Land Girls at the Old Rectory

It was 1942 and Britain was running out of food. Twenty-year-old Irene Gibbs had always fancied working on the land rather than in the cigarette factory so she volunteered for the Women’s Land Army. She was billeted with 30 other “town gals” at the Old Rectory, Halesworth in Suffolk. Irene and her land-army friends had had no farm experience and were unable to distinguish a bull from a cow – something they soon learned. Irene describes with wry affection how they came to terms with back-breaking weeks of hoeing, the dusty work of threshing and the more relaxed days of harvest. The land girls were high-spirited and adventurous. Besides farm work they took in their stride the army on maneouvres and the US airforce, not to mention hitch-hiking, wall-climbing and some long-suffering hostel wardens. They also had to deal with a wide range of farmers who varied from the hospitable to quite the opposite.