Mary Coe recalls summers spent gleaning in the fields, laudanum-soothed babies strapped to their mothers’ backs.
Eighty-six-year-old Sybil Hayhoe looks back with pride at her years in service, while the village postwoman is sharply aware of her unequal wages. Girls aspire to be housewives, hairdressers or nurses, except Fiona, who dreams of training horses. Told through the voices of ordinary women, Mary Chamberlain’s portrait of an isolated village in the Cambridgeshire Fens remains as vital and thought-provoking as on its groundbreaking publication in 1975.



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