Interview: Mona Kedslie McLeod - What granny did in the war

• McLeod is active despite her years

WHEN Mona Kedslie McLeod was a teenager she was such a strapping lass that her scientist father was wont to say that if he ever lost his university post, she would be able to keep her parents and her six siblings by becoming a strong woman in a circus.

"I've always been exceptionally strong – I still am," says McLeod, who is still mountaineering at the age of 87, although she looks 20 years younger, with her erect carriage, strikingly handsome features and leonine head of pewter-coloured hair.

"I climbed the Pentland Hills just the other day," she reveals over coffee and biscuits in her beautiful, antiques-filled Edinburgh flat. She looks so fit she could probably still earn a living as a strong woman were she not also a strong-minded historian and prolific author, launching her latest book next week. It's her second about a 19th-century Polish philosopher, whose many links with Scotland she previously explored in From Charlotte Square to Fingal's Cave. Perhaps it was her youthful vim and vigour that encouraged McLeod's father in June, 1940 to announce to his bookish middle daughter, then 17 years old and dreaming of heading for an Oxbridge education, that she was "volunteering" to join the Scottish Women's Land Army. In other words, she'd be digging for victory on a farm in Galloway. She did just that for the next five years – and oh, what a muddy war it was!

"Shortly after Dunkirk, Daddy, who cared about the higher education of women, told me that I would be putting my studies to one side because there was a war to be won," says McLeod.

But now McLeod's wartime adventures are to be featured in a year-long exhibition opening in Edinburgh next week. Land Girls and Lumber Jills, at the National War Museum at Edinburgh Castle, celebrates the contribution of a generation of women like Mona McLeod, who battled on the home front in two world wars.

Recruited into the Scottish Women's Land Army and the Women's Timber Corps, formed in 1917, they fought their war in the fields and on the hills as in Scotland alone, an extra 500,000 acres of land was given over to food production with the help of 8,500 Land Girls and prisoners of war.

The opening of this exhibition could not be more timely. Tomorrow, the president of the National Farmers' Union in Scotland, Jim McLaren, launches an appeal to raise around 60,000 to erect a Scottish memorial to this "forgotten army" of women, whose labours were so vital to the war effort and whose back-breaking work has been ignored by successive governments, who refused them recognition because they were "only volunteers". In 2000, they were finally granted a place at the Cenotaph, in London, for memorial services – albeit having to march last in line – then, in July 2008, they were finally sent medals.

"It's a disgrace, an absolute disgrace the way that the Land Girls, who put food on the nation's tables, have been ignored," says McLeod.

And McLaren concurs: "We should never forget the Land Army girls."

The campaign now has the backing of the Scottish Government and the Crown Estates in Scotland has offered to identify a site for a memorial.

For McLaren, it's personal. His mother, Janie (now 86), was a Land Girl on his late father James's 1,000-acre farm, near Crieff, in Perthshire, which his son still farms today. "I suppose you could say I wouldn't exist but for the Land Army in Scotland," he says. "I feel a lasting memorial is overdue."

But better late than never. For, alongside Land Girls and Lumber Jills, exhibition curator Elaine Edwards's book, Scotland's Land Girls: Breeches, Bombs And Backache, will be published by National Museums Scotland in March, the first book about the women's work north of the Border.

As both McLeod and Edwards note, the harsh reality for these toiling women – "I had chilblains everywhere," McLeod shudders – was nothing like the harvest of golden memories suggested by films such as the cloyingly sentimental Anna Friel vehicle, The Land Girls, or BBC 1's recent Sunday afternoon serial, Land Girls, starring Summer Strallen and Nathaniel Parker, in which there was more rolling in the hay than baling of the stuff.

"Ha!" exclaims McLeod dismissively when I mention these sunlit romps. All she can say is that for five years she was far too bone-weary to do anything other than sleep, because she worked so hard five-and-a-half days a week on the Armstrongs' farm, near Gatehouse of Fleet. That would have pleased her deeply religious father, a sculpture of whom sits on a table beside us as we talk. It's a copy of the Jacob Epstein original in Leeds University, where Professor Walter McLeod was a renowned bacteriologist.

"I could have joined the Land Army in Yorkshire, but Daddy said he'd investigated and rejected York University farm because it was surrounded by RAF stations. 'Therefore, not a good idea,' he said. Perhaps I should explain that my father was an expert on venereal disease – his first, great breakthrough research work was about it, because he'd seen so much when he served in the First World War.

"So, I came to Scotland in July to a fairly isolated farm, where I'd once been as a Girl Guide. Within a week I was making hay. What is so extraordinary was that I was neither annoyed, shocked nor horrified. Daddy did all this without consulting me. Yet I never questioned it."

Obediently, she pulled on her "totally inadequate" uniform. "It really was a disgrace: short-sleeved Aertex blouses, one green woollen sweater, a hat, a very nice dress overcoat, which looked super over breeches, but you couldn't work in it, two pairs of cotton dungarees, which you wore over cotton breeches, which were so badly cut that if they fitted, you couldn't sit down and if they were comfortable, they looked like balloons. You got long woollen socks, a cotton coat and a dress raincoat. No gloves. It was totally inadequate for working out of doors all winter. I even had chilblains on my ears! Eventually, I got my brother's old sports coats and wore layers."

Born and raised in Leeds, where she was educated at the Girls' High School, then at Skipton High School, McLeod is of good Scots stock. Her parents met at Glasgow University and her mother Jean Garvie's family were linen manufacturers from Perth, who lived in Poland for 100 years. Her father was from Dumbarton. McLeod grew up surrounded by people speaking fluent Russian, German, French and Polish and – in her mother's case – Gaelic.

Coming from a privileged, educated family, McLeod says she doesn't wish to sound snobbish but the farmer for whom she worked was "thick – really stupid!" Nonetheless, she was treated well by him and his "much more intelligent" wife. The only Land Girl for miles around, she was desperately lonely, missing family traditions such as civilised debates and huge Sunday afternoon teas attended by academics and students from all over the world. She got one week off with pay a year, but always took another week's unpaid leave, saving up out of her salary of 12s 6d (65p) a week to buy her train ticket, because she couldn't bear to be away from her family at Christmas. At weekends she'd cycle to Kirkcudbright, a round-trip of 18 miles, to shop and have tea at the air-sea rescue canteen.

"So much for Daddy's fears about me meeting young servicemen!" In fact, she met and fell in love with her first husband, Norman Tennent, a member of the brewing family, while working as a Land Girl, conducting an epistolary romance since he was soon posted overseas. They married after the war and had three daughters, only one of whom survives. She divorced Tennent when she was in her forties.

Now widowed – her second husband, Robert, to whom she was blissfully married for more than 20 years, died two years ago – she's planning to write a memoir for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, about their rich family history and what granny did in the war.

Today, she insists she wouldn't have missed being a Land Girl for anything. It opened up a whole new world and made a woman of her, although she'd have preferred to serve three years rather than five. "It was much too long," she sighs, adding that all that hard work made her even physically stronger. In five years she was ill only twice: once with an ear infection and another time she was concussed and rushed to hospital. "I'd been trying to ride two bicycles at once," she confesses. The food was good and plentiful. "We ate meat every day, a full cooked breakfast every morning, a huge lunch and high tea. The outdoor life was terribly healthy, despite having to work in all weathers. Of course, books were my saviour."

All that hoeing – "the most awful job!" – threshing and hoisting of bales, muck-spreading, digging potatoes, horse-warming, and toting hundredweight (50kg) bags of turnips and fodder on her back meant that she probably could have done that circus act had she been so minded. Instead, she gained a first-class honours degree in history and fine art at Edinburgh University.

"I really was strong as an ox. For years, I never wore sleeveless dresses because I had enormous muscles in my upper arms – awfully embarrassing and unattractive."

Land Girls and Lumber Jills, National War Museum, Edinburgh Castle, February 26 to February 2011. For details of the Land Girls memorial appeal, contact Sarah Anderson at NFU Scotland: 0131 472 4000, [email protected].