10:55am Thursday 31st July 2008
IT was, says Alderholt grandmother Rita Smith, a wonderful day - and one that Prime Minister Gordon Brown said was long overdue.
Rita, 86, was one of 50 former Land Girls invited to Downing Street last week to receive a badge of honour in recognition of the war work undertaken by the Women's Land Army.
The 50 had been selected at random to represent the 30,000 women who will receive their badges in the coming days.
When war broke out, some of them had never seen a cow before, let alone milked one, but before the war was over, thousands of women were pulling pints in a way they had never previously imagined.
Others had learned to plough a straight furrow, plant potatoes, tend pigs and other livestock, and make hay while the sun shone - and even when it did not.
Another 6,000 worked with the forestry commission as part of the Timber Corps.
Across the land, the Land Girls and Lumber Jills became familiar sights in their uniform dungarees, filling the places in the fields and farms left by the men conscripted into the services.
In December last year, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn announced that former members of the WLA and WTC could apply for the badge of honour and was overwhelmed by the response.
Rita was one of them and thought no more of it until a phone call from the Land Army Association a few weeks ago invited her to Downing Street.
"I nearly went through the floorboards," she says.
But last Wednesday, she and her daughter Jan set off for London.
"I haven't been on a train for 30 years and I'd never been in a London taxi cab, so that was a novelty - I couldn't stop giggling," says Rita.
The day started at DEFRA House where the women were welcomed by Hilary Benn before being shepherded on to coaches and taken to Downing Street.
"We went through the famous door and up the stairs with all the lovely photographs of prime ministers.
"I thought: I can't believe this," says Rita.
After Hilary Benn presented each of them with their medal, Gordon Brown arrived.
"We have been slow to thank you," he said.
"We could have done this years ago but I'm pleased that we can do it now.
"We owe you a huge debt of gratitude."
He invited them all to tour the cabinet room and the gardens and made a point of speaking to each of them individually, Rita said.
She had joined up in 1941 just as she turned 18, keen to stay near her home in Boveridge and near a young serviceman in the searchlight regiment based at Cranborne, (with whom she was going out and to whom she has now been married for 65 years).
"At 18, you could be called up anywhere and to any service.
"I was a country girl and I wanted to do land work so I joined the Land Army before I could be called up.
"I started work just down the hill from my home on a fruit farm at Biddlesgate.
"I tended the fruit, cleaned out the pigs and tended the ferrets."
She learned how to grow strawberries, how to thatch and how to plough a field with a motorised hand plough.
"At the end of the row, you had to lift the plough onto your shoulders, not let the engine die and turn very quickly and let it go down to do the next row, but the engine invariably cut out and I'd have to yell for help at that point," she says.
Rita moved onto what is now Cranborne Gardens.
"We had a slightly eccentric head gardener at Cranborne who was mad keen on keep fit and would do cartwheels from one end of the pathway to the other.
"But I learned a lot from him - everything about vegetable gardening."
He encouraged her to keep a diary about what she had to do, which she is now passing on to her grandchildren.
"The army had taken over Lord Salisbury's Dowager House and there were some beautiful lawns there," she says.
"We dug up those lovely lawns to grow potatoes."
Their produce supplied the army and the American soldiers, based locally, and the villagers of Cranborne.
"We'd go round the village on Friday evenings and take an order for what they wanted and then deliver it on a little trolley round the village on Saturdays."
On the whole, says Rita, she enjoyed her war.
"I was out in the fresh air, learnt a lot about gardening and I've been gardening ever since."
Land Girl power
"I was born on a farm and lived on a farm so I knew what farm work was all about.
She was sent to Knutsford and from there to a farm in Peover in Cheshire where she was the only woman working alongside seven men, who doubted her ability to lift and bale hay.
"All I got from the seven men was I bet you can't do that," she recalls, "and I showed them I could, so they quietened down.
"You were out in all weathers - you just went and did the job.
"I remember being tired out.
"I think when you are so young you don't think about how important the work was.
"The war was on and you felt you had to do your duty - you were helping to fight a war."
But she enjoyed the work so much that she stayed on until January 1947.
Caroline, who lives in Newton Tony, says: "Harvest time was great fun - long hours and hard work with the old threshing machines. It was so dusty - you went home looking like a chimney sweep."
She found herself working alongside German POWs.
"They didn't want to be in the war, they were so sorry about it - they didn't want the war any more than we did," she says.
"They used to sling the dung from the tractor and we used to break it up between the rows," recalls Jeanette, who was just 16 when she joined up and was sent to Hatfield on milking duty but then transferred to general farmwork in Welwyn Garden City.
"You used to get it in your hair and all sorts."
Elsie was a Londoner and was sent off to Clacton-on-Sea to do market gardening and Sadie was a city girl living in Birmingham, who found herself driving tractors and cherry-picking, scaling 30ft ladders.
"We used to go out in the forest and help plant the trees.
"I like outdoor work - I'm still an outdoor woman at my age."
"We started at 7.30am until 5.30pm and in the dark evenings we had to do fire patrol and sometimes didn't get home until 10 at night."
Midway through the war, Joan married and became Mrs Gulliver and moved to Bowerchalke, but she continued to work for the forestry commission until she had her first baby.
"It was real hard work but I thoroughly enjoyed it - they were the best years of my working life."
Carer Corina Ball presented the framed certificate and medal to Wendy, who had no idea about what had been going on behind the scenes.
She said: "It was all a long time ago. I don't know what all the fuss is about. We were just doing what had to be done."
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