Set My Hand upon the Plough

‘It was the war which liberated Barraud from her life of clerical drudgery in the City and sent her to a rural England where, it appears, she made no compromise of her identity.’ Luke Turner

In 1939 the writer Enid Barraud, disillusioned with her city life, left London and went to live in a village in Cambridgeshire, joining what became known as the Land Army, one of thousands of women who went to work the land while war raged overhead and abroad. In her recently rediscovered memoir, Set My Hand Upon the Plough, first published in 1946, Enid writes with remarkable candour and honesty about her life on the farm, and her relationship with the farm workers. Barraud preferred to identify as male, was known to her co-workers as John, and lived with her female partner. Based on her wartime diaries and her contributions to Mass Observation, the book also reveals Barraud’s sexuality, and it now joins the ranks of LGBT memoirs, casting new light on the lives of the men and women who fought or who worked on the home front and their role in the liberation of Europe.