WANDA Szajna-Hopgood has a wonderful photograph of her father Zbigniew about to launch into a leap to save a determined header from an attacking forward.

It was taken at Bootham Crescent on April 18, 1945, when an RAF Northern Area XI played a Polish National XI.

A programme from that day, yellowed with age now, shows that her father – full-name Zbigniew Szajna-Stankowski – played in goal for the Polish XI.

You’d probably already guessed from the name that Zbigniew wasn’t English by birth. He was in fact one of the Polish airmen who, after their country was overrun, managed to make their way to Britain to continue the fight against the Nazis from here.

“They have a very brave reputation,” says Wanda, a 53-year-old teacher of design technology and art at St Peter’s School. And so they do.

Zbigniew’s story was, like so many stories from those days, extraordinary.

Photographs from the war show a young man in military uniform with an almost matinée-idol charisma and good looks.

Born in 1915, he grew up in Warsaw where, in the 1930s, he studied at the Warsaw School of Gymnastics.

Then war reared its ugly head. At the beginning of September, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west.

Sixteen days later, having signed a secret non-aggression pact with the Germans (a pact that wasn’t to last long) the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east.

The young Zbigniew, who appears to have been in the Polish air force, was imprisoned by the Russians in a prisoner-of-war camp.

The details are hazy, because like so many from the wartime generation, her father was always reluctant to talk about the war, Wanda says. But had he not been held in that POW camp, she believes he could well have been among the thousands of Polish officers and nationals rounded up by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and massacred in the Katyn forest.

Zbigniew escaped that fate: and somehow he managed to escape from the Russians too, and make his way to join the Free French Forces. Ultimately he found his way to Britain.

The football-mad Zbigniew ended up in Blackpool, where he lodged with a Mrs Armfield. She had a young son, Jimmy, with whom Zbigniew used to kick a ball about.

Jimmy went on to be football legend Jimmy Armfield – who played 627 games for Blackpool, many as the club captain, and who also captained the England national team fifteen times.

Years later, Wanda says, her mother heard Armfield talking on the radio about the two Polish officers who used to kick a ball about with him during the war.

Zbigniew joined the RAF and trained as a pilot.

Because of his language difficulties, however, he never got to fly.

Instead, he became an RAF fitness and parachute instructor – as well as playing in goal in a succession of services football matches at grounds across the country: Sheffield United, Mansfield Town, Coventry City, Watford and, of course, York City.

After the war, Zbigniew remained with the RAF.

He married an English girl, Delia, and was stationed in Ceylon, Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Man, eventually retiring with the rank of Flight Lieutenant in the late 1960s at the age of 53.

He then worked as a PE instructor at a shipyard in Northern Ireland and then at a community centre in Sunderland, before dying of lung cancer at the too-early age of 57.

Wanda was just 12 years old when her father died: but she remembers him as a ‘gregarious, vivacious, fun-loving’ man.

She said: “He always had a story to tell. He never spoke about the war, but he did talk a bit about his life in Poland.”

As a teenager, Wanda and her mother lived for a while in York. Wanda went to Queen Anne’s School and then York College of Art. But she moved away.

Years later, and after a career in children’s television, she and her husband Tim left London, where they had been living for 20 years, and moved to York, only for Wanda to find herself living near to the very football ground where her father once played.

Such is life.

• We have an extra photograph to finish off with this week, a picture of two mystery women sent in by reader Fred Toms, who thinks it may have been taken in the Skirpenbeck/Scrayingham area some time during the First World War. If anyone recognises either of the women, please contact us at features@thepress.co.uk