During the Second World War, did you find yourself sitting in school alongside evacuees from other parts of the country? Idle-born Mrs Eleanor Higgins did. She recalls her mother and other members of the WVS going along to clean out the now-demolished house Thorn Garth in Leeds Road ready for evacuees coming to Bradford from London.

"The children all came to our school at Thackley and I remember them joining our classes and their strange way of speaking. They probably thought the same about us! We all fitted in and made friends. I wonder how many stayed up here?

"My mother's group also went on one or two afternoons a week to a large house in Highfield Road, now demolished, to make rope netting to cover the guns etc. I believe it was called Summerfield or maybe Briarfield as there is still a lodge where the gateway was with that name on it, below the fire station.

"My father was the milkman for Idle village and we lived at Sandbeds (why it was called that I've no idea) on the curve of the road below and opposite Green Lane, before the pair of houses were demolished to make way for Rank Wharfedale.

"We'd moved on to Town Gate where my parents took over the fish-and-chip shop at the top of High Street, now a dentist's surgery. Because of my father's two trades I seemed to know everyone in Idle and they knew me, so I had to behave."

Thanks for those memories, Eleanor. Does anyone else remember evacuees coming to live among them at a time when, ironically, many Bradford youngsters were themselves being sent away to parts of the country which were considered safer than here?