Another branch of agriculture which women are beginning to take up with success is work with heavy motor tractors.
Miss Ursula Winser and Miss Mollie Jameson are good examples of women who do this sort of work. These girls have been driving a tractor-plough in Shropshire. They volunteered for the work at a time when the local farmers were in despair at their inability to use the only tractor in the district, the last available driver having been called up for military service. The girls had had some experience of motors, Miss Winser having been “chauffeur and odd man” when working as a V.A.D. in a hospital at the beginning of the war. She was not accustomed, however, to a type of car of which the starting-handle alone weighs many pounds. Moreover, in order to be taken along a road from one field to another, a tractor requires to have the “spuds” taken off the wheels. These are strips of steel, put on with two bolts and nuts each, and there are twelve spuds on each wheel, usually thickly covered with mud and oil, so their removal is no drawing-room job. But Miss Winser and her friend were not to be daunted. In spite of their lack of experience, and further hampered by a large audience, which assembled, in a spirit inclined to mockery, to watch their efforts during their first days of work, they ploughed on in the most literal sense, conquering their difficulties and gradually acquiring mastery over the tractor. Miss Winser and Miss Jameson take the work of driving the tractor and managing the plough by turns, the former being very hot and the latter very cold work. They have now worked the tractor for some months, taking it over considerable distances to farms all through the district. They are able to plough from four to five acres of land in a day, and have recently started training some of the local girls in this work.
XXII
MISS EVELYN LYNE AND MISS MADGE GREG
In addition to their great hospital work, the Joint Societies of the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John have established many of what may be called the additional links in the long hospital chain which stretches with such perfect organisation from the spot where the soldier is wounded on the battlefield to the point where he is able to return with renewed strength to duty. The accounts which follow of the experiences of two workers illustrate the similar lives of many other “V.A.Ds.”
MISS EVELYN LYNE MISS MADGE GREG
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Miss Evelyn Lyne went to France in October, 1914, as cook in the first Voluntary Aid Detachment to be sent abroad. The detachment was to start a rest station at one of the base railway stations for feeding and re-dressing the wounded as they came through in the hospital trains from the front. A series of railway luggage-vans drawn up on a siding had to serve as the headquarters of the detachment, which Miss Lyne described as follows: “We had very hard work and great fun scrubbing and disinfecting the vans; they looked beautiful when finished, and were equipped as a kitchen, dispensary, dressing station, store-room and common room respectively. No one would believe what a charming kitchen a railway truck made. Besides the kitchen we had a very long fire burning between old railway lines arranged at the right distance to support the huge pots for making cocoa, six pots at a time, so that we could have enough for 300 boiling at once. We worked day and night at the rest station in twelve-hour shifts, and, being a humble cook, it was my lot to stand for hours over the fire stirring cocoa, sometimes in the pouring rain, and with smoke belching into my eyes.” As a rule the rest-station workers were given only an hour’s warning of the arrival of a hospital train, and then had to prepare food for from 300 to 800 wounded men. When the trains came in, the workers would take their cauldrons of cocoa or soup and baskets of food on handcarts to the carriages. “No words can ever express how splendid the wounded men were,” wrote Miss Lyne: “one never heard a complaint, and we were so thankful to be able to do just that little for them.”
Later Miss Lyne was sent to cook for between eighty and ninety nurses at their billet in an old château at one of the hospital bases. This was hard work indeed, for she was the only cook, and had eight meals a day to serve. The nurses were on Army rations, so a whole sheep or the quarter of a bullock would be left at the door daily, and Miss Lyne soon became an expert butcher! When later she had to return to England she wrote: “I shall always look back on those days in France as the happiest time of my life.” She is now working as an inspector of hostels under the Ministry of Munitions.