大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Jacky Hayward of Hastings Community Learning Centre for 大象传媒 SCR on behalf of Mrs Phyllis Roma Alice Cole and has been added to the site with her permission. Mrs Cole fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I was called up in 1940 at the age of 20, having already been made a war widow. I didn鈥檛 want to go into the armed services and being a lover of the great outdoors I joined the Women鈥檚 Land Army.
After weeding for a week at the old Frederick Road Hospital, several of us were told to pack our bags ready for digs in Uckfield where we were to replace the men on the farms and do the threshing. In a group of four girls we were picked up by taxi at 6.30 am to be taken out to various farms in Uckfield itself as well as Laughton, Isfield, Fletching and many other hamlets.
The four of us were shown how the thresher worked, with the tractor. We discovered how rain stopped play because the belt slipped. We were a happy team and learned the art of threshing quite quickly. After a busy day we鈥檇 be picked up around 4.30 and taken to our digs for, a bath if we were lucky, to get the inevitable dust and dirt off and then for our evening meal.
One girl would stand on top of the machine, a great rumbling pre-historic monster, which throbbed all the time. Another girl on top of the stacks of wheat, corn, oats or barley, would throw the sheaves down to the girl on top of the tractor. It was she who had to cut the bind on the sheaf with a very sharp curved knife with a quick twist of the blade. A man stood opposite her and fed the loose stalks into the ever hungry shaking contraption. The straw that remained, after the cereal was removed was guided back by an elevator which deposited it on the opposite side of the machine. Here the third girl would be raking and spreading it out, as evenly as she could to make a new stack, this time of straw. Of course she had to be helped by a man and most of them were elderly, as the young men had enlisted. The last job of the four was the worst, called the 鈥渃ave-ins鈥�. This was where all the dirt, dust muck, whatever, came out in clouds like a great ogre spilling out its insides. This girl had no help and looked as if she had been down a mine by lunch time. Needless to say lots of tea, cider and water was drunk, especially if the threshing was done in a barn. We didn鈥檛 see each other till break time and were glad when the farmer brought out his cider, it certainly made things go along better.
The forms (yes we had them even then!) had to be signed by the farmer to say that he agreed that the job had been done to his satisfaction. One amusing time we had was when wire netting was put up around the stack towards the end of the thresh, we would see the old boys running around like two year olds shouting and wielding sticks and shovels to wallop the rats as they ran out of the bottom of the sheaves.
Funny memories of country life.

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