54 K O'Dell Land Army I was a Land Army girl and one memory I have was when my friend and I had a
job to do collecting brussels sprout stalks with a horse and cart and
filling in bomb craters.
The idea was to back the horse and cart to the crater, put the back down and
release the sprout stalks. Being such conscientious girls we pushed the
horse as well as the cart down into the crater - and my friend went down,
too. You can imagine the pandemonium. I yelled for help and eventually some
farm men came running over and.
One had to unharness the horse and another saw to my badly shaken friend
while a tractor pulled out the cart. The dear old horse, Deba, was none the
worse for wear and we carried on with our work, feeling quite sheepish about
the whole affair.
The friend,Vera, still lives in America. She married a GI and moved there
after the War.
It was a great life on the land - hard, hard work, often in the icy cold and
wet, but we did have some lovely summers. We worked till late at night,
cutting corn, stacking sheaves, thrashing, but the worst for all of us was
collecting the ghastly barley chaff with its dirt and prickles in your
clothes in the sweltering heat.
Can any ex-Land Girl remember the lovely harvest teas we had brought out to
us by the farmers' wives? Do they remember cutting the legs off our
dungarees in the summer to get a lovely tan?
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