“I can see the disgust on the face of one neighbor when Jack, the farmer, asked to lend a man, produced a land girl.”

Mona Macleod worked in Kirkubrightshire during the second World War, providing the skilled labour needed on farms before mechanization. The girls were given heavy agricultural work in fields, with animals, carrying hundred weight sacks, sawing wood, felling trees, filling up rat holes. It was a tough way to grow up, but this illustrated memoir provides a record of a time when women faced the rigorous physical challenges involved in winning the war at home.