Book of the Month is Nicola Chester’s ‘Ghosts of the Farm: Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land and Community’ — which draws a connection between two women in two different eras who both wanted to become farmers. Read an extract from the preface, titled ‘The Bedroom Carpet Farm’, below. Printed with kind permission of the author and publisher.

I am eight years old. 

I am a horse. 

But. I am also its rider. 

As my legs gallop faster along the road, my hands are raised to hold the reins (sometimes a thin dog lead), the leather passing correctly between ring and little finger of both hands, crossing my palms to be held, softly, sensitively on top by each thumb. I put my reins in one hand to reach down to pat my good horse’s neck-of-air and shake my own mane in response.

In my imagination, all-consuming and utterly convincing to me, I am riding out to inspect my cows in the water meadows. From the old watermill, where Lytton Strachey and some of the bohemian Bloomsbury set lived before moving close to the village I live in now, I cross a narrow bridge over a little grass-washy chalk stream, straightened during the farming efforts of the Second World War. In wet weather, the stream’s original meanders return like ghosts; little floods making inverted commas around the sentence of the straight line. I pass the concrete-block houses of that era’s pillboxes; guard posts built to defend against an expected invasion in 1940. Sometimes, the cows shelter inside. Behind them, a dozen lovely cows of mixed breeding are already looking at me. I dismount my horse, reach out and rub the creamy dun cow with the black nose on the soft whorls of her forehead. I call her Rebecca (of Sunnybrook Farm). Her breath smells of fermented grass, her broad wet nose makes me grin. Her pink tongue licks my hand roughly and then goes up each of her nostrils in turn. The calf at her flank is curious, and I steal a glance, but even that makes the cow raise her head a little: it would be silly of me – and a breach of trust – to even attempt to touch her baby. I wipe my hands in the grass, giving them a ‘farmer’s wash’, before remounting. We ride around the field boundaries, checking each trough is refilling, poking at the orange ballcock with a stick, before turning for home: back through the fields, through the allotments and clattering through our edge-of-village estate, in my old brown Mary Jane school shoes. Mrs Pastern (I think of the springy, shock-absorbing part of a horse’s leg, between hoof and fetlock) calls out, ‘Which is it you are exercising today?’

‘Emma,’ I call back. ‘The chestnut mare… She doesn’t like waiting!’ Mrs Pastern waves, and the beginnings of an awkward self-consciousness prickle into my world as soon as the words are out of my mouth. I am grateful to this neighbour who plays the game with me, pretending I am riding a horse that exists in reality, not just in my imagination. I gallop off into my embarrassment, as if I can’t stop myself. ‘Emma’, the horse I am riding, the horse I am, is a spirited chestnut mare; known among ‘horsey people’ (whom I desperately want to be) for a bold and unpredictable sensitive horse, not best suited to checking cows and fences. Tomorrow, I must bring out the sensible and patient pony I have imagined as Jack. But for now, I am home, and I must get on with the farm work.

I am also the farmer of my own bedroom-carpet farm.

I rebuild the little plastic-cobbled, drystone walls that clip together satisfyingly, like the bobble catch on Nan’s handbag. Clip. It’s my favourite form of enclosure that goes with the rest of my Britains Farm Toys, still Europe’s biggest maker of accurate, to-scale agricultural toys. I love the piece with three rails and a stile built into it, which I place in the opposite corner to where I put the metal trough (so walkers and farmworkers alike won’t have to walk through mud, puddled by thirsty animals; I try to be a good farmer).I put the sheep in, that I decide are probably Hampshire Downs, and put one ram in with them, with his plastic whorled fleece. Then I hitch Boxer, the grey carthorse, with his black harness collar, blinkers and gloriously feathered legs, into the blue-and-red tip cart and fill it with hay; stems of summer-dry grass, which I’ve snipped and twisted into haycocks.

The beloved battered and muddy blue Land Rover that lost its topnin the garden is parked beneath the plastic curved and corrugated roof of the Dutch barn, beside the blue-and-white Ford tractor. Both of these vehicles have a towing hitch and suspension. I’ll need to move them somewhere else if I happen to get the red Massey Ferguson combine harvester. I like the mixture of old and new on my farm. It’s how I feel the best farms should be: change, progress and modernity, yes; but not forgetting what has gone before – especially if it is still perfectly useful. The stables are full, and all the horses named: Drummer and Comet, Clover and Skylark, Starlight and Sparrow, Copper and Beechnut; Joe, the Suffolk Punch; and Marmalade and Porridge, the Shetland ponies.

I am frustrated that there aren’t other animals available on my farm though: the ones that aren’t enclosed by the walls and fences; the farmland wildlife. Because this means just as much to me, and I see it all around, and wonder why it isn’t included in the animals I can save up for and buy. Later, I make hedgerows and trees with green scouring pads, and graduate to Humbrol model paints.

There are a few people on my farm: a tractor driver; an ancient shepherd carrying a lamb and a crook, with a hessian corn sack as an apron rolled around his middle; hatless riders of the seventies, others with caps; and women. There are a few old figures from the 1930s (possibly lead-painted) – a rosy-cheeked woman with a basket and a missing arm in a long pink frock, apron and headscarf; a farmer and a carter in grubby, worn smocks – but also, more modern women: a seventies ‘daughter’ feeding chickens from a broad pan of meal, dressed in wellies and a miniskirt; a daffodil-blonde figure in a blue dress; an older woman wearing a green jacket, cap and a sensible, pleated skirt. But there are two others I like the best, that I feel could be grown-up me. One is a brunette dairy girl, smiling in white overalls, with red lips and black wellies, and her more serious friend is dressed in blue overalls over a cream blouse, with green wellies and the same postbox-red lips. Both are leaning to carry a heavy silver pail, using their hips and left arms to balance its weight. Both look keen, capable and full of energy for the work required of them. Most of the figures have a clever timelessness to them, while, at the same time, being utterly modern, summing up for me the mise en scène of the farms I see on TV or peer into from the sticky leatherette seats of our passing family Cortina.

These women were farmers on my farm. Not wives or daughters, but farmworkers. It didn’t occur to me then that all but the two red-lipped figures first cast in the 1940s wore dresses with their sensible boots and carried baskets of corn for the hens or eggs, and had a distinct domestic tie to the farmhouse, market and kitchen.

I’ve seen and known some of these women, with their headscarves and intimidating, efficient, no-nonsense practicality. They are out in the fields, driving Land Rovers, organising things in the village. One of them appears on a poster on my wall: the legendary Miss Marguerite de Beaumont of the Shalbourne Stud, pictured in breeches and jacket, holding a beribboned horse she has bred, named Shalbourne Fiesta. I have one of her books, The Way of a Horse, on my shelf, sandwiched between pony stories featuring adventurous, courageous girls of slender (or no) means, and fiction, no matter the genre, of deep husbandry and knowledge that examine everything through the prism of the rural. Books where beguiling, ancient magic and history sit just below the surface, constantly threatening to break through into the now, overlaying my imagined and real countryside in deep-tilled layers. But in the books, and on the posters on my wall that mingle horses and farming scenes scissored out of magazines, there is a strange gender divide and a generation of women missing. Almost all the images of horses are with women and men, but all of the images of farming are exclusively with men and boys.

Yet I know they are there, or have been there, these often-older women from a different age, and I wonder, where have they gone and who is coming behind them? Hovering on the margins is the presence of those indomitable farming, horsey, outdoor women, ready, surely, to take me on as some kind of apprentice. With these women, and with these red-lipped girls in my bedroom-carpet fields, I am a farmer too, on my farm that spills out from my bedroom, right outside into the village, its estate, its fields.

I am seven, eight, nine, ten – eleven, even (at this point, my mother and my schoolteacher are worrying about me) and THIS IS NOT A PHASE.

I live almost entirely in my own imagination. I farm the green-sward and ploughed swirls of the orange, patterned carpet, and it is inconceivable that, when I am a grown-up, I will be anything other than a farmer – one that rides and trains horses too; because if I dream it, and see and read about grown-up women doing it, that job surely exists? I just have to find these women and overcome my shyness and timidity around them, before they fade from view. Because I get a sense that that’s what’s happening. Like them, I am not afraid of hardwork. I am there for the energy represented in the cheery seriousness of those 1:36 scale figures. It’s all I want to be when I grow up.

I’ve been trying to find and inhabit that farm ever since, in whatever way I can.

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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. Buy a copy here (£20.90).