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This story was submitted to the People's war site by Christine Wadsworth of Wakefield Libraries and Information Services on behalf of John of Wentbridge and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

I remember clearly when war was declared and announced on the wireless. I had no concept of what war was like except that it filled me with dread. Nor did I imagine then at the age of thirteen, I would be in the army and abroad before it ended.

We, two adults, four children, were living in North Yorkshire at the time and I was boarding at Ackworth (Quaker)School, but In the winter term of 1939 I contracted Scarlet Fever and never returned there. To be nearer to father's business we moved in 1941 into a larger stone house near Wentbridge, with a few acres of woodland, a field along the river and up nearer the house a half-acre orchard and a one acre field.
Here we began to live what is now called 'the good life. We kept goats and hens (eggs and meat), grew crops for both, had the benefit of apples and pears from the orchard. There was no electricity so after the winter of 1941/42 we had the house wired-up and installed a small diesel generator giving charge to two sets of batteries to give us electricity. Cooking was done on an Esse cooker we had installed and burned Phurnacite and enjoyed real wood fires!
One night my mother was in the kitchen and had to go into the workshop next door where there was no blackout on the window. She got no further than the door, when she turned, dashed through the kitchen into the living room shouting "The garage is on fire!" and made for the telephone. We all left the house to see whct could be done, but it was too late. The only thing the firemen could do when they got there from Pontefract (6 miles away), was to extinguish the embers and what was left of two cars (one the business's and the other our own) and whatever else was inside. If they had not done so, they said there was a risk that any German plane making for home might think it was a factory and dump a few bombs on the off chance!

I started an engineering course at Whitwood Tech', but after two years my father decided to send me to another boarding school - in Dorset! Why, I will never know, for I was in my element in engineering as my later life has revealed.

Durng early war-time holidays I worked on a local farm, but in the summer there were schemes for teenagers to work on farms elsewhere, in my case I cycled to Ripon (being paid so much a mile for not using public transport) and lived with other volunteers in a nearby village hall. Daily we would cycle out to 'our' farm to help bring in the harvest.

Later on, after leaving chool, I worked full-time for seven months on a farm in Towton, stooking corn sheaves (backaching) on the battlefield of the 1461 War of the Roses, later threshing the wheat, picking sprouts and taters in pouring rain! I enjoyed farming and seriously considered it as a career, hardly surprising as research into my family history has revealed that I come from a family of farmers and millers and an engineer - or two, well one!

Although we were a Quaker family and thus were against war, many of my contemporaries at Ackworth felt that this was not a war just to gain access to more land and resources, but was a sectarian one that was likely to affect the whole world. In the event and having been deferred for some six months or so on account of my farming work, I accepted the matter and was called up in January '45.

After initial training in Richmond and Edinburgh I was posted to Carronbridge near Dumfries for more rigorous training and later selected as suitable for officer training. This route took me in turn to Wrotham in kent, Trentham Park ( NR Stoke-on-Trent), Brancepeth near Durham, Bombay, Delhi, Amritsar, Saugor, Delhi again, finally Bombay and Southampton where our docking on 6th October enabled me to ring my parents to tell them I was 'back home' and receive their good wishes for 21st birthday!

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