW2, most of the men over age 18 were in the military in way or another. England is an island and they’ve got Nazis to the European coast and anything else imported is coming across the Atlantic and getting sunk. No Fiji apples from New Zealand or red grapes from Chile or bananas from Costa Rica or American wheat or corn. No chocolate!!! The English have to grow their own food or starve and all the men and farm workers are fighting in Africa and Asia. They recruit women - 100,000 “Land Girls” -- to work on farms and those women feed all of England.
The Land Girls get paid less than male farmhands, of course. Polly was in charge of 40 or so Land Girls at a hostel and worked herself. She organized the women into work parties and drove them around in a “lorry” [that’s Brit-speak for a truck] to local farms where they would plow fields, pick potatoes and beets, bring in the hay, milk cows, castrate pigs, shoe horses, and kill rats. (Yes, kill rats. The Land Girl would ride around on a bicycle with a can of arsenic!)
So, whatever it is that had Gran Su and Lucy so down, Polly picks them up in her car and they go off to hang with her and the Land Girls. I found a picture of this, and I wonder if that’s what she picked them up in?
Cute, huh? It makes me jealous, you know? It’s 1942 and according to Wiki, women in the UK only got the vote in 1928. Ms. Plummer is motoring around the countryside in a car of her own and I can’t do that yet!
Gran Su wrote:
Lucy and I were as exhausted as any day in N. Our fatigue was most welcome, the result of doing good work, with wonderful women, in service to our country, to feed our people, that we might prevail against tyranny. It was then not so very different from what we did every day in N. We lived in a place where even Kings and Queens counted potatoes to keep a nation fed, we were dirty and bloody to the elbows, and Lucy’s feet were never clean.
Polly was so very right, and I am so grateful to her. This is work which we oversaw and at which we toiled in N., and it is no less important here. The two are so related, for the hardship of the War here trained us for the work to be done there and the work to be done there honed the skills we need here. Needs and the work to meet them exist everywhere and we are called to perform it.
We stayed with Polly and joined the Land Girls as they brought the hay in. I had forgotten how scratchy and dusty forage is for horses and cows! The girls were wonderful and we ate sandwiches with them and drank cold tea from canteens and the cheese and jam tasted as hearty as anything we had ever had in N. It was not as fine, to be sure, but the company was gay and we sang in the truck on the way home from the fields.
Sounds like the bus trip to a tournament, doesn’t it?
Oh, and that bit about how they are as exhausted as any day in "N." I don’t know what N is. It pops a lot during this time in Gran Su's notes and diary and it sounds as if they were sad about it and Ms. Polly Plummer and the Professor are trying to be positive and helpful. I suppose it might get irritating -- I know I get pissed when mom always says, when life gives you lemons, bake a pie. But, that's what I'm trying to do, since I am stuck here, and that's the sort of person it sounds like the Professor and Ms. Polly Plummer were.
Also, Gran Su wrote that a lot of people in the towns didn’t trust the Land Girls. They were living on their own, they had gorgeous tans (no SPF 50 sunblock!), they were earning money, and in the winter they wore too many clothes and in the summer, too little. I love that last bit. The girls had these heavy brown pants and green sweaters (they call them britches and jumpers) and in the summer, the Land Girls turned them into shorts and halter tops. Hilarious. Scandalous. I love them all.
Though, it makes me sad, too. Why do women get so down on other women for being strong and working hard and running their own lives? Why isn't that a good thing? Why can't we support one another? Maybe the older women didn't like these fit, hard working women running around in halter tops with tans, but all the men are at war, so why does even that matter? And even that shouldn't matter, right? If Naomi were reading, she'd comment about the feminist thing here, but I think I'll go for a run instead and imagine that I'm waving at Land Girls out in the fields.
Gran Su concludes:
It is impossible to be bitter when I see the example of Polly and the Professor. Returning from N. was not the end, but rather is the beginning of a great calling.
So, Gran Su ended up adopting the life, lemons, and pies philosophy, too.
Here are some pics I found in the file of the Land Girls who were in Polly’s hostel.
look at that racy top!!
These Land Girls are holding DEAD RATS!!
Peace and love my back up vocals of the Flist. These ladies are cool.
Next entry, Running