Around the summer of 1957, when I was about 9 years old, my grandmother died after a long illness and my dad was devastated.

At the time, we lived at 39 Woodcock Park Mount in Wortley. The house was an end terrace of five two up, two down houses. Even in the 1950's, the toilet was at the end of the street and the bathroom was a tin bath in the middle of the kitchen, although the bath was stored in the cellar when not in use. We had a small front garden with a shed in it and our back garden was a slope leading up to a field. My dad kept our chickens in the back garden which had become overgrown with brambles and weeds, Part of the wall separating our garden and the field had fallen down recently but hadn't yet been repaired. We only had a front door and no back door, although there was a path behind the house to get to our cellar which is where we kept our coal.

We couldn't get into the cellar from the outside but there was a coal chute at the back. This was unusual in that the chute was a hole cut into the ground rather than the wall. There was a large wooden lid that lifted off for the coal delivery and a long chute down to the cellar. We had access to the cellar from a staircase in the kitchen.

Following my grandmother's funeral, we all left for a family holiday to our caravan in Whitby. My dad stayed with us for two weeks but then returned home by himself for work and left us for the rest of the school holidays at the caravan.

On this particular evening, my dad had gone to bed but heard banging coming from downstairs. He jumped out of bed, ran downstairs and grabbed the poker from the fireplace as he thought there must be a burglar in the house. Armed with the poker, he checked both rooms downstairs but realised the noises were coming from the cellar. He cautiously descended the staircase from the kitchen to the cellar only to find, much to his surprise, a pair of big brown eyes looking straight back at him. Standing shivering on the pile of coal was a young foal!

Sighing with relief, my dad returned to the kitchen to get a bucket of water for the foal and decided he would sort it out in the morning because there was no way he could get the foal up the staircase on his own. That done, he went back to bed.

When he got up in the morning, he went down to check on the foal which seemed to have had a restful night in the cellar. In the daylight, he realised that the coal man must have left the lid to the coal chute off after the last delivery. The foal. which lived in the field at the back of our house, must have wandered down over the broken wall and fallen down the chute in the dark!

My dad went to call for Andy, one of his neighbours who had come over from Ireland many years ago, to see if he could help him get the foal out of the cellar. Andy, having heard the story, thought my dad had had some sort of breakdown from his mother dying and his wife being away from home. On conviction, Andy agreed to accompany my dad back to his house. When they got to the kitchen, Andy wouldn't go down into the cellar first and made my dad go down before him.

My dad went down and Andy followed him. As Andy turned the corner of the staircase, he exclaimed, 'Jesus, help and save us, Joe. You've got a horse in your cellar.'

They approached the foal cautiously and my dad took hold of the front of the horse whilst Andy got the back end. They managed to manhandle the foal up the staircase and through the kitchen but as they got into the front room, Andy lost his grip on the back legs. The horse, being scared at being held, kicked out and knocked Andy over the sofa. My dad managed to direct the horse out of the front door and down the four steps at the front of the house.

With freedom so close, the horse set off to run with my dad still clinging on to its neck. It dragged him past our front garden and onto the green. My dad wouldn't let go and as the neighbours came out to find out what all the noise was about, my dad started shouting, 'Hi-ho, Silver, away!' One neighbour laughed so hard that her coat, that she'd grabbed because she wasn't dressed properly, fell open and she gave the rest of the neighbours more than they'd bargained for!

When we got home from the caravan, we didn't believe my dad either. It wasn't until my brother went down to the cellar to collect some coal and came back with a shovel full of horse muck and said 'See Mum, dad wasn't lying!' that we actually believed him.

Ann Stewart née Bright