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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by RICHARD FIELD on behalf of MARGARET MORLAND and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

By Margaret Morlan d
(as related to Richard Field)

When war broke out I was doing a routine clerical job at the Barnsley Co-op but when my compulsory call-up papers came, my friend, Nancy and I decided to enrol in the Women’s Land Army.
We were kitted out with corduroy breeches and jumper and dinky hat and sent off to join 40 other girls to live in a hostel in Knaresborough.
Neither Nancy nor I knew anything much about the country. We’d lived in the town all our lives although we did go into the country for walks and picnics.
Suddenly our lives changed. No more lying in bed in the morning, or having our meals cooked for us, or doing a job in a warm office.
Now we had to be up soon after 6 o’clock in the morning, given a quick breakfast and then we were bussed or cycled to some local farm, stopping only briefly for sandwiches at midday and keeping going until 6 at night. When we got back to the hostel we were so exhausted that all we could do was to fall into our bunk beds and sleep!
The work we did was heavy and dirty and tiring.
In the summer we were kept busy cleaning the machinery, sometimes leading the heavy horses, and sometimes forking sheaves of corn. After the harvest we helped with the threshing, another hot and dusty job.
We got so hot it we could hardly breathe.
In the winter we worked in freezing conditions, pulling sugar beet, or topping turnips or mangels. One afternoon after spending hours sorting carrots in the freezing outdoors I got so cold that I fainted.
My grandmother heard about this and let me have some of her clothing coupons so I could buy a pair of trousers to wear under my uniform. That certainly helped!
A few of the men on the farms didn’t really like us girls, and made life difficult for us. I remember one of them, seeing me loading hay, kept it coming at such a rate I couldn’t possibly keep up. He just resented girls doing men’s work.
At the hostel we didn’t have much time for relaxation. However, there was a piano and since I was the only one who could play it, I was in some demand.
There were soldiers living in barracks quite nearby, and they quickly came to appreciate the attraction of having 40 girls almost next door. They really became quite a nuisance and in the end we had to tell them they could only come by invitation!
After living six months in the hostel, Nancy and I were invited to go and live in at the farm of Mr Harry Blaken at Monkton Mains, near Bishop Monkton. They were very kind to us.
The house was quite large but in a few ways it was quite primitive. It didn’t have a bathroom so we had to use an earth lavatory in the garden. We even had to share a bed.
They had one of the early tractors and two heavy horses and we used to lead them while the men went behind doing the ‘scruffling’ (weeding). The horses were huge. You had to be careful they didn’t tread on your toes!
While I was at Monkton Mains, I used to walk to Bishop Monkton to attend chapel, and it was there that I met Ken, the son of a local farmer, who was to become my husband.
Our courtship was not very glamorous. Just occasionally we went to the cinema and sometimes attended an event in the village, but that was about all.
Ken’s father died when he was only 23 and so he had to take charge of the farm which kept him very busy. Of course, when we married I became the farmer’s wife which was quite a new experience.
One of our guests at one of our Christmas dinners was Gustav Braun, whom we had met at chapel and who had been a German prisoner-of-war at the local POW camp near Newby Hall, just outside the village.
Gustav, and later his wife, became very good friends of ours, and they used to visit us after the war, and my husband and I went over to see them in Germany in the 1960s.
Only a few weeks ago Gustav’s daughter, Gretie Rausch, came over from Germany to visit my son, Howard and his wife. So a long Anglo-German family friendship, which started when Ken and I invited Gustav to Christmas lunch at the end of the war, is still alive today in a new generation.

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