Finding Ella Harding

Last Tuesday was our first session at Brambles Care Home in Wye, where we introduced some of the residents to ‘Finding Ella Harding’  - which is a Heritage Lottery funded project being run by Jasper from Funder Films CIC.

Ella Harding was a teenager living in Wye during the First World War, and she kept a diary of the war by sticking newspaper clippings into exercise books, and writing accounts of what happened during the conflict. When she turned sixteen she volunteered at the aerodrome in the village where she spent her time mending planes.

I’m running four creative writing sessions with the residents to give them the opportunity to use the Ella’s diary as inspiration for writing, and to link some of the diary entries to their own lives.

During the war newspapers often published inspirational, patriotic poems, and Ella included some of these in her diaries. On Tuesday we read Big Boy Blue and War Girls by Jessie Pope.

War Girls talks about all the roles that women carried out during the war. It’s somehow comforting to think that despite the horrors of the war, something good came from it, as it was the first time women were able to take on roles that had traditionally been for men, and I wonder how different the world would be without that step forward.