It had all started at 11.15am on September 3, 1939, at least for those who could understand what the word “war” meant. My own story, however, began on just another day in the October of 1945.

Just another day, that was, for a happy little girl who was playing with a gang of children in Wellington Road, Ilkley.

In those days children were not taught to fear strangers, but neither did we need to be taught to be curious. So, although none of us felt afraid of him, none of us had failed to notice the strange man who was walking up our street either.

Although barely five years old, I sensed that this man was something beyond strange.

His khaki uniform and kit bag had singled him out as being different, even from a distance, but, as he drew near enough for me to see him clearly, it was his sickly pallor and the strange haunted look on his face which was to define him, and which would live with me for ever.

In case you hadn’t guessed, this stranger was the father that I, the little girl, had never known – and his other-worldly appearance had been earned in the hardest of ways.

This walking skeleton had just returned to us from being a prisoner of The Japanese Imperial Army in the jungles of Burma. Of course, all that was so long ago now as to have become history, at least in the eyes of the last couple of generations.

So much water has passed under Ilkley’s bridges since then and my father and mother have both been dead for some time. I had come to believe that this, my most poignant of memories, had been laid to rest with them.

That was until my recent visit to Ilkley.

While browsing through books in a shop in Brook Street the other day I chanced upon a copy of Caroline Brown’s “Ilkley At War”. Then, as I thumbed idly through its pages, I found myself being drawn into a reverie of my own early life.

As I neared the end of the book, still basking in the warm glow of a shared past, I was totally unprepared for what was in store for me. On turning the next page, I found myself transfixed by the gaze of my dead father.

His haunted face of that yesterday of more than 65 years ago was staring out at me from a photograph which, until that moment, I had no idea had even existed.

The picture had been taken by the talented Albert Anning, the leading photographer for the Ilkley Gazette at that time.

His sympathetic composition could only hint at the emotions with which each of us would have to learn to live for the next half century, or so. But hint it did. On the surface, the photograph showed the cozy scene of my new dad, reunited with his wife and daughter in our home. However, just below that surface, was a loving and loyal wife who for three long years had, each and every day, to fight the fear that her husband was already dead, and a little girl, who, at five years old, still had to learn what a father was.

The hero of the piece was that most special of men who had endured so much in order that such a day might dawn for all of us.

He would, of course, continue to suffer for the rest of his life, but what was to prove this quiet and unassuming man to be a true hero was the fact he would never have acknowledged himself to be one.

Quiet and unassuming he may have been, but, although he lived to be 73 in spite of his ordeal, rice never passed his lips again from the day of his release. He never knowingly bought anything which had been made in Japan either.

n Ernest Addy died in 1984. Pat’s mother, Mary, died in 2002.