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This story has been submitted to the People’s War website by Anne Wareing of the Lancashire Home Guard on behalf of Gladys Curtis and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was sixteen and a half when war broke out and living in London. My grandparents lived in Lincoln so I went to stay with them. Eventually my parents left London and also moved to Lincoln.

I went to work in the offices of Ruston and Hornsby and met a friend there who was joining the Land Army, so I decided to go along and join also.

I went to Bourne in Lincolnshire for training and ended up working with the Forestry Commision, during various jobs in the woods, planting trees and the like.

There were many girls there from all parts of the country, some, like a friend of mine only stayed for four days, something I have teased her about ever since and some like me who stayed in the service for four years.

After eighteen months we formed the Women’s Timber Corp and our ‘pork pie’ hats were changed to green berets.

Following this I went to Wetherby for a further four weeks training, measuring trees and learning how to access them for their suitability for pit props and railway sleepers. Three friends and I went down to Gloucestershire, we were billeted with a lady with four children at a house at Inglestone Common.

We worked at the local sawmill along with a group of Spanish prisoners of war who were working under the command of some New Zealanders. The work was hard and very physical, but we were young and fit.

After this my friends and I were split up I went to Sherbourne where the work there was mostly making pit props. I was billeted in a farmhouse and the food wasn’t as good as we had been getting before. I remember we complained and sent for Miss Evans the Welfare Officer from Bristol. She arrived to talk to us with a bag full of buns, to placate us I think.

Eventually I moved to Bedminster just outside Bristol, they used to collect us in trucks to take us to where we would work for the day, we worked from 7am to 5pm, a long working day. By this time I had been in the service four years, I then suffered appendicitis and had to have an operation to remove my appendix, this finished my time in the Land Army. I worked until the end of the war in the W.L.A. offices at Lincoln.

When I came out I received a certificate of thanks from the then Princess Elizabeth, this certificate I still have.

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