Land Girls
   Angela Huth
  1994 St. Martin's Press NY USA
   ISBN: 031214296X


After their farmhands are conscripted in 1941, John & Faith Lawrence enroll in England's new Land Army, which sends young women out of the cities into the fields. These three girls bring to distant Dorset high adventure, clashes in culture & all their passion for life.

Each girl, from different parts of the nation & society, blossoming into women in an era when promiscuity & virginity plagued them as much as air-raid sirens heightened fears for any tomorrows. Each girl brings to Hallows Farm at the end of summer, a fresh & funny novelty about farm work, an engaged heart & an easing for a worried, weary family.

Each man, on the otherhand, in uniform or out, suddenly has to struggle with duty & their ideas about newcomers. With the arrival of a bevy of pretty, personable, unattached women & the very real threat of being dead by morning, the men are thrust into the role of teachers in more ways than one.

To begin Land Girls & continue to delve into its quietly evocative pages is to hear the stories of our mothers & grandmothers. How placid & seemly it all was on the surface & how passionate & premeditated beneath.

Angela Huth has drawn each girl, Agatha, Prudence & Stella, with a fullsomeness that lets you hear their voices, feel their youthful desires & see them in the attic dormitory where they've transformed a dull storage room into a lively, colorful boudoir, replete with oft-kissed photos of boyfriends.

We meet Faith & John Lawrence & their asthmatic yet virile son, Joe, who will play such an important part in each girl's life. We'll also meet Joe's long-distance, strangely distant fiancee. We learn of the intimacies & vanities, the sacrifices & deep affections between husband & wife, themselves survivors of the previous war.

We watch as each girl falls in love with life on the land, with the Lawrences & their lovable, troubled son. As we watch the old-timers struggle with their clabbered lives we also see the girls find untapped wells of strength, compassion & courage.

Nice, poignant way to end the book. Well worth reading. I loved it, where it took me & everyone I met there, even wizened, thwarted old Ratty & his fearsome Post-Mistress wife. Memories of my own gave a harmony to Angela Huth's Land Girls as have few books. Charming, hilarious, scary & rich in the dramas, fears & epiphanies that once made up our wartime lives.

More from Angela Huth:
Non-Fiction: The English Woman's Wardrobe
For Children: Eugenie in Cloud Cuckoo Land etc.
Plays: The Understanding & The Trouble with Old Lovers.
Fiction: Nowhere Girl; Virginia Fly is Drowning; Sun Child; South of the Lights; Wanting; Invitation to the Married Life & two books of short stories: Monday Lunch in Fairlyand & Such Visitors.
(05/23/99)

Rebecca