ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

My father, Frank Kirk, volunteered for the services, by trade he was a watch maker at the Barnsley Cooperative Society, and he was placed in the RAF as a Flight Engineer. Most of the memories I have are of accidents - there was one time in India when a Lancaster crashed - my Dad and his comrades were told to hang on to the top beam of the plane as it crashed - and to lift their legs up - Frank escaped with an injury to his nose. Another time he remembered a plane crashed and the only way they could get the pilot's body out was with a chainsaw. That upset him a lot.

Otherwise, India was a peaceful place, my Dad had a dog whilst he was posted in the Kashmiri mountains and, after being promoted to Corporal, an Indian batman. He did get ill after a while and suffering from gingivitis and dysentery lost all his teeth and a lot of his hair at the age of twenty three.

My mother was not allowed to join the forces, she desperately wanted to go but her parents wouldn't allow it. Her memeories included the Blackout - it was so dark and because they had take the railings away she fell into a basement one night and another night she remembered seeing Sheffield burn from Barnsley.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.