Millions Like Us - Women's Lives in War and Peace 1939-1949

Naomi Mitchison imagined an Atlantic crossing in a herring boat, wondering how much luggage she cut fit in with the diesel oil

Members of the Women's Timber Corps at Shanford Lodge, Brechin, main; a woman chopping down a tree at Bowmount, Roxburghshire; writer Naomi Mitchison with a Free French officer, a guest at Carradale House in 1943, left

In December 2007, 60 years after their organisations were disbanded, 20,000 former members of the Women's Land Army and the Women's Timber Corps were informed that they were finally to be awarded a special badge in recognition of their contribution to the Second World War.

One of these was Kay Wight, now aged 83. On the day of the announcement, as a lively veteran of WLA reunions, Kay gave several enthusiastic interviews to the Scottish media, along the lines of "Better late than never…"

A few months later a small parcel dropped on her doormat. Inside was the "special" badge, unimpressively mass-produced in her view ("not a badge I would have ever put on a jacket"), accompanied by a perfunctory certificate: "Not even my name on it! Not a thing!" The signature was photocopied.

STV phoned the next day. Could she comment on the report that 50 Land Army veterans had been invited to a reception at Downing Street?

"I said, that's the first I've heard of it." So who was going to this reception? Forty-nine English ladies, it turned out, and one from Scotland. "Well, then I blew my top. Just one lady… And I thought about it. And I thought, damn it, I have helped to make this cause known. So I wrote a letter, saying, 'If you can only think of one lady in Scotland to go to Downing Street to receive this badge, and I'm not one of them, nor hundreds more like me, well, you can have it back!'

"And I sent it back, and not a word did I ever get back from them."

Mrs Wight's indignation has often been in my mind since I set out, four years ago, to try to tell the story of the generation of women who lived through the war and its aftermath. More than the offhand negligence of officialdom, Kay minded the impersonality with which she and her kind were fobbed off. As she saw it: "Get those badges sent out and shut them up."

Historians can be equally guilty of indifference towards the individual when it comes to describing the past. I was determined to adopt a different approach when I decided to chronicle the period 1939-1949 almost entirely through personal accounts. But how was I to select representative stories from the thousands there were to choose from? It seemed best to rely on intuition rather than method, and to trust in my documentary-trained instincts for "a good story". A typically feminine approach, some might say, but perhaps all the more suited to a book attempting to reconstruct a tumultuous decade through the eyes of the women who lived it.

Which was how I found myself in Mrs Wight's front room. I'd come to Scotland having discovered that the WLA had an active veterans' organisation based in Edinburgh. My first octogenarian interviewee, Isa Rankin, offered a humanising picture of wartime in the glens. Isa had been an accomplished tap-dancer; her hostel in East Lothian turned out to be a mine of performing talent, only too willing to help raise money for the Land Army Benevolent Fund. Their signature tune was:

We're in the Land Army

We think we'll all go barmy

If this goes on for years and years and years …

Today, the concerts remain the high spot of Isa's war: "We didn't get to bed till about two in the morning… On Saturday mornings you'd get up and think 'Och, we've got to lift manure…' Well, we could hardly lift the fork, never mind the fork with the manure on it!"

My second visit was to Mrs Park, a slight, woman who joined the Timber Corps in 1942. It was hard to imagine such a small person undertaking such arduous labour. Jean was out in all weathers felling, cross-cutting and stacking the timber by hand.

No stranger to hard work, she'd been employed as housemaid to a landowner in Inveraray from the age of 14. Post-war, married to her ex-prisoner-of-war boyfriend Jim, she recounted their struggle to find accommodation, and Jim's insistence - despite her having proved she could work - that she remain at home.

"I kept talking to Jim about getting a job, but it was 'Oh no! I'll keep my wife'." Jean's interview put a face on the statistics. By the end of the 1940s, two-thirds of women aged 20-64 had returned to full-time housework.

Kay Wight's story also mirrored the experiences of thousands of her contemporaries.

Aged 15, Kay was apprenticed to a dressmaker; her time in the Land Army made no concessions to her youth, but it boosted her confidence: "At the beginning the men told us we were useless, with our soft hands and posh Edinburgh way of talking … But I must admit that when I could thin neeps and lift tatties a bit better, it made me feel really good. To think: 'Oh, I can do as good as you now!' "

But Kay's great love remained sewing and, like so many, she spent the war years dreaming of new clothes. "That was what we saw the future as being. A free life, being able to go into the shops, buy materials and make a new dress. I was going to sew for Scotland!"

Living memory gives a tangibility to history. But contemporary diaries lack the freight of hindsight, and have the edge when it comes to immediacy. Reading Naomi Mitchison's war diary brought me up close to the real fear felt in Britain in summer 1940, when invasion seemed imminent.

In May 1940 Naomi was at Carradale House, Kintyre, expecting her seventh child. She records that she was sick and experiencing nightmares, but she also reflects on her intellectual position. In the light northerly summer evenings Naomi had leisure to read, and a history of the Scottish kirk prompted thoughts about ideology and hate.

"Must there be hate in order to be life?" As France fled from the Nazi advance, what did it tell its young men as they prepared to die for their country? Those early Scottish martyrs had been certain of heaven. Was courage dependent on superstition? Was the cowardice that she felt a luxury, to be shed if her own family were threatened? Naomi tried to look coolly at the likely outcome of an invasion, and concluded that, as a committed left-wing activist, she would almost certainly be sent to a concentration camp. The family might have to flee. She imagined an Atlantic crossing in a herring boat, wondering how much luggage she could fit in alongside the diesel oil. 'It seems fantastic…' On 30 May she noted that she had bitten her nails very badly, '… a thing I have not done for months.'

Naomi Mitchison could see that the war was bound to cause terrible loss of life and huge unhappiness. Against this, all her instincts as a thinking, educated person, but also as a woman and a mother, recoiled. Mitchison's reflections - her impulse to save herself and her family - raise fascinating questions about women's attitudes to war.

Was this a kind of intellectual paralysis, reserved for the over-educated minority - thinkers, not doers - or was it the involuntary reflex of every woman who has ever lived and loved, to save, to hide, and to protect? Organised violence revolted women like her; the expression of hate through force offended against the deep-seated need of her sex to build nests and to nurture. "Can we also not love?" she cried. But as the Nazi armies rolled inexorably across northern France, history was now on the side of the doers.

Yes, the real war was fought by men; the real victory was the men's victory, and history is written by the winners.

But a bigger story has remained unwritten. While our servicemen returned from battle in 1945 entrenched in their view of themselves as the superior sex, women emerged from the war transformed. Deep down, they no longer bought the myth that women were inferior. Millions Like Us is their story.

Kay Wight's, Isa Rankin's, Jean Park's, Naomi Mitchison's, and millions like them across Britain. A special badge? Each and every woman who lived through that time came out marked for ever.

• Millions Like Us - Women's Lives in War and Peace 1939-1949 by Virginia Nicholson is available now, published by Viking, priced 25. The publication was serialised earlier this month as a Radio 4 Book of the Week.