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I suppose it comes to us all - the sudden realization that we are getting old. 76 is not much of an age these days but when I reminisce, as you do more with age, about past times, particularly 'The War', you realise that so many people not much younger than yourself know little about that awful 1939-45 experience. And I realise that although I was just 10 when war broke out I have many vivid recollections which will all too soon (without being morbid) be lost forever unless I get them down somewhere.

It's so difficult to convey the horrific atmosphere of those two nights, 12th and 15th December, 1940. Mr. Anderson, and Sheffield City Corporation who gave my family one of his air raid shelters, saved our lives.

We lived on the Flower Estate, in fact my family was the first to occupy No 3 Clematis Road, before I was born in the 1920s. My father was a Sheffield Transport Tram Driver and when the air-raid shelter was issued he obtained two sides from an old single decker Sheffield tram to put across the front entrance to the shelter, the space between the two sides filled with soil to give blast protection to us inside. We never dreamt that we would need it but my father, who had been in the trenches during the 1st World War knew better, thank goodness.

The Air Raid Sirens went at about 7.0 pm on that Thursday night, and my mother, father and I got into the shelter. It was cold and damp but we had candles between upturned plant pots for heating and as the evening progressed things got hotter, both inside and out. I was on the top bunk wrapped in blankets and gradually fell asleep despite all the gunfire and bombs outside.

It was a few minutes to midnight, according to my dad's watch, when I woke suddenly shivering with a combination of cold, fear and premonition. At a few minutes past midnight on Friday, 13th December, this huge aerial mine went off only a few yards away from our shelter. Funny thing was that there was no bang. Dad said later that you don't hear a bang when you're in the middle of an explosion. All I knew was that the old piece of carpet hanging down across the shelter door blew in and landed on top of me, followed by piles of rubble and muck. None of us were hurt, thanks to the shelter and the old Sheffield tram. But stunned. We sat in silence for quite a little while, but my dad managed to climb out to have a look. When he got back in he said that our house and lots of our neighbours houses had "gone". We could hear our local Air Raid Warden blowing her whistle, and someone was shouting that we had to get out because the gas meters at all the houses were alight.

As we scrambled out my father disappeared. He had fallen down a manhole in what had been our back yard, and I shall never forget him clambering out with blood on his face saying, "Now I can tell everybody I was wounded in two world wars" He'd cut his nose as he fell. I could see his face in the light from the flaming gas meters

The Air-Raid Warden shouted that we had to go down to the public underground air raid shelter on Wincobank Avenue. On the way bombs were dropping and several times we had to dive for cover under a wall along Bluebell Road. But we got there and managed to squeeze in as it was packed.

We sat there for several hours until the all clear went. I'll never forget one of our neighbours disappearing and coming back after a short while with a large basin of pork dripping and a loaf which he shared with all the kids. And I will always remember at about four or five in the morning when things had quietened down a neighbour who had been working nights came in the shelter looking for his wife, daughter and mother. But we knew that all three were dead. My sadness for him, first felt in that air-raid shelter when I was just 11 years old,is as poignant today, 65 years on. As I recall, it was said that 14 of our neighbours were killed on Daffodil Road.

The house was eventually rebuilt but we didn't move back. I visited it, or where it had been, in 2003 but the whole estate seemed to have been bulldozed to the ground. Some youths, yobs, or hoodies came along and wanted to know what I was doing on their territory. When I told them I was born there and that we were bombed by the Germans, 14 people being killed right here they just said "F***ing 'ell".

Was it worth it?

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