D-Day 80: Southsea woman looks back at supporting Second World War effort and troops on Normandy Landings

Doris Houghton, 98, volunteered for the Women’s Land Army (WLA) alongside millions of others to help with the war effort. Over 7m females helped the armed forces in munitions factories, with First Aid, on farms and in other roles.

Ms Houghton, who lived in the East End of London during the war, said she was compelled to help. She added: “A farmer came to our house one day because he’d heard I wanted to volunteer and looked me up and down, sizing me up but because I was so small and skinny, he didn’t employ me. You need to be strong to work with cattle you see but I was glad because I didn’t really want to go milking cows.”

Despite the setback, Ms Houghton was called up to the WLA in 1942 and went to work on an agricultural farm in Halstead, Essex. She initially considered joining the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), but was drawn to the prospect of working in the countryside having endured heavy bombing around the docks near where she lived.

Ms Houghton had to spend some nights sleeping in underground stations and shelters during the Blitz. As part of the WLA, she was employed with a group of Land Girls, as they were called, working with the crops in the fields, riddling potatoes, harvesting and supporting the salad crops in the greenhouses.

She recalls long days of manual labour, muck spreading and working with the horses, with the women learning as they worked. “I remember well on my first day, the farmer came up to me, looked at my hands and the hoe that I was holding, and showed me how to properly hold it,” Ms Houghton said.

“You don’t let it slide you see or it takes all the skin off your hands. There were also German and Italian prisoners that were put to work in the fields with us but we had as little to do with them as possible. When we would be resting at lunch in the fields sometimes a military vehicle from the Anglo-American canteen based near us would pull up next to us and two or three American airmen would jump out and offer us some little American frankfurter sausages.

“They would find some branches, make a little fire and cook the little sausages on sticks for us.” Ms Houghton said she has remained in good health over the decades, though admits to slowing down since her days of swimming in the sea when she moved to Southsea 60 years ago. She has fond memories of downtime in the evenings after working in the fields.

“There were three US military camps located around where we were and sometimes the American Chief of Staff would ring up our manager and say if they put on some transport could they ask the Land Girls to attend their social dance? We loved going to the dances mainly because there would always be lots of food there, and we were pretty fed-up of eating beetroot, we mainly had beetroot sandwiches for lunch and then beetroot again in the evening.

“After the dance, they would put us in the van and take us back to our farm accommodation again. I’ll always remember clambering into this van after the dance and as I sat down, there was an American airman in my seat waiting for me to sit on his lap! The cheeky devil, he shouldn’t have been in there, trying to leave the camp that night.

“A lot of the girls did have boyfriends from the US camps and I remember one day there was a lot of whispering in our ears, giving us hints as well as giving us a kiss and then later when we got back laughing and chatting with the girls we realised they were leaving for the D-Day operation, although they didn’t tell us outright, we just put two and two together. One of my friends did end up marrying her American boyfriend and went back to the States with him.”

Ms Houghton’s family home was sadly destroyed in a bombing raid over London and the family was evacuated out of the area - losing all their belongings. Her schoolfriends were evacuated away from London to areas across the country. Ms Houghton lost track of her friends and colleagues she made while part of the WLA.

She settled down with a young family in Southsea after marrying and travelling to Iraq after the war with her then husband, who worked for an oil company. A re-enactment group Land Girls at Large will be honouring the vital contribution made by the WLA at the upcoming Southwick Revival weekend between June 8 and 9, a parade which brings the village back to the 1940s. Further details can be found on its website.