Farming, Fighting and Family: A Memoir of the Second World War Book

Farmer, author and broadcaster Arthur (A.G.) Street was one of the leading voices of British agriculture during the Second World War. His daughter Pamela - herself an aspiring writer - was 18 when war broke out. David, her future husband, served with the 4th RHA in North Africa. Using their previously unpublished diaries and letters, Miranda McCormick - Pamela's daughter - tells the candid story of a Wiltshire family living and working at a time when 'a little German with a black paint-brush moustache turned [the] world upside down'. Their very different experiences of war are woven into one masterful narrative of love, duty and separation during a time of national adversity. Detailing the sudden rise of her tenant farmer father to the status of a national celebrity, Pamela's service as a VAD nurse and in the ATS, as well as her unofficial fiance's detainment in German and Italian prison camps, this is a story told with an almost allegorical simplicity. Intimate and personal, this vivid account of 'ordinary life' during extraordinary times is also the chronicle of a generation for whom farming was the fourth line of defence.