Farming, Fighting and Family

The Wiltshire farmer/author/broadcaster Arthur (A.G.) Street was one of the leading voices of British agriculture during WW2. His daughter Pamela - herself an aspiring writer - was eighteen when war broke out. Her contributions to the war effort included working on her father's farm, nursing in the local military hospital, and serving in the ATS. Her future husband, David McCormick, served with the 4th RHA in North Africa. Captured in December 1941, he endured the remainder of the war in prison camps in Italy and Germany. Miranda McCormick has skilfully woven together her forebears' very differing wartime experiences. Of specific interest to social, military and agricultural historians, for the general reader this is also an intensely human - at times heart-rending - story of love, duty, separation, temptation, guilt and eventual reunion. Pamela fell in love with an American pilot - but she remained true to David. The strain was so much that she was invalided out of the ATS.

Auteur

Miranda McCormick is the granddaughter of the Wiltshire farmer/author/broadcaster A. G. Street and daughter of the novelist Pamela Street. She was brought up on her parents' farm in the Wylye Valley in South West Wiltshire. Educated at Somerville College, Oxford, she worked for Sotheby's Books and mss department and John Murray Publishers. The fact that Max Hastings quotes from his as yet unpublished work in his best-selling All Hell Let Loose is testament to her literary abilities.