Product Description
"A Wartime Winter" and "A Wartime Summer" recreate a year growing the crops which were of such vital importance - wheat, sugar beet, potatoes, flax, and hay. Threaded within the programmes are eyewitness accounts of those who lived through these extraordinary times, as farmers, land girls and housewives.
About the Author
Paul Heiney has been a television reporter for over twenty years, starting with That's Life! He has worked on In at the Deep End, the Travel Show, Food and Drink and, on Radio 4, You and Yours. Recently he has enjoyed getting justice for BBC 1's viewers on Watchdog. In 1990 he transformed his life by taking up traditional farming in Suffolk. For ten years he worked 36 acres with Suffolk Punches, a decade rich with experience as he learned what life must have been like for our farming predecessors. He wrote a diary of his activities for the Times as well as several books. He also created two best-selling videos about farming with horses, Harnessed to the Plough and First Steps to the Furrow, working with his mentors, Roger and Cheryl Clark. Paul had agreed with his wife, fellow broadcaster and writer Libby Purves, that they should have the farm for no more than ten years. After the farm's sale Paul has tried to make more time for his other great passion, sailing. He has also presented for Anglia the popular series A Victorian Summer, eight half-hour programmes that show both sides of traditional farming: the glory of working the land with horses as well as the rigours and difficulties that Victorian farmers faced. 'Working the land', says Paul, 'is about the people who labour on it, so I hope we capture some of the richness of character which defines the countrymen and women of the eastern counties. They remain, for me, farming heroes.'
