A MAN who lived through the Second World War in York has revealed how life under coronavirus lockdown is in some ways worse than wartime.

But, Mike Bowes says today’s York has means of coping that were unavailable in the 1940s, particularly the internet.

He was 11 when war was declared in September 1939 and remembers his mother crying as she heard the news.

Throughout the war, even though his school was bombed, he was able to meet his friends, go to school, move around the city as he wanted to, and there were no food shortages.

“At the time, of course, as an 11-year-old, it (the war) didn’t make a great deal of difference,” he said. “We just took it as a normal way of living.”

Now 91, he is currently living in strict isolation in his Strensall home with his wife.

“I don’t think young people really realise how serious the situation is,” he said.

But the couple are coping well, he said, because they have access to something that wasn’t available to anyone in wartime Britain - the internet.

“It’s much easier to keep in touch,” he said.

In wartime Britain, you never knew when you would be able to speak to your relatives - particularly if they were in the armed forces, such as his two cousins, slightly older than himself, both of whom died on active service.

You could always get essential food items in wartime, he said.

“The most essential thing was a ration book. If you didn’t have a ration book you didn’t get any food,” he said. “The Government decided for you what you could buy.”

Children didn’t dream of eating sweets - they dreamed of eating bananas, which were unavailable during the war.

Like many, the family’s Acomb garden became a vegetable allotment with food producing animals.

His school, Poppleton Road School, was heavily damaged in the Baedeker Raid in April 1942 that killed 72 people.

“It quickly got back to normal. We went back to school," he said.

The children gathered up their wrecked school desks and took them to their new classrooms in Scarcroft School where they used them in woodwork lessons.

He still has the coffee table he made from the ruined desks that year.

He remembers cycling down a street where houses had been bombed and seeing hosepipes pouring water on one of the burning houses.

For Mr Bowes, war ended on his 17th birthday, May 4, because that was the day Montgomery took the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces in northern Germany.

He has made the date a double celebration ever since.