My father had a sheep farm in Middlesmoor at the head of Nidderdale. I was thinking about the 1947 storm. We were off school for six weeks because the house was snowed in and we really enjoyed that. All we could see were the tops of the walls and we lost about a hundred and twenty sheep because they were buried under the snow along the walls. My father had a shepherds crook and he used to go and put the crook down to make holes in the snow. The sheep lived whilst the snow was hard but as soon as it began to thaw it dropped on to the sheep and they drowned. We lost 150 sheep out of 300. Half the flock.

We had a pet sheep called Nanny and all through the storm she used to come into the kitchen to drink the milk out of the milk bucket. And when the snow was melting we had a wood behind the house and she’d gone up the wood and slipped and fallen against a tree with her legs in the air and unfortunately we found her dead and she was expecting triplets.

My father almost gave up farming, but when it melted everything began to come back to life again.