Nicola Chester writes superbly well and has a close relationship with the natural world. This book takes the area around the author’s home, and where she grew up, and travels back to the 1940s, war time, to describe the rural community then. Much of the detail comes from the diaries of a woman farmer and the challenges she faced dealing with men, the War Ag, weather and war time.
The brilliance of the writing is that the reader, this reader at least, feels as though the author is standing in a field as that woman farmer deals with a bunch of grumpy men even though the events happened before the writer was born. And it’s only reasonable that the woman farmer makes imagined visits forward to the present in the later stages of the book.
In this book, the past of 80 years ago is not a foreign country as the villages, the shape of the hills and the predominantly farming land use are all still in place but things were certainly different then, in so many ways, a mixture of good and bad. There were more working people on the land but they were working standard 50-hour weeks of manual work unbroken by a Zoom meeting through which they could snooze. At the end of the day those workers went home to cottages that now may be airbnbs but then were hovels without electricity or even often running water. How many of today’s population would opt to go back to those days, and how many from those days would turn down the chance to live in our world?
We hear something of the other ghosts of that farmland – its wildlife. Imagine ploughing at night and hearing Corncrakes in Wiltshire, Berkshire or Hampshire these days? What were the Stone Curlew numbers and how familiar were they, Lapwings, Corn Buntings and Skylarks to those working the land? Which plants flowered in the field margins? And which insects pollinated them?
This is a wonderful book. It arrived with me only a few days ago and I have neglected other tasks for the pleasure of reading it. And that means that I can tell you that it goes straight into my shortlist for this blog’s Book of 2025 – which will be revealed at noon today.
The cover? That’s farmland for sure, but when much of the action in this book occurred it would have looked quite different. With a bit of imagination the cover could have captured that aspect. But it is very attractive and I’ll give it a solid 8/10.
Ghosts of the Farm: two women’s journeys through time, land and community by Nicola Chester is published by Chelsea Green
Buy this book direct from Blackwell’s – a proper bookshop (and I’ll get a little bit of money from them).
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