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In the early years of the second world war I was a very young boy age 6 or maybe 7. The news from school was that all the children in the school were to be evacuated,why I do not know but we were. I remember standing in Bradford Forster Square station with all the other children.
The train took us out into the country to a small village called Cowling on the Colne side of Keighley.Here we were split up and me and my brother ended up in a farm well out of the village. I had never been on a farm or even into the country side and it was all quite new to me.
I have always been what you might call inquisitive, my mother would have preferred the word meddlesome. Farms to a small boy had a number of things which interested me.
In the farrmyard there was a hut and within the hut was a lot of scuffling which needed investigating.At one end of the hut was a door which had a big padlock on it and on the other end was a small trap door which one had to lift in a sliding movement to open it. This I did but was not prepared for what happened next,there was a sudden rush of activity as a whole swarm of geese came charging out and the hatch had become stuck and the wwhole lot escaped into a nearby beck.I was told that it took the farmer and helpers most of the evening to get them back. It was not long after this that we were returned to our own homes.Later I was to learn that the whole thing had ben a practice in case we needed to be evacuated properly.

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