Medal Joy for ex-Leavenheath Land Army girl, Doreen.

A former Women's Land Army girl has been honoured with a medal for her efforts working on Suffolk farms just after the Second World War.

Phyllis Symonds, 81, known as Doreen, received the award for her contribution to the war effort by working the land between 1946 and 1950.

Mrs Symonds of Kiln Drive, Great Cornard, volunteered to join the Land Army when she saw an advert in her home town of Leeds, aged 18.

Working in a bakery and looking after her younger brother, Mrs Symonds jumped at the chance to start a new adventure.

But when she travelled through the Suffolk countryside to Leavenheath one dark night, she couldn't believe the change in her surroundings.
"All you could see was pubs," she said.

"I said to the driver, where are all the shops? He said 'about 20 miles away'."

Boarding in a hostel in Plough Lane, Leavenheath, with 90 other girls, life was often tough for the young volunteers, many of whom had left home for the first time.

Packed into bunk beds in dormitories heated only with coke stoves, the girls would work at farms in Bures, Leavenheath, Boxford and surrounding areas in all weathers.

Mrs Symonds said: "It used to be very cold in the winter. I don't know how we did it.

"Sometimes we used to get snowed in and we used to get time off."
Doing all sorts of agricultural work such as sorting potatoes, making hay, ploughing fields and harvesting sugar beet, life was tough for the Land Army girls.

But Mrs Symonds remembers shopping trips to Colchester on Saturday afternoons were a treat, often followed by a meal and a trip to the pictures.

As well as dancing with soldiers who made trips to the hostel from their garrison in Colchester, Mrs Symonds and her friends would often walk to the Hare and Hounds in Leavenheath.

It was at the pub Mrs Symonds met her husband, Rodney, and the pair married in 1949 and lived in Suffolk ever since.

Mrs Symond and Ellen Cundy are still good friends and keep in contact after 65 years