McFALL, MO., Mar. 16 – Well, Molly and Ned, you see, had been hitch-hiking all over the country last summer, you know? Florida, New York, the Dakotas, all over, and they hit Kansas City and run into this friend they’d known in California, a guy they called “Boris,” not because that was his real name but because he was sort of a hairy-chested revolutionary, you know? And Boris tells them about this farm up in Northwest Missouri.

So Molly, who is 23 and a very talented painter, and Ned, who is 20 and is very big for motorcycles and Molly and other things, decide that since they have nothing else much to do, why not join Boris and whomever else is up there and live in a farmhouse and till the soil and get back to nature and things like that, you know?

They thumb their way 80 miles un to this little town called McFall, Mo., and are walking along a dirt road looking for Boris when they run into this girl named Linda, in her early 20’s, who is walking toward them on the same road and they ask her, you know, “Where’s Boris?” and “Where’s this neat farm?” and things like that.

That is how it started for Ned and Molly (although Ned and Molly are not their real names — they asked that other names be used here). Earlier this week, a friend called them and told them he had just read in the newspaper that the three persons who more or less ran that farming commune they had lived on for almost two months were (gasp) former members of the blood-letting Charles Manson “family” of California, and what did they think of that?

“That’s really weird,” said Molly yesterday, seated by her easel in an old farmhouse near here dabbing away at a canvas as she talked about life in a commune. “I mean, it really blew my mind. Why, I remember when the farmers would stand around looking at us, I’d say things like, ‘Who do they think we are, the Manson family?’ ”

Well, what was life in the commune like, anyway? Idyllic? Enrichment of the soul and soil? That sort of scene?

Not quite.

When they first arrived, the 8 or 10 others already there were literally living in filth. Said both Molly and Ned, in separate interviews: “We told them, ‘just cause you raise pigs doesn’t mean you have to live like them.’ ”

The group was living in two old farm houses and a motorless school bus. Present were the three ex-Mansonites, who called themselves the Rev. William Cole, 37, Linda and Patti, both in their early 20’s; young men who went by such names as “Bo,” and “Little John”; other young women with names like “Nancy”; and two infants, one apparently belonging to Linda, the other to Nancy.

It did not take the hitch-hikers long to decide to move into the woods and build their own shack, for the sake of privacy, cleanliness and a desire to disengage themselves from the internal bickering and arguing over such matters as who was going to put in a good day’s work and who was going to he able to avoid work as much as possible, they said.

Then came the dysentery. Seems as though someone was so unfamiliar with rural life that he or she did not realize that after you have drawn water from the well and used it for bathing, you are not supposed to dump the dirty water back into the well.

And as though suffering from dysentery were not bad enough, Ned said, the outhouse was so filthy that most in the group preferred trotting off to the woods when necessary.

Then someone thought he had caught a venereal disease. As Molly explained it, “Everybody got worried. I knew everybody’d been playing around with everybody else except Baxter and me.” (“Baxter,” is Ned — Molly continually referred to him in that way, while Ned, interviewed in the back room of a motorcycle shop in which he works as a repairman, kept referring to “me and Molly” in a manner that revealed both respect and adoration.)

Then came the heat — 100-degree weather, day after day, as they remember it — so that instead of working so much in the fields, “we’d drink beer and play the guitar and go swimming.”

Bill Cole, the leader of the commune, was a likable soul, both said. He seemed to be the only one who knew anything about farming. He hardly qualified as Agriculturalist of the Year, however. The only really outstanding crop on the 200 acres they naively thought they could work were huge tomatoes, Ned said.

“They were really fine tomatoes,” he added, rounding his hands to demonstrate their cantelopian size. “And we had a whole acre of them. But we didn’t have a truck and we couldn’t get them into the city to sell. Linda sold a few around town, but most of them just lay out there. It was terrible.”

Cole, on the other hand, was patient, dealt fairly with the farmers in the area, and worked hard, they said. When Boris nearly burned out the tractor engine (the tractor had been given to them ), Cole did not bawl him out but patiently explained how tractors need oil, Ned recalled. And Molly remembered how philosophically comforting Cole had been when she was telling him one day about being terrified of lightning and thunder.

“He’d say it’s okay to be afraid,” she said, “that that was the first step to being aware.”

Molly also remembered how Cole would become angry when Boris started talking about revolution. He’d tell Boris, “Shut up, I don’t want to hear none of that out here,” she said, and now wonders whether maybe that was because Cole had his fill of such talk when he was with Manson in 1969.

Finally a friend of Ned and Molly visited the commune one Sunday, saw what it was really like and gave them an old truck, gratis, so that they could leave. When they stopped by later, in the fall, everyone else had left too, except Cole, Linda and Patti.

Now these three have left, California lawmen on Cole’s tail, wanting him on a check forgery charge and as an important witness against and others accused of from that “family.”

Boris is now attending university. Some of the others live in a hippie pad here and talk of traveling. Molly will have an art show in Denver soon. Ned is busy repairing motorcycles.

In the field nearest the shacks in which they lived lie hundreds upon hundreds of yellow-orange tomato skins, long since dried and wrinkled by the summer sun and winter cold.

By HARRY JONES JR