Author and Land Army girl celebrates 100th birthday

A WOMAN who wrote several books inspired by her time in the Land Army has turned 100.

Eve Diett celebrated her birthday at home in Britwell Road, Watlington, with family and friends on Thursday last week.

Guests, which included her children, Michael Diett, Christina Nixon and Karen Oliver, enjoyed tea and birthday cake.

Her fourth child, Susan Bujard-Diett, had attended a family party at the Fat Fox Inn in Watlington on Saturday, January 3, before returning home to Switzerland.

Mrs Diett had received a 100th birthday card from King Charles III and Queen Camilla that morning.

“It’s marvellous to have this card,” she said. “I’ve never had so many cards in all my life. I can’t believe that I’m 100 — I don’t feel any different.”

Mrs Diett has published two books, Here Come the Land Girls (2006) and The Diary of a NAAFI Girl (2012).

Her first book formed the basis of a play, Lilies on the Land, which toured England in 2011 and 2012.

It featured four women who signed up to become part of the women’s Land Army during the Second World War.

Mrs Diett said: “I wrote my first book in pencil to start out with, so I could rub it out with an eraser.

“When I finished it, I sent it away thinking nobody would bother about it. But then they wrote back and asked if I could send them more.”

Mrs Diett had joined the Land Army in 1942, when she was 16, having lied about her age. She recalled: “To join the Land Army, I had to put my age up a year because I didn’t want to work in the ammunition factory like my family wanted. You had to be 17 to join the Land Army.

“As soon as I left school, which had been taken over for munitions, I was very sad because I didn’t want to leave school.

“I thought, I’ve got to escape. I’m 16 years of age. I’ve got to escape and in the Land Army I used to drive the tractors, I tried everything.”

Mrs Diett then joined the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) where she met her husband Bill, from Watlington, who was a butcher at the camp she was working in.

She said: “Bill used to come and stand by my bar and I remember saying ‘Haven’t you got anywhere else to go?’ He said he didn’t, adding: ‘I like looking at you’, which I told him I didn’t like.

“I told him that he was embarrassing me in front of all these soldiers because they were all coming back from the front to buy their essentials from my shop. I was trying to do that and he was standing there and driving me up the wall.”

But eventually the couple married at St Leonard’s Church, in Pyrton Lane. Mrs Diett also told of how she knew the Cadbury family growing up in Worcester, where she was born in 1926.

She said: “When I was about eight or nine, they [the Cadburys] used to take us out. They lived behind our house — they had a big house at the back.

“I used to be invited to tea and I used to sit there and I wouldn’t eat. It was because I was shy, you are more so when you’re a little kid, I think, than when you’re older. I couldn’t eat, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was shy.”

Mrs Diett recalled how her nine-year-old brother walked home when Coventry was being bombed in 1940 and the sky was “all flames”.

She said: “As we were walking, I could feel something hot over my head and I looked up into the face of a German pilot. At the side of the road was a little ditch.

“I got my brother by his braces and threw him in the ditch and I said, ‘Get right down’. I went in after him and, as the bullets were going past us at the top, the mud was going into my hair.

“I was angrier about the mud in my hair because I used to keep it in curls. I was more worried about that than being shot at. Eventually they went.

“We climbed out and we were absolutely filthy with all the rubbish, mud, bits of cigarette packets, old buttons, everything. And the houses were ruined. There were no cats, no dogs, absolutely nothing.”

Ms Oliver, Mrs Diett’s youngest daughter, said that Mrs Diett had also written another book, which hasn’t yet been published.

She added: “It’s about when she was a housekeeper and when she used to do dinner parties. She’s got quite a few good stories!”