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This story has been written onto the ´óÏó´«Ã½ People’s War site by CSV Storygatherer Janet on behalf Shirley Abbott. The story has been added to the site with her permission and Shirley fully understands the terms and conditions of the site.

My father joined the T.A. in the Queens Own Yorkshire Dragoons in Sheffield before the war in 1937; they were a cavalry regiment, and he liked horses! Regularly going to camp in the summer at Helmsley and Sandbeck Park, the horses were stabled in Norbury Hall, Sheffield. When war started in 1939, he went with his squadron and horses through France, by train, and then by ship to Syria where they tried to stop drugs being used by the Vichy French, for their German war effort.

I have lots of places and photographs of the battles he was in; El-Alamain Mareth Line; Left Hook, Tunis and Tripoli. He was meticulous in keeping a list of his travels in N.Africa.

The horses were sent to farmers in South Africa and the regiment was mechanised in 1942. He returned to Liverpool, England on 23rd October 1944 and was in the Army for another year, also serving in the Home Guard until 1956.

Meanwhile my mother had been at home looking after me, had spent most of the war as a bookkeeper for Mellows, window frame manufacturers, and then doing war work in engineering. We still kept the house in Sheffield, but I was sent to live in Badwell, Derbyshire with my grandmother, who, as a widow, was housekeeper to the vicar Rev Brian Keeley. My cousin Ann and her mother also lived there, as my cousin’s father was serving in the RAF.

After a couple of years we got used to the war situation and I returned home to live with my mother. I went to a little private school and spent many nights in our cellar during air raids — the house was Victorian, terraced, with an escape door to the adjoining houses, to assist in the rescue if the house was bombed. Nobody would go into a neighbour’s house and steal or disturb ones belongings - a very different state of affairs than today!!!

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