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A J OL LY G O OD L AUGH
The women who survived their training adapted well and cheerfully
to their life in the woods, despite the hard labour and scant regard for
health and safety.One such,Vyvyan Garstang, remembers an eventful
day:
‘It was a very densely thick wood, and we had a hard job to get
the trees down. You take off so many branches, and then you roll
the tree so that the branches holding it would release it. Well,
this tree wouldn’t come down. I had to swarm up the tree, and lop
off the remaining branches. Still it wouldn’t come down. So I had
to lop off the last remaining branch, and then the tree started
to come down. I thought I could slide down the tree, but I’d got
stuck. So I had to come down with it. Of course, I had my legs
wrapped round the tree and the bailiff shouted out to me to put
my legs out or else they’d have been broken. It came down with a
bump! We all had a jolly good laugh over that, it was real fun’.
By the end of the war, more than 2,000 women had worked for the
WFS, helped by at least another 1,000 women working outwith the
organisation in local forests and sawmills.
Members of the Women’s Forestry Service holding
axes after completing a day’s work
materials of war 9