New book about the young women who worked Ontario’s farms during Second World War

To this day, Dorothy Maxwell doesn’t know why she filled out that application when it came round. She’d never been more than 80 km away from her home near Brockville. But when the application came across her desk she, bored with her class, filled it out without a thought and shortly thereafter was whisked away to a farm in Southern Ontario.

Maxwell is just one of many women, young men, retired folk and others who found their way to farms as part of the province’s Farm Service Force, a program launched during the Second World War to help Ontario farmers with its shortage of farm labourers, seeing as so many were in uniform. Many of the women who went came to be known as the farmerettes.

Their joys, work and misadventures are recalled in Onion Skins and Peach Fuzz: Memories of Ontario’s Farmerettes, compiled by Bonnier Sitter and Shirleyan English. Here’s a few excerpts:
• “Two boys worked there, one tall and the other short. The short one asked me out! I so wanted the tall one to ask, but instead I just waited for him to notice me. One day he said he had something for me and said “put out your hand.” I did, and he gave me the biggest ugliest tomato worm. I screamed and dropped it.” — Betty McCallum
• “Just before our tour was over, Mr. Smith sent us to pick pears. We had a ring we were to measure them with to be sure they were the right size and I often wondered about that, thinking ripeness would be a measure of whether they would be ready for picking and these pears looked too green to pick. But he knew his fruit.” — Edith Sunderland
• “Kathy lost her watch in the spinach today and they started rooting through about 60 bushels and didn’t find it. There was great excitement of course.”
— Norene Turvolgyi

To get a copy, email English at dandsenglish@bell.net or call her at 519-672-1575, or call Sitter at 519-235-1909. The hard-cover book costs $49 and shipping is $20.