From the Eastern Daily Press, Skipper's Byways, Wednesday, December 13, 2000.

Timely return for a poignant story
by Keith Skipper

I have tugged together various strands of Lucilla Reeve's poignant story in these columns during the past couple of years.

The Norfolk battler, who took on Breckland's unforgiving soil and military might before committing suicide in 1950, was also featured in a recent BBC Television programme, The Villages That Vanished. [BBC2 East, 9th Nov. 2000]

Despite suggestions from one or two interested parties that her exploits have been afforded an over-generous dash or two of romance, she remains for me a truly compelling and largely sympathetic character.

Yes, she was naive to line up alongside Oswald Mosley on the fascist platform, and she courted more gossip and rumour by cutting her hair short, dressing like a man and tearing around in a little red sports car.

She could divine water. She believed in ghosts. A deeply ingrained stubborn streak came, through in her defiant text: "People have only once to say I can't do anything, and at once 1 decide it can be done."

For all that, it is impossible not to warm to the way she created order out of chaos with physical endurance and mental tenacity-When her farm was taken over by the Army, she lived alone in an old wooden plucking shed waiting for the chance to go home.

Now one Of her three books has been republished to help widen the debate over the part she played in a saga of displaced villagers and broken promises.

Farming, on a Battle Ground by A Norfolk Woman (£9.95) covers her personal and farming experiences from 1938 to 1948. It is slightly different from the original published nearly 50 years ago; at the end of some chapters there are poems taken from her two other volumes, The Pheasants Had No Tails and The Earth No Longer Bare, while photographs from these books are also included.

George Reeve, of Wymondham, the original publisher, is to be congratulated on this timely reprise. Lucilla Reeve remains controversial - but deserves to be heard whenever the story of Breckland's lost villages is told. Perhaps public demand will see her two, other books republished.