Anniversaries and memorials

THIS is a really big year for anniversaries - the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, the bicentenary of Charles Dickens, the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, the 600th anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc, 25 years since Andy Warhol's death, the 30th anniversary of the Falklands conflict, the 50th anniversary of John Glenn becoming the first American to orbit the earth (that's next Monday, by the way), the 700th anniversary of the forcible disbanding of the Knights Templar by Pope Clement V (on 13th April and ostensibly the reason for Friday 13th being an unlucky date), the 300th anniversary of the birth of the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, the 500th anniversary of the official unveiling of Michelangelo's painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and the 50th anniversaries of the Cuban missile crisis, Marilyn Monroe's death and the first James Bond film.

Gosh, it makes you feel old when you realise you remember seeing Dr No in the cinema, reading about Monroe's death (and the media coverage that had no comparison until Princess Diana) and being completely terrified by the threat of nuclear war starting in the Caribbean.

Some of these events will be with us all year, and many will leave their marks in media coverage, books, films and actual memorials in many forms.

Many are already carved in stone as major historic landmarks.

So it always comes as a surprise when you discover a group whose endeavours were heroic but have gone largely unsung.

This year is not an anniversary for the Women's Land Army - the centenary will come in three years time - but the Women's Food and Farming Union (WFU) has chosen this week - because of Valentine's Day - to highlight an appeal for a memorial to the women who kept this country's farms working throughout both the First and Second World Wars.

This organisation is particularly important to me because my mother was in the Land Army on the Cotswolds during the war and, as a Bristol-born girl, developed a love of cattle, farming and the land that stayed with her all her life.

The only thing she couldn't deal with was mice - a horror that stemmed from reaching into a big feedsack one cold night and finding her hand in a hot squirming nest of baby mice. Personally I always thought the idea of the floods of cockroaches on the old stone floor around the kitchen range was more alarming, but we all have our own terrors.

My parents were not the only couple to meet because of the Land Army. Many land girls met their future husbands on the farms where they worked. One farmer told his story to Eunice Finney, press officer for the Women's Land Army Tribute Fund: "I had one gentleman from Gloucester who spent hours on the telephone telling me about his late wife and how they had met on a farm in Staffordshire when he was the bailiff (today known as the farm manager) and his late wife was the girl from the Land Army, responsible for milking the cows on the farm. Their eyes met over a cornfield on a starry night and it was love at first sight. He always has fond memories about Valentine's Day as they were married on 14th February."

The WFU has embarked on a special campaign to honour the Land Girls and Lumber Jills of the war time years.

The directors of the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas in Staffordshire have told the county's WFU branch that every week visitors to the Arboretum ask for directions to the memorial to the Land Girls. So the WFU is managing a project to raise funds to create a memorial as a lasting tribute to the Women's Land Army and honour their contribution to British agriculture, during the war years.

The memorial in the Arboretum will take the form of a bronze statue of a Land Girl complete with pitchfork.

So far £10,000 has been raised for the project.

There is a website, www.womens landarmytribute.co.uk, which has an online donating facility and information about why the Land Army should be honoured.

Fanny Charles