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My parents were married on Boxing Day 1938. Their first home was a rented house at Carr Gate, near Wakefield, in West Yorkshire. It was in an isolated avenue surrounded by fields.

Two huge carthorses (one was white and called Pinky) galloped thunderously in the fields around the houses when their day’s work on the farm was done. The farmer sowed seed in the biblical manner of the Parable of the Sower, throwing handfuls of seed from a sack slung around his neck. Whether this was because of wartime shortages. My mother grew a sunflower in her garden and the farmer begged the seeds for his hens but one of his calves intervened. It leaned over the fence and licked the flower, which withered where the calf’s tongue had touched it.

Other memories at Carr Gate were watching the warplanes flying over at the start of their bombing missions and seeing the survivors coming back, fewer in number and some of them damaged and their engines limping. After Dunkirk fleets of buses brought injured servicemen to Pinderfields Hospital. Later the men were seen during their convalescence walking about in Wakefield, some of them amputees.

At the time that they were married my father was employed as a surveyor with West Riding County Council, working on standard road widths. Driving was not a universal skill at the time so the council provided chauffeurs for the surveyors when the job took them out of the office. M father, however, had driven since he was 14, was prone to car sickness when travelling in a car unless he was driving and kept two cars of the same type. He cannabalised parts from one to the other so that one or other of them was always roadworthy.

He was called up with the Technical Grade and took charge of three opencast sites mining coal for the war effort. One was at Temple Newsam, a stately home in public parkland owned by Leeds Council. The site was later restored as a golf course. The workforce was part Irish and part Italian prisoners of war. The two factions did not get on and sometimes fought. They drove the dumpers so fast that sparks flew. Amongst the machinery was Lease-Lend equipment from the USA including an enormous walking dragline. My father was also an air raid warden.

My mother was a housewife until Churchill asked everyone to go out to work to help the war effort. She worked in the office of a wire works which was involved in making guns but left because she did not care for the atmosphere. She then worked in the site office at the Temple Newsam opencast site. My parents often had breakfast in the site canteen with the navvies. She used to watch the rabbits sitting in circles in the woodland at lunchtime. She hated hearing the sound of the trees when they were felled to get at the coal. One day a military unit came with call-up papers for her but went away when told that she was a married woman and already engaged in war work. My mother had a badge marked priority issued to those doing war work which she wore discreetly on the back of her lapel and which gave the wearer priority in bus queues.

Later they moved to a rented flat in a Georgian house in Sheffield. Such was the housing shortage — Sheffield was heavily bombed — that they were one of two hundred couples to apply for the flat. It had a small kitchenette and a drawing room large enough to hold all the members of the walking club that my parents belonged to. The landlord did not allow children and refused to let anyone, including his wife, to hang out washing in the garden. A metallurgist from the university rented one of the other flats and stank out the house with his experiments.

There were many Sheffield memories. The Luftwaffe machinegunned pedestrians in The Moor, a major street in the centre of Sheffield. One of my parents’ friends lay in the gutter, playing dead, to escape. The walking club had an isolated cottage which they used as a clubhouse, near Bradfield, in a water catchment area where the Water Board would allow no permanent habitation in case of pollution to the water supply. It was broken into by an escaped Italian prisoner of war, who left his blood on the broken window and helped himself to some tinned sausages. After the war the moors above the cottage had to be cleared of ordnance. The Dambusters practised over Sheffield’s reservoirs nearby. In the city centre American troops congregated in segregated groups outside pubs, blacks at one, whites at another. One day a spaniel dog sat in the tramlines in the busy road outside the flat and held up the trams and other traffic in the rush hour.

My grandmother would ring from London when an air raid was in progress there and my mother could hear the sound of the doodlebugs over the phone. On one occasion a bomb was found hanging on a hedge in my grandparents’ street. My grandparents had a leather goods shop in the East End (originally a saddlers supplying harness to costermongers) and during the great fire of London in the blitz my grandfather watched the blaze stop two doors away from his shop. My parents visited my grandparents and were walking in a park in Ilford at the time of the Battle of Britain. A dogfight started in the sky overhead and a plane crashed in the park.

My father’s sister-in-law worked on the searchlight batteries trapping enemy aircraft in the beam so that the ack ack guns defending London could shoot them down. The work affected her greatly. One of his brothers worked on a farm, using a haystack as an air raid shelter and bringing a case of eggs as a present when he visited.

People were demobbed in waves after the war, frontline personnel first. My father was in one of the later waves. The tenancy of the Sheffield flat was for the duration of the war only. He got another job with London County Council and my parents stayed with my grandparents whilst they house hunted. They left Sheffield in May 1947. There was still snow from the very hard winter. By May it had turned green. During that winter their walking club had been out walking on the top of the field walls, such was the depth of the snow, helping the farmers to search for and rescue sheep buried under the snow. Ahead lay a new life, wearing a coat threadbare in a year’s travelling in the rush hour on the tube and coping with gazumping — but that’s another story.

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