By Emily Parsons

Last updated at 12:12, Saturday, 27 October 2012

A pensioner is desperately trying to track down a childhood friend – after a chance encounter at a bus stop more than 70 years after they last saw each other.

Ivan Short

Ivan Short spent his early childhood living in Nenthead, near Alston, before his family moved to Brampton in 1941.

His small remote hometown was one of the first places evacuees were sent to when World War Two broke out.

At the time, he and his sister and cousins thought nothing of the bus load of strange children arriving in their midst, happily playing outside with them on the day of their arrival and accepting them into their classes.

Fast forward 73 years, and Mr Short, now 83, had an unexpected meeting in Carlisle.

“I was standing at a bus stop in Denton Holme about seven weeks ago,” he recalled, “and this woman came up.

“She asked how long I’d been waiting, and said a bus would be along soon.”

The ice broken, the pair began discussing accents and when Mr Short, of Botchergate, mentioned he had grown up in Nenthead, the woman revealed she too had lived there.

“She told me she had been evacuated to Nenthead on the day the war broke out, September 3, 1939,” he explained.

“I remember I was sat in the school playground with my sister and cousins when the bus arrived with all these evacuees on. Their teacher was Miss Bailey, I think, and we all played together.”

The mystery woman went on to describe her home – barely 100 yards from Mr Short’s own childhood home – and the school.

Before Mr Short could ask anything further, her bus arrived and the woman disappeared as quickly as she arrived.

“It has been haunting me since,” he said. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to find her, and so I’m hoping she might read it in the paper.

“It was coincidence, because I’m normally housebound but had gone to Denton Holme on a rare trip.”

Mr Short, a retired miner, described the woman as “sprightly” and said she had revealed that she had also lived in Cornwall for a number of years.

He desperately wants to be reunited with the woman, to share their tales of childhood.

First published at 11:16, Saturday, 27 October 2012
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk