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This story has been submitted to the People's War website personally by Margaret Eccleston and added to the site with her permission.

I was born and brought up in Manchester, a city girl, so why did I join the Land Army?
I had a choice of the Forces or 12 hour day and night shifts in Engineering. I chose the lesser of two evils and set off by train to Swaffham Prior in Cambridgeshire, not knowing what to expect, to a place I had never heard of. On arrival, I found I was one of fifty girls all from Lancashire and billeted in a beautiful old house set in acres of land. I was to share a bedroom with three other girls on the third floor, which was obviously the maids’ quarters pre-war. We spent an hilarious hour trying on our uniforms before we went to bed. The next day we started work. Woken at 6.00 am Washed, dressed and beds made and breakfast at 6.30 am. We were divided into gangs of twelve or so, piled onto the back of an open topped lorry and, off to work by 7.00 am. With a packet of sandwiches and a half box of tea, which is a box into which an urn of tea is placed and packed round with hay. By lunchtime, the tea has become stewed and tepid but, beggars cannot be choosers.
Our first job was helping to clear the fens ready for future sewing of vegetables etc. We chopped down bushes, dug out weeds and tree stumps. It was quite a christening! We spent our first evening comparing aches, pains and blisters. It took time but we did settle down.
The jobs varied with the seasons. Everything was done manually sixty years ago. No Combines at harvest times, just hard work and long hours, following the tractor round, gathering and setting up the sheaves, which later had to be pitch forked onto a trailer and built into stacks. Which eventually had to be threshed, a dirty and sometimes scary job because as the stack got lower, so the rats started to emerge. A wire fence was put round the stack and a couple of dogs put inside the fence. We girls had to carry on working with our trouser legs tied up with string!
We were sometimes sent out in ones and twos to outlying farms. I was allocated to one such farm to help with muck spreading, when I met Farmer. A huge shire horse, which scared me to death, and he knew this. I had to harness him to a cart which I had loaded with the oldest and most ripe manure. Getting him to the field was a nightmare, he took absolutely no notice of any command I made, he just stopped whenever he felt like it and chewed the grass near the hedgerows. My next job was to climb into the cart up to the top of my wellies in the load and shovel it out as far as I could until the cart was empty. This journey had to be made several times. The final straw at the end of a terrible day was leading the horse and cart back to the farmyard. I forgot the cart was wider than the horse and took one of the gate posts with me. I didn’t last the week out there. Potato picking was another back breaking job. Then there was the riddling, a machine with three layers of wire netting. The potatoes were loaded at the top and a large handle, like an old fashioned mangle, had to be turned, small ones fell to the bottom, medium in the middle, large on top. Small potatoes were sent to the jam factory to bulk out the fruit in jam. There was fruit picking in the summer. Apples and strawberries, etc. We were allowed to eat as much as we wanted but after a couple of days we were sick of them. I still don’t like strawberries. In the winter, we did not work such long hours but there was always plenty of work to do, which kept us reasonably warm. At lunchtime, we would gather bits of wood and twigs to make a fire, and then toast our sandwiches. Have you ever tasted toasted cheese butties, flavoured with wood smoke and whatever you happened to be working on that morning because hygiene was non existent. Hand washing was nothing but spit on a hanky and toilet facilities was the nearest large bush! Social life was quite good. We had the Army under canvas in the grounds of the hostel and an R.A.F. camp a couple of miles away, so there were cinema shows and dances, there was a local pub where half a shandy was 4 old pennies (about 2 new pence today). One or two of us hitch-hiked into London a few times and stayed at the Y.W.C.A. We danced to Joe Loss and his Orchestra at the Hammersmith Palais. We had to get permission for this so it didn’t happen very often, especially as doodle bugs were very busy at this time.
I could go on, writing this has brought back so many memories. Like the times the girls in the downstairs dormitory would charge six old pennies to leave the window open and sign you in. If you had a special date, signing in was before ten o clock, Lights out at 10.30, and these rules were tightly kept (or so the matron thought!).
On the whole we had a good time, made lots of friends, and for almost four years I was a Land Girl, not a farm-hand, there is a difference, I loved it and all the twenty five shillings a week (one pound 25 pence)

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