Audio Transcript

When I first turned up at Goadby Marwood in the early 1940s, I’ll be honest — I had no idea those quiet Leicestershire fields were going to shape some of the most important years of my life. The War Agricultural Executive Committee — “the War Ag,” as we all called it — sent me there to run a newly taken-over hostel for prisoners of war. I was an agricultural lad myself, so they kept me off the front line, but don’t let that fool you: trying to feed Britain back then felt like fighting a whole different sort of war.

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The Manor sat right in the middle of the village, a grand old place that had once been a hunting lodge. When I first walked in, it was freezing cold and empty as anything — but it wasn’t long before the rooms were echoing with voices from all over Europe. At the start, we housed conscientious objectors, lads who didn’t want to fight but were happy enough to put their backs into the land. Then the lorries started rolling in with Italians — sunburnt, a bit lost, some of them grinning like they couldn’t help themselves — and later on, the Germans arrived, quieter, more serious, most of them straight from the North African fighting where the war had swung against them. My job at Goadby was basically to turn all that muddle into something that worked. Every morning I’d sort the men out and take them off to the local farms — beet fields, dairies, hay meadows — anywhere that needed extra hands.

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Life had a rhythm of its own in those days, though it wasn’t without the odd jolt. I still remember November ’42 as clear as yesterday. I’d been driving home in my lorry — the back loaded up with tired potato pickers — when I got a bit heavy-footed. Forty-two miles an hour in a thirty zone, as the policewoman who pulled me over was keen to point out. There I was, trying to keep Britain fed, and she’s standing there with her notebook, giving me a look my mother would’ve been proud of. Fair enough, I suppose. The magistrates later fined me thirty shillings. A month’s worth of grumbling from the wife cost me more.

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The War Ag didn’t care much for excuses either; they wanted results, and it was down to me to make sure they got them. But it wasn’t all just numbers and quotas. These were real men I was in charge of, with names, stories, small moments you remembered.

Some of the Italians would sing while they worked — proper tunes, too — and you could hear them drifting across the hedgerows like the fields themselves were humming. A few of the Germans used to whittle little wooden animals for my kids out of scrap bits of timber they found around the place. Most of them had seen more of war than anyone ought to, but bit by bit, a sort of respect settled in. By ’44, it didn’t feel much like we were enemies in that little corner of England — just men trying to get through the days as best we could.

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Lucy — my wife — she was the one who kept The Manor ticking. She cooked for everyone: our family, the prisoners, the guards, the War Ag fellows. She, along with the girls from the Land Army, somehow turned that cold old house into something like a home. In the evenings, once all the men were back from the fields, the smell of stew and fresh-baked bread would drift through the whole place. I can still see the light from the kitchen windows slicing through the Leicestershire mist.

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We grafted; we really did. Everything was in short supply — fuel, seed, fertiliser — and yet every year we were expected to pull more out of the land. Hard going, no question, but there was pride in it too. Goadby Marwood wasn’t just another posting. It became a proper community of sorts — an odd one maybe, but held together by necessity and a bit of human decency.

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When the war finally ended and the prisoners started heading home, the place felt strangely empty. In 1948 the hostel shut for good, and Lucy and I packed up again, ready for whatever farm came next. But I’ll tell you this — a piece of me never left that village. It stayed in the quiet lanes, the laughter that once carried across the fields, and in that big old house that sheltered so many of us from the storm the world was kicking up outside.

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Even now, when I look back, it’s not the shortages or the slog I remember. It’s that feeling of purpose — knowing that, in our own small way, we helped keep the country going. Goadby Marwood wasn’t just where we worked. It was proof that even in the middle of a war, people can still plant a bit of kindness and sometimes, against all odds, watch it grow.

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