REINFORCEMENTS from the Army Cadets leapt to the defence of a 91-year-old D-Day veteran yesterday to help stop him being turfed off his allotment.

Patrick Churchill, who stormed Juno beach with the Royal Marine Armoured Support regiment on June 6, 1944 as a radio operator, was threatened with eviction from his allotment on Kingsfield Crescent by Witney Allotment Association because it wasn’t worked often enough.

The association has since said Mr Churchill can continue to use the allotment he has dug for 20 years, but will inspect it every month.

So yesterday uniformed cadets from the Witney Detachment of the Oxfordshire Army Cadet Force picked up spades and forks and donned gardening gloves to help tidy the allotment and plant new vegetables, trees and bushes.

Mr Churchill said: “I think it’s wonderful they are helping me out, but they will learn something from it too.

“The thing about the armed forces is that you make friends with whoever you serve with and they are with you for the rest of your lives, so they will be learning that.

“Witney Allotment Association has stringent standards but we are confident that with the help of the cadets we will be able to keep it up to even their standards.”

He added: “But I would do it with or without the cadets. It’s therapy for me. I feel sorry for most people at my age. Imagine what it’s like sitting in a care home just playing bingo all day.

“With the cost of vegetables as it is, it’s hard to make ends meet on a pension.”

Colour Sergeant Michael Bennett, 30, of Oxfordshire Battalion The Rifles, Army Cadet Force, said: “The cadets have come to lend their support.

“When these things are highlighted to them they are always keen to get out in the community whenever possible. We’ll be doing lifting, digging and anything required to turn it from what it is at the moment.”

Cadet Kieran King, 18, added: “It’s especially important to give something back after all he’s done for us.

“We’re going to try to turn it into a community project and help him out over the longer term,” he added.

Mr Churchill joined up in 1942, enlisting in the Royal Marines rather than the RAF because they would let him in aged 17.

He was with the Royal Marines when they stormed Juno beach in 1944 before being attached to the French unit 4 Commandos.

Mr Churchill was demobilised in 1946 and returned to Pressed Steel in Cowley where he had briefly worked before the war, and later at Oxfordshire County Council.

He lives with his wife Karin, 84, who survived the Dresden bombing.

She escaped over the Berlin Wall from Communist East Germany, and was en route to Calcutta to join up with Mother Teresa, when she came to Oxford to learn English where she met Patrick.