For many years, I’ve created a series to mark the start of every month. These posts have covered a range of topics, such as the running of the WLA, Land Girls at work, as well as at rest, a county focus on Land Girl’s activities, and last year’s WTC photo of the month.

This year, we move from photos to poetry, showcasing a poem written by a Land Girl or Lumber Jill to kick off the start of each month in 2022.

If you have a poem that you’d like me to feature, then do get in touch. In the meantime, enjoy our first poem appropriately titled The Land Girl.

The Land Girl

She came from haunts of book and pen
Where typewriters did clatter.
In Shorthand speedy notes she took
On many a solemn matter.
She tired of ledger, ink and files
So joined the girls in breeches,
They sent her right out in the wilds
Where townsman seldom reaches,
So up at Philips’ farm she rolled,
To toil and sweat and shiver,
In days of heat and days of cold
For work goes on for ever.

She walks a dozen miles each day,
She carries bales of straw,
She cuts the corn and mows the hay,
She learns to chop and saw.
She ploughs, she sows, she tends, she reaps
The harvest when it’s ripe.
She milks the cows-their records keeps
(It’s time she had a stripe!)
She toils with pitchfork, spade and knife,
She very rarely stops,
But ask her if she likes the life,
She answers, “It’s the tops.”

By E . Entwisle, a Land Girl in Cheshire, WLA number 146834.

Published in The Land Girl, February 1946, p4.