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We had quite a social life as teenagers, a lot revolved around the Church. I would think that every Saturday night there was a dance. Also, it cut across the generations — there would be parents playing Whist in a room off the hall, so that we were supervised up to a point. I was 11 when war started and 17 when it finished, and I was a Guide for all those years, and they organised things in the village as well, with the Scouts in the hut next to here

People stayed in the village because everything was there for you -- you didn’t travel because you had no means of travelling. You have to remember it was Blackout, the last bus from Keighley, the Bradford bus, was 9 o’clock in the evening, so if you went to the pictures in Keighley you more or less had to walk both ways, and it was dark.

Money-raising in the village was quite a thing, house-to-house collecting for War Comforts — comforts for the Forces. The War Comforts Committee met in the Scout Hut, and they organised it. The Reverend Hugh Hunter was the Chairman. Everybody worked together: the knitters, the sewers. I suppose that there were lots of communities like it, but in Riddlesden in particular, there was a real community feeling during the war. Everybody knew everybody else; the school was only small: we walked to school and the parents met each other and remained friends, even as the children grew up.

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