ORGANISED by the Low Moor Local History Group, Map Day, held at Aldersgate Methodist Church, was well attended.

Entering the side door of the church, you found yourself in a room full of tables spread with large-scale maps of the Bradford area. A key to the grid pointed you to the village or locality you wished to examine.

Mary and Geoff Twentyman, leading lights in the group, had invited me to give readings from my newly-published childhood memoir Low Moor Lad.

I had originally drafted this account of the first 11 years of my life, in the late 1940s and 1950s, some years before, partly for my own pleasure and also to see what I could recall of that formative period.

The book is partly chronological, partly thematic. Chapters focussing on particular individuals who impacted on my life mix with those that bring together memories of my family, the schools I attended and specific locations in and around the old village.

I wrote the account with no intention of publishing it, as I couldn't see it appealing to more than a dozen or so family and friends. But the Twentymans thought it might be of interest to folk in the Low Moor area as a picture of a village that no longer existed, except in the memories of people born before 1960 or thereabouts. So I decided to publish it myself, using a printer recommended by the Twentymans.

I had already used the locality in my fantasy trilogy The Book of Lowmoor, aimed at readers aged from 12 years upwards. In this novel, the village of Low Moor itself has largely vanished, with only a few outlying buildings surviving. Place names are distorted, and the tallest characters are no more than eight inches high.

It was only recently that it dawned on me that this vanished village was a metaphor for old Low Moor itself, which had been obliterated around 1970, to be replaced by tidy streets of neat redbrick housing of a familiar suburban kind. The obliteration of what I couldn't help regarding as 'my village' - so ingrained in my memory were its parks, fields, common, reservoirs, streams, streets, terraces, yards, snickets, shops and pubs - was a subject outside the scope of a book whose timeline ended in 1956, when I did the 11-plus exam and got a place at Bradford Grammar School.

At the very end of Low Moor Lad, however, appears a poem written decades ago which I originally included in one of my collections. The poem is an attempt to recreate the sense of astonishment, bewilderment and loss I experienced when, on a visit home to Mineral Cottage in Abb Scott Lane, I decided to walk down through the village and have a beer at one of the pubs.

It was a day of thick mist, with visibility reduced to ten yards or so. Unprepared for what I encountered, imagine my reaction when I found myself stumbling through what resembled nothing so much as a war zone - heaps of rubble and miscellaneous wreckage broken here and there by chunks of still upstanding wall and the odd bereaved chimney stack.

As people gathered in the church for my first reading, it was good to be able to chat with the best friend of my earliest years, Mick Briggs. Mick and I had kept in touch in recent years; I had emailed him a copy of his chapter in Low Moor Lad, and later a copy of the book. I had hoped to include a photo of Mick in it, but none, sadly, had survived of his earliest years. I did, however, include a photo of School Fold, where he and his parents had lived just up the road from my home.

The highlight of the day was soon to come. "Brenda Parker's here!" And there she was - the subject of chapter one in Low Moor Lad, smiling, looking years younger than her age - 81, she told me - and no longer taller than me. Brenda had been my earliest playmate when I was four and she seven, so there we were, an old man and an elderly lady who had known nothing of one another for nigh on three quarters of a century.

Brenda was no longer a Parker, though always and nothing but a Parker to me. She was accompanied by her daughter and daughter-in-law. It turned out that her daughter had spotted an article on Low Moor Lad in the Telegraph & Argus and decided to come along to the reading.

When I wrote the book, I had, of course, no way of knowing if Brenda was still alive, as she had no way of knowing if I was, and living in the Bradford area. My Bradford-based cousin Paul had been ribbing me for days about Brenda: "I'll get her to turn up so she can gave you a good thumping," he joked.

Fortunately for me, she didn't administer the thumping, but she did explain something that had puzzled me for more than 70 years. Why, on the one occasion when she took me up Abb Scott Lane to her home, did she leave me standing outside the door, eager to penetrate its mysteries, but without the impudence to do so uninvited? She was, she explained, one of eight children, four boys and four girls, and didn't want to ask me in when the house might be in a state of upheaval. Highly imaginative as I was, this explanation had never occurred to me. Life never loses its ability to surprise and fascinate, does it?

For copies of Low Moor Lad email info.lmlhg@gmail.com or send a cheque made out to Low Moor Local History Group for £13.00 (includes £3 postage and packing) and send to Low Moor Local History Group, c/o 13 St Abbs Fold, Odsal, Bradford BD6 1EL.