FARMER'S GIRL

A departure for this Vermont publisher, for here is a book about Old England, not new England. In content, it is a natural for them -- a record of large scale farming in England, with martial accompaniment, as the author, an office worker in London, takes the job of helping run a farm in Norfolk. This turns out to mean not only keeping the books and payments, but learning to manage, coming into direct contact with all practical duties of the many acres, animals, workers, and developing an agricultural sense. The first two years of war are filled with all aspects of farm organization, business problems, weather, getting the produce to market, filling orders -- and having them cancelled -- problems of machinery and replacements, and, to add to the gaiety, evacuees, bombings, army manoeuvres, officialdom, forms to be filled, shortages and surpluses, and local excitements. There is a marvelous gallery of characters, from the owners to the farm workers, military and civilian drifting population. All to the tune of the changing war news and rumors of those days. British but brisk. A story of the English farm front, which may be America's farm front tomorrow.