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This story was submitted to the People’s War Site by Doreen Oaks for Three Counties Action, on behalf of Vera Rose Jones, and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Cows! Thirty of them, to be precise, were my life for four years of my war. I worked for them, with them and even fought back at them when they knocked me off my stool.

I was nearly seventeen and working in a factory, in Hackney, London, but the time soon came when I would be called up. I didn’t want to go into the forces and opted for the Land Army. When I became eighteen I was posted to somewhere in Norfolk, where there were a lot of land girls. We were each asked if we would like to go into a large unit and live in huts, or go to a small farm and be with a family. I chose the latter and was sent to a small farm near Ipswich.

At first we were given only dungarees and a jacket. When the uniforms were issued I didn’t wear mine much as I didn’t socialise (I was much too tired and spent my free time relaxing), and didn’t go home; my Nan (who I’d lived with) had been bombed, although was safe, and my mother was evacuated with my brothers.

The Land Army, I think, was never given the recognition it deserved, and somehow felt that as we were packed off on the land we were forgotten. We didn’t have the privileges the forces had. For instance, we couldn’t use the NAAFI canteens, and it was the Salvation Army that fed and looked after us, off duty. No other official bodies came to see if we needed more clothing or to enquire as to our welfare.

The cows needed milking then, cleaning, feeding and mucking out. I worked alongside the farmer, his wife and children, and it was very hard going. We were out at six every morning and I did so for nearly four years.

There were no machines to do the milking then; all done by hand. Many a kick I received from the cows and was sent flying, covered in milk showered over me from the bucket. It was a painful and mucky process at times, and when the calves were born it was an even more painful and mucky process.

I loved the life and didn’t want to go home. Nan had died and my mother was still away. The boys went into the forces; one went into the army and was killed in Singapore, one died in a minesweeper, which was sunk, the third was a pilot who crashed in Scotland and had his legs severed, although survived. My fourteen-year-old brother left home one day and didn’t come back. It was assumed that he’d been killed in an air-raid — he was never traced.

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