At the end of the second world war I was a young woman living in the city of Graz in Austria. Life was hard and food was short. The British Army was helping to feed schoolchildren and as my mother was a school caretaker we had close contact with the army cooks. One day a young man called Harold asked me to help him with the cooking - the beginning of our courtship. I went off skiing but he followed me so I knew he was serious! When I came back from skiing Harold got to know my parents better and once he’d had a few schnapps with my father everything was fine. But it was a further two years until we were married. The wedding was in Austria, Harold went back to Sheffield first and I was brought over to join him by the army in 1947.


At home in Lowedges