FORMER Land Army girl Joan Gay is to rejoin some of her wartime colleagues at the Cenotaph in Whitehall on Sunday for the national ceremony of remembrance.

Mrs Gay, who met and married the farmer's son while serving on the land during the Second World War, said it was great honour to be chosen to attend.

Mrs Gay, 78, helped her husband Dick run Wernham Farm, Marlborough, for nearly 40 years before they retired in 1989 and moved to Back Lane.

Originally from Southport in Lancashire, Mrs Gay had moved to London with her family when war broke out in 1939.

She was in her early 20s at the time and said: "I was at the age where the Government would have told me where to go so I decided to make my own choice."

Mrs Gay volunteered to join the Land Army although it was a new occupation for her.

She found herself on a Somerset farm near Frome where she was expected to carry out the same heavy chores as a man. She said: "Besides the milking I had to muck-out, plough, thatch roofs; anything a man could do I did."

She ended up going to a farm in the Somerset village of Laverton where the farmer had an 18-year- old son. Three years later they were married and what was a wartime role for Mrs Gay became a way of life.

The couple, who have two daughters and a son, moved to Marlborough to take over Wernham Farm in 1950.

She continued to be a member of the British Women's Land Army Society which picked her name from a hat to be among it representatives at the Cenotaph.