All had fascinating stories to tell and we will be featuring some of these on our Heritage page over the coming weeks.

Here is the first to share her memories with us:

One former Land Girl will be well remembered by many in Hemel Hempstead. Stella Chandler, now 85, lives in Nettlecroft, Boxmoor.

"I'd almost forgotten I ever was a Land Girl" she said, but recent publicity stirred her to look out her keepsakes.

Stella was a Land Girl in Cheshire and still has her uniform trousers, milking jacket, arm band, tie and badge and a wealth of books and magazines published at the time to help with farming in the 1940s - a treasure chest of memories.

Hundreds of children will remember her in her second career - she was head of Infants at Eastbrook and at Chaulden Schools for a total of 25 years.

Now just a glance at her luxuriant and colourful garden shows how much she learned from her agriculture days.

She joined the Women's Land Army in 1942 and was offered training at Reaseheath Agricultural College.

She had an allowance of ten shillings a week (now 50p!) - less National Insurance and unemployment Insurance contributions.

Her Ration Book - with coupons complete, identity card and gas mask were essentials - and she still has them.

Posted to a farm in Macclesfield, she inherited the unwashed sheets of a previous Land Girl.

The farmer was surly, the wife downtrodden and overworked. Stella worked with cows, cleaning shippons (cow houses) and milking.

She was kicked across a yard by a horse and spent many lonely hours in a field, muck-spreading with a fork.

Compensation was to discover a nest of peewits and learn how they nest on the ground. "We worked long hours in all weathers," she said.

Elsewhere she did vegetable growing, bunching flowers for market and washing eggs for the packing station, collecting honey and fruit picking.

For a few months she kept a handwritten diary. It is dominated by the relentless mucking out of shippons, pouring rain and muck spreading.

Irene Jackson of Gadebridge Road, Hemel Hempstead was posted to Lea Valley from London and involved in horticulture, mainly glasshouses.

"It was like being sent to the end of the world," she said, but it changed her life.

She married a soldier and they got a house and work in the new town of Hemel Hempstead.

"I remember we saw aeroplanes flying out and towing gliders to invade - that sticks in my mind and when the rockets came they built us straw shelters from the straw bales."

Now 84, she served about three years.