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These memories are submitted by Meryl Baldwin and added to the site with her permission.

I was 11 years old and living at home when the war started in Aberbeeg. The war started when we were at church and the Vicar gave it out in church that the war had started. There was a lot of blackout and we had to make sure there was no lights showing outside and my father was an ARP warden. We went to school and had to take gas masks with us. We weren’t too bad for food my father had a good allotment up the garden and we kept chickens as well and my mother would make bread and make jam and things like that she was very versatile. My father used to go up the farm up the top of the mountain and help a lot and he would have little titbits from there…because we were seven of us, but two or three had gone away from home then.
I had a sister and a brother and they had gone away to service as you call it, but one had joined the RAF and the other was a cook in the Wrens. My other sister was in the ATS and I had a sister in the munitions because she didn’t want to go to the war. So we all done our bit in our time.

I remember VE day going up to my mother’s home, because I wasn’t living there then. And they had a big party going on out on the road. Somebody had their windows open and they played the piano and there was a lot of dancing. I remember Lloyd George, he was our Member of Parliament and he came down and there quite a few photos taken.

I joined up as a land girl in 1946 …my other sister joined the same as me. Then I went down to a place called Michaelston y Fedw down near Cardiff and we lived in a hostel with a lot of other girls and we really enjoyed it. We used to have trips into Cardiff we seen Joe Loss and his band when he first started….and then time went on and after Christmas a lot of them weren’t very well and we took the Land Army truck and we all went home….and we got into trouble for that. So they told us we had to go where they put us….so they sent us to Welshpool in mid Wales. It was lovely up there. We went to this hostel up there and it was so flat, and there was a brook running by and then we had so much snow…1947 all that snow, and they sent us all home for two months!

We travelled around a lot and met different people and went to different places. I went to Bridgend and St. Brides in Caerleon and we travelled around quite a bit. We went to a place at Bridgend and that was when they were first doing silage and things like that. They had this big horse going round trampling the stuff in this pit…and I got on the horse and someone gave me a big stick to make him go faster and he reared up in the air so they were telling me to hang on. And I used to do the milking….it’s with a machine, but not like they do today….it was just ordinary stalls and you’d milk the cows as you went along. It was quite interesting I enjoyed it. It must have finished about 1949…the land army, but I stayed on with the farmer I was working. I was working on a farm near Glenusk near Caerleon, and I met Arthur then, my husband, and we finished then. We travelled around a little bit…it was a lovely life....working on the farm.

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