A glorious haunting

They lived in the same village and shared the same dreams – just 60 years apart.

- Illustration: Lucy Davey

Miss Julia White, horsewoman, sailor, farmer and haunter of my own farming life (such as it isn’t) first appeared in my life when I was 17, trying to get myself to agricultural college. Or was it when I was 20, taking out my frustrations on an office typewriter, too soon returned from working as a cowgirl in the Canadian Rocky Mountains? She’d have been 90 then, had she lived just another six months.

Either way, she, and women like her – older women, cheery, indomitable, often headscarved and horsey, have always existed in the friendly shadows of my own rural life. As old as the last century, Miss White died in 1989. We never met, but have people and places, barns and fields, barn owls and horses (or the descendants of both of those) and actual horseshoes in common; we walked the same land in West Berkshire, spoke to the same neighbours and shared the same dreams and frustrations. I feel her presence often.

In 1985, in her mid-eighties, she published The Inkpen Saga, recalling her farming apprenticeship with two extraordinary women, who lived openly as a lesbian couple, as the much-loved, accepted heart of their local community. They owned a temperamental, buttercup yellow tractor, called Racing Lizzie. She met them toasting crumpets at a Girl Guide camp they were joint-leading.

Julia’s book records her subsequent education in milking, ploughing, harvesting, threshing and animal husbandry, and then the brave buying and renovating of a dilapidated farm in her own right, all in a country at war. It records the difficulties of farming without running water or electricity, how she won the respect and cooperation of her male farmworkers, who stepped up to sow by hand when the first tractor and plough she ordered from America was torpedoed at sea and sank, destined to plough the Atlantic bottom forever more.