And while many women found the reality to be intense labour and homesickness, one Doncaster woman found that life in the Land Army was exactly as the recruitment posters depicted: healthy, challenging and exciting.

Joan Scholes of Barnby Dun, 79, remembers blissful teenage years of days spent working with shire horses, pitch forks and milk churns.

"I don't think it is just nostalgia," said Joan, "I still think of it as a good, happy and healthy time. Life in the open was absolutely brilliant. It was one of the best times of my life."

After the war in 1946 and aged just 16, Joan was one of the last groups of women to join the Land Army, a government-run effort to keep British agriculture afloat while thousands of men were fighting.

Although the war had finished the Land Army was still in operation as the country was affected by rationing for several more years.

Joan's memories had been consigned to the back of her mind until she received a letter from Downing Street a few weeks ago with a badge and certificate thanking her for her hard work.

Joan said: "I was thrilled because after all these years you don't even think about it but it's an honour and a privilege. It brought back lots of memories."

Upon joining the Land Army Joan found herself billeted in Nissen Huts with other girls in the Buckinghamshire village of Bletchley.

Every day she woke at 6am to a breakfast of bread and dripping lit by paraffin lamps, before being loaded onto a lorry and taken to a farm where she would pick potatoes, tomatoes, gather hay and milk Friesian cows.

It was the unusual things like learning to drive a tractor that are Joan's most cherished memories: "I'd never driven before and I remember that you had to crank the tractor by hand and be very careful or you'd break your wrist," she added.

And when the work stopped, the girls had other things to keep them occupied. "We would play table tennis, sleep or go to church. Once a month a lorry would come and take us to a dance in Wolverton, the nearest town."

In November 1947 Joan left the Land Army to become a nurse, welcoming in the NHS in 1948. It was a career that she remained committed to for most of her working life and went on to become a nursing tutor.

Joan was unmarried until the 1970s when she was "swept off her feet" by her future husband, who died just over three years later.

More recently she has played a key role in the community as chair of Barnby Dun Parish Council and has raised thousands of pounds for charity by abseiling from the top of Doncaster Royal Infirmary and the grandstand of Doncaster Racecourse, despite being in her 70s.

It would seem that for Joan, the grit and determination learnt during her Land Army experience, is an attitude she has carried throughout life.