Bedfordshire Land Girl Memoir
Bedfordshire Women's Land Army | Land Girl Memoirs
Clifton Hostel
Bette Schwarz nee Harding
(WLA 163843: 1 February 1946 18 August 1948)
After having worked on private farms, milking, Betty decided she would like to try life at a WLA hostel, working for the county's Agricultural Committee.
"I was a bit fed up having to work weekends. When you're young, you feel you'd like to be going different places and I was always working on Saturdays and Sundays."
"So I asked for a transfer [from working on a private farm] and they sent me to Clifton Hostel, near Sheffordit was a very big house, turned into a hostel. And I was sent out then with the other girls in the lorry every day, to different farms. That was another experience really. Because I'd never lived with othersI was quite a shy person... I never could bring myself to undress in front of everyone else. I used to go to the bathroom and put my pyjamas on and have a wash. But when I'd been there a little while I got used to the other girls stripping off and I used to think, well it's stupid me hiding in a bathroom, you know, and I got a bit hardened to things."
"The room I went in I had to share with five other girls, lots of bunk beds. It's quite an eye-opener when you sleep with five other girls. Some of the swearing that went on ― my Father was very strict about swearing; he wouldn't have any swear words. These young girls from London, they swore like troopers. But they had hearts of gold, really."
"They were all from London. I didn't realise, in those days, how different they were from us. For one thing, the food. I'd been brought up to eat very good, humble food. Potatoes and gravy and vegetables and meat. If they put it in front of the Londoners, they wouldn't eat it. All they wanted was to go down to the fish and chip shop and buy fish and chips. They ate rubbish, even in those days. They really did. We did shepherd's pie which was nicely cooked, or steak and kidney pie and they'd push it on one side. Off they'd go and cycle in the village and buy food."
"And they were rough, as well, They sometimes, when it came to bedtime, and they'd been out for the evening, they just used to jump into bed in their knickers and, poor as we were, my Mum had always taught us to get undressed, wash and get our pyjamas on. They didn't bother about all that. The first thing they did in the morning was sit up and put their make-up on. It was quite an eye-opener, really."
"The biggest eye-opener was when one of the girls came and sat on my bunk bed one day and she was absolutely lousy (infested with lice). I thought, 'My God, she's 'crawling'.' I went and told another girl, who used to work with children. I thought, well I don't know what they look like, really. She came and looked and said, 'You are' and told the Warden. And then we all had to go, marching in and have our hair washed with this stinking stuff and a turban round it for twenty-four hours. I said, 'My goodness, I've reached seventeen and it's the first time I've had lice in me hair.'"
Every day or week they were sent to different farms, doing field work. "The first job I went to was pulling beetroot. That was horrible because you had to pull the tops off. Your hands were so sore by the end of the day, where you screwed. You couldn't put gloves on because when you screwed the round with it, so you had to take your gloves off. And we had red hands and so sore but it was fun."
"One of the nicest jobs ― there was an apple orchard at Cockayne Hatley [near Wrestlingworth]. I should say there was a million trees there , belong to the Co-op [Co-operative Wholesale Society]. We had to prune them. None of us girls knew a thing about pruning. We were told, 'Each tree's got to be no taller than six foot.' The foreman did sort of come round but, I mean, if one of these apple trees had an apple on themwe did hack them aboutall the pieces that fell off them fell into the middle of the rows and one girl took them all to the end, and the forelady ['forewoman'] built a big fire."
"It was in October and November and it was lovely to have this big fire and have a warm and, at dinner time, we toasted all our sandwiches on the fire and we used an Oxo [meat extract] cube, which were a penny (less than p) in those days, and put it in a flask and take that to drink. We'd all sit round the fire. It was a very nice time."
"It was very hard work. Land work is not easy because you're bending all day. You can imagine, your back kills you at the end of the day. But we all used to sing on the way home from the fields to the hostel. It was a big old truck with canvas sides.
"We had two trucks and sometimes you'd drop off at that farm and then another dozen at that one or just two at that farm. The driver used to drop them and she had to work at the last place."
"If it was pouring with rain up to dinner time, you could be 'rained off', you see. This particular day we were rained off. The truck was going into Bedford so the driver said, 'Anybody want to go into Bedford?' so, of course, we all said yes, quickly changed into our clothes and went into Bedford."
Betty later married a German former prisoner of war she met in Bedford when she was a land girl.
Page last updated: 17th October 2013