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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 Sylvia Horner and has been added to the site with her permission…

I was eleven and at a Welsh public school as a boarder. We were all encouraged to give service in any way. The music teacher received half a ton of wool after Christmas in 1941, 1942, and 1943 and five hundred of us knitted it up in the next three months in to pullovers, balaclavas, socks and scarves.

In the summer holidays of these years thirty of us volunteered to do farm work in the Vale of Glamorgan. We lived in six bell tents and a church hall in which we ate. We were sent out in pairs to work for various farmers and we all became very good at stooking, pitching, loading and stacking oats and barley, potato picking, planting, dipping sheep and thistle scything.

In the evenings the thirty of us would collect in one bell tent and sing, anything from hymns with descants to bawdy and community songs.

There was one tap across the lane and a limited supply of hot water from kettles on an old fashioned range outside the church hall. My friend and I took a galvanized bath filled it with water and put it behind a canvas screen, angled in the corner of the building. Here we would have a nightly ‘all over wash’ in the black out. One night I dropped her torch in the water, so it really was dark. We washed our faces first, and then gave each other permission to stand in the water.

At the end of our three weeks hard labour we had earned the princely sum of 7s.9d. (seven shillings and nine pence) each.

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