While most 93-year-olds are content to enjoy a relaxing retirement, one elderly author has decided the time is ripe to publish her second novel.

Gwyneth Lambert, from Wallington, has published a novel based on her experiences in the Women's Land Army during the war.

Round and Round the Orchard tells the story of 60-year-old Bronwen Owen as she remembers her life from 40 years earlier.

The Women's Land Army was a civilian organisation created during the first and second world wars. The women who staffed it worked in agriculture, replacing men called up for military service.

In the book the main character, Owen, remembers how she became involved with the land army because the London insurance company she worked for moved to Devon to avoid the Blitz. She describes her work milking cows, mucking out pigs, skinning rabbits and other laborious tasks the land girls carried out.

The story also contains some romance and while working in Devon, Owen attracts the attention of a number of male suitors but is unable to settle on any of them. The story opens with her considering a marriage proposal, years later, from a man called Ben.

Mrs Lambert herself was born in 1917 and attended Wallington County School after a period of home schooling and a stint as a protestant pupil at a Catholic Convent school in Putney.

Mrs Lambert joined the Women's land Army in 1942, returning to work in Torquay at the end of the second world war.

Round and Round the Orchard is her second novel, following a prequel titled Town Girl.

A spokesman for her publishers, United Writers Publications said: “By drawing on her own experiences Gwyneth Lambert gives this book an authentic and captivating appeal which relates very much to the period of the 1930s and 1940s.”

For more information visit unitedwriters.co.uk or call 01736 365954.