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This story was submitted by Joyce Miles in May 2005.

I was in the Women’s Land Army or the Forgotten Army for 3 ½ years. I joined at 16 ½ years, as a Lancashire girl hoping to be sent to Southport, market gardening, but this was not to be. I ended up in Somerset on a tractor depot!

What memories — long hours in the fields, mowing, even flax pulling, sore knuckles and blistered hands — no rubber tyres in those days! We had to fit bands on spud wheels to cross the road.

It was a bit lonely sometimes sitting in a field eating your chunks of bread and cheese (packed up by the landlady) but sometimes you were surrounded by Italian prisoners, digging ditches.

I don’t think all of this did me any harm, probably a world of good and one good thing came out of it — I met my husband who was in the RAF stationed at Lulsgate, now Bristol Airport.

This was the only reward that I got!

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