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Mrs Gladys Hoskins — Tenbury Wells

I was in the Land Army and on VE Day I was living in Tenbury. On VE day everybody was so excited that they cleaned out the whole of the cattle market and held a dance and big get together for the whole town. The great thing was light because all the lights were switched on again.

I had spent the whole winter working on a threshing box going around different farms.

I had been living in Tenbury’s Land Army hostel on Bromyard Road with 51 other girls, of which 26 were from Yorkshire, when they were asked for two volunteers to go threshing. I hadn’t a clue what threshing was but being a Yorkshire girl I put my hand up because it was more money. What a revelation it turned out to be. I was assigned to cut the bands. This was done climbing a ladder to the top of the machine with it grinding away, and cutting binders and feeding the sheaves into the machine.

In early spring I became very ill from all the dust and couldn’t work for a couple of weeks. The forewoman came to see me and said that the vicar of Lindridge had a private land girl who had to go back to Birmingham into hospital and was looking for someone to replace her.

The forewoman said they thought it would be a nice little job for me. As it turned out, the first thing the vicar had to do was to teach me to milk a cow, but there was also a pig and a huge garden.

When a farmer came to the hostel from Berrington needing someone able to milk cows I was the only one who knew how to milk so I ended up on a dairy farm. One day I was working in the garden with the vicar who had a great sense of humour. He was due to do a funeral and as the hearse came up the drive he dashed through the back door coming out the front with robes on, still wearing his work boots. When he came back he said that’s another one planted.

When we went out to the fields we were only given two pieces of bread and a small piece of cheese and a slice of cake if we were lucky — not much when you were working in the fields all day. Some farmers wives used to feed us and one in particular. We were called into the kitchen to find on the table a huge bowl of cream and apple pie. The farms had the milk and fruit to cook with so I got to eat fruit and could even send fruit home to my mother, which would arrive the next day.

The conditions in the hostel were good, being a cross between the army and a boarding school. We were a proper army with an army number. I can still remember mine 114592. Like the army, we had to go wherever we were sent and had no choice. I had joined the Land Army after working in a mill, which was a reserved occupation making the cloth for all the uniforms. I would have liked to have joined earlier and have had more of a choice, but by the time I was released in 1943 and conscripted, the only choice was the land army or working in munitions working under ground in the factory filling shells. I had some friends who did this very dangerous job, they used to come out with yellow skin and hair so I thought working in the fresh air would be better and when I went to the local recruiting office in Huddersfield, I managed to join the Land Army.

After VE day we still had to carry on working on the farms but in a more relaxed atmosphere.

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