Nicola Chester’s ‘Ghosts of the Farm: Two Women’s Journeys through Time, Land and Community’ — our September Book of the Month — is a bridge between eras, between classes and perhaps, between people, writes Melissa Harrison.

In the years during and after the Second World War the dauntless Miss Julia Maud White, a near-novice where agriculture was concerned, successfully managed a farm in the little village of Inkpen in West Berkshire, where Nicola Chester now lives: walking the same lanes, knowing the same barns, trees and landmarks, and subject to many of the same ambitions. For since she was a small child Nicola Chester has also wanted to be a farmer; one woman realised her dream, but the other did not. Chester’s second book, Ghosts of the Farm, traces the differences and similarities between these two rural lives, setting one over the other like tracing paper to see where they meet and where they diverge, and seeking to return to the story of farming the labour of women, often unseen, unrecorded – and undervalued. As the paired threads of biography entwine it asks, too, how different the countryside might be today if more women were running farms, and why, when it comes to vital conversations about how land is used, women’s voices are still too easily talked over and ignored.

Julia White begins her apprenticeship at 40, in the year 1940: memorably, Chester shows her in her little car, with two dogs, towing a tiny caravan across Salisbury Plain – slap-bang in the middle of a vast convoy of tanks. She is on her way to a farm and pony stud run by two women, Marguerite de Beaumont and Dorothy Mason, business and romantic partners, who have agreed to teach her how to farm. It is with their help that, just one short year later, she takes on the running of a near-derelict farm in Inkpen – this at a time of dire national need, when the Ministry of Agriculture could take your land away from you if it wasn’t productive enough. It is quite the undertaking, and, drawing on White’s own memoir, Day Book and Cultivation Record, and walking daily the same paths, lanes and fields, Chester imbues the story with great colour and detail. Miss White comes vividly to life, as do Doris and Marguerite and the farm hands and villagers; as does the reality of rural life in wartime, with rationing, bombs falling, and American troops firing live rounds across the quiet fields during training. It is not a rural idyll, far from it: but Miss White rises to the occasion, and it is deeply satisfying to follow her progress. ‘I would like to be her apprentice,’ Chester writes. ‘I think we’d have some fun. She has got under my skin so much…that I can sense her ghost sometimes, as well as the ghosts of those that worked these fields.’

White was, very clearly, a member of the upper classes, and of independent means; Nicola Chester is from a working-class background, albeit one rich in horses. To many, particularly those in cities, riding seems synonymous with money; country people, of course, know that the picture is much more complicated than that. As a child Chester works at a nearby riding school in exchange for lessons; the stables that house the school are let to the school’s owner by a woman farmer, she recalls. It is the beginning of a lifelong relationship with horses undertaken on ‘shoestring tied to shoestring’, one that takes her to a ‘dude ranch’ in Canada as a teen and later sees her married to a man who works at a stud and living in the tied cottage that comes with the job – but never results in ownership of a horse. Class roils and twists through Ghosts of the Farm, as it does, largely unspoken, through all our lives: the difficulties it causes Miss White and the uses she puts it to; the precarity of Chester’s own existence with a growing family in a tied cottage, and the effect that has on her ability to speak up on local matters; the way sexism and classism entwine to marginalise her and so many other women, and keep them from farming at all. She quotes the statistics: while women make up 55% of the UK farming workforce (often unpaid) just 16% are ‘farm holders’, dropping to 7% in Scotland. Is it possible that access for women into agriculture has actually gone down since Miss White’s day? 

And there’s something else that connects and divides Chester and her predecessor. In the 1940s, agriculture was at the start of an enormous shift: not just from horsepower to tractors, but also a vast uptake of chemical fertilisers, the ploughing up of hedges and hay meadows, the filling-in of ponds, the ‘improvement’ of pastures and the invention of silage, all part of a race to get more out of every acre – much needed following two terrible wars – that saw wildlife plummet across the UK and most particularly on farmland. Miss White could not have known what was being unleashed, but Chester does, and she mourns everything that has gone and everything that is still being lost, despite what we know. ‘Mechanisation saves people, it feeds them; it allows ease to those punishing hard jobs and lives,’ she writes. Yet ‘it hurts to look back and pinpoint the start of the slow poisoning and starving of the birds and insects with the new chemicals to this time.

‘So much of the sentiment, practice and approach linger on… and what was laid down then has presented us with bitter challenges of an existential kind. Most people are divorced from the land and how their food is produced, and farmers are often left poorly rewarded for what they produce and unsupported in doing it benefit nature or access to people.’

Yet it is in just this challenge that Chester, a lifelong ‘farmer of the imagination’, finds her place – and her voice. ‘I think what farming needs is a bridge,’ she writes; ‘people that care and are passionate about a living countryside we can all know, with the imagination to bring all the other stuff to bear.’ 

She’s right: it can be thankless work, yet it’s one of the things that makes her books and her journalism valuable. Ghosts of the Farm is a bridge between eras, between classes and perhaps, between people. All it takes is an open heart.

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Nicola Chester’s ‘Ghosts of the Farm: Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land and Community’ is published by Chelsea Green on 30th September. Read an extract here. Buy a copy here (£20.90). A bonus interview with Nicola, touching on Nicola’s time as a cowgirl, being a ‘farmer of the imagination’, and the changing role of women in farming, will be sent out to paid subscribers this coming Monday — more information here.

Melissa Harrison is the author of ‘All Among the Barley’, a novel set in a farming community in the 1930s. She writes a ‘Nature Notebook’ column for The Times.