Frances Donaldson: A Woman’s War edited by Rose Deakin

CHARLOTTE MOORE Frances Donaldson: A Woman’s War: Letters to a soldier in the Second World War Edited by Rose Deakin Eden Valley Editions £9.99 Oldie price £8.37 inc p&p

‘Darling, I hope that you are all that I think you are. Because only so can life ever really get right again after the misery of these years,’ wrote Frankie Donaldson to her husband in 1943. Jack was a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Engineers, liaising with the Russians in Tehran. Frankie was running a Warwickshire farm and bringing up their two young children. They hadn’t seen each other since 1940.

This book, edited with a commentary by the Donaldsons’ daughter, Rose Deakin, uses the letters Frankie wrote almost daily to Jack to chronicle the frustrations and joys of farming and motherhood, the effect of the war on British domestic life, and the adventure of breaking into a man’s world. For adventure it was, despite the anxieties and hardships.

Before the war, Frankie had known nothing about farming. She had a glamorous girlhood in London and New York with her playwright father Frederick Lonsdale, taking dancing lessons from Fred Astaire. P G Wodehouse was a family friend. ‘He was my godfather’, writes Rose, ‘though, I think, oblivious of the fact.’ Jack’s background was less exotic – ‘public-service, intellectual stock’ – but equally non-agricultural. A socialist, he gave half his inheritance to finance the Peckham Pioneer Health Centre, and worked for prison reform. When war broke out, the Donaldsons decided a farm would combine a good life for their children, a living after the war, and a contribution to the war effort.

Frankie was never a hobby farmer. Though her father once competed with Lord Beaverbrook to see who could spend the most money in a week, little cash came her way; the family income depended on her endeavours. Her letters show anxiety about overdrafts and expenditure. Rose remembers a frugal childhood, short on treats and holidays, but full of animals, tractor rides and playing in the mud; bliss for this robust little girl – less so for her delicate brother, Thomas.

It was also short on parental attention. Jack, absent for four years, was a stranger.

‘Dear Daddy, I hope you are not dead,’ wrote Rose. ‘I don’t think you should send that,’ said Frankie. ‘It might be true by the time he gets it.’

Frankie spent all day labouring or writing – she produced three books about farming, to considerable acclaim. Thomas and Rose were left with a governess or to their own devices. ‘I engaged [a governess] full-time at £100 a year’, Frankie told Jack, ‘on the understanding that she would not be too conscientious about her work as I did not want the children looked after all the time.’ She regarded the semi-feral results with affectionate horror. ‘Tho’ they are sweet, they are also odious… Sometimes I really have to leave Rose because, if I didn’t, I should beat her up.’

Her voice is sharp, honest, uncompromising. ‘I only sit down with difficulty, having been tossed in the air by one of my pigs and landed on my bottom. The old bitch did it exactly like a bull and from behind when I wasn’t looking… Animals arouse all my

most sadistic instincts. I think that is why I like farm animals so much. It is one’s duty to hit them and one can work off quite a lot of steam’; ‘If you get up at six in the dark and in a hurry and the water is cold, there isn’t anyone living who would wash after about the first three mornings… I smell – either of sweat or sour milk.’

She battles obstructive and misogynist bailiffs and inspectors: ‘Tho’ I don’t think one could truthfully say I bit off more than I could chew, I find the chewing fairly tough.’

Frankie makes no attempt to censor her pessimism, though she sometimes apologises for it. ‘Was I always like that or is it the effect of the war?’ But gloom is balanced by satisfaction, even delight. ‘I like [farming] better than golf and tennis and riding and parties and everything I’ve ever enjoyed all rolled into one.’

She’s proud of her bulging biceps, and of the fact that ‘we women have managed to make ourselves felt’. Her love and longing for Jack is constant – ‘You always only bring out the best in me’ - and his confidence in her never wavers.

This is a book about wartime experience – air raids, land girls, shortages of everything from toilet paper and cigarettes to concrete and wire – and about one woman’s courage and tenacity, but it is also a love story with a happy ending. Jack returned for good in 1945. He and Frankie continued to farm. He became a Labour minister, she a successful biographer, and they remained mutually devoted for the rest of their long lives.