"We used to count them out and count them back."

"We used to count them out and count them back so we knew how many were missing," recalls Barbara Weatherley, ne Moses.

It was such a familiar sound that she knew immediately when one of the planes was in trouble.

"You could hear it coming down. It was almost like the sound of the engine revving up."

The date was March 5, 1945. Then 16 years old, she was sitting at home with her younger brother Glen and her mum at their home, number 37 Nunthorpe Grove. Her dad was at work at Rowntree's and her elder brother Ronald was away serving with the air force.

As the noise of the troubled Halifax came ever closer, Mrs Weatherley, Glen and their mother had to run for their lives.

"We fled into the air raid shelter. When we got there we heard a massive explosion. We were just in time.

"We stayed in there for ages. We didn't dare come out.

"We heard a shout from Nunthorpe Grove. They were saying, 'get out of there, get out!' Then we realised the fuselage was on top of us."

This was the largest part of the wreckage of the 426 Squadron Halifax which crashed on Nunthorpe Grove. As we recalled in last week's piece to mark the 60th anniversary of the crash, six of the crew and five civilians were killed. The plane was in trouble soon after take-off from RAF Linton-on-Ouse. Freezing fog left it so heavily iced up, it was destined for disaster.

That article prompted two readers to get in touch with their own vivid memories of the incident, including Mrs Weatherley.

Neighbours yelled at her family to evacuate the air raid shelter because the unexploded bombs on board the Halifax could go up at any moment.

She and her family only realised how close they had come to being casualties when they emerged out of the air raid shelter into the daylight.

The fuselage had landed on top of the Anderson shelters in their garden and next door's. They had to crunch their way to safety over broken glass from the blown-out windows of their home.

The trauma was all the more painful for being an exact repeat of what they had endured less than three years earlier. "It was absolutely harrowing," says Mrs Weatherley. "It was like '42 all over again. You couldn't believe what you saw. Total devastation."

Unbelievably, their home had been hit in the worst German air raid on York in April 1942. Then, three bombs were dropped on Nunthorpe Grove.

One blew a hole in the roof of Mrs Weatherley's home. For years it was covered in tarpaulin. It had finally been fixed, only for the Halifax crash to wreck it again.

While the bomb squad made the area safe, the family were taken in by the same relatives and friends who looked after them after the air raid. She stayed at the home of a friend in Balmoral Terrace.

Because of the threat of explosion, they were not able to return home for a change of clothing or a toothbrush. Mrs Weatherley went back to Priory Street Higher Grade School. "You just got on with life. You had no choice. There was no avoiding work, you had to get cracking."

Ivy Deighton, ne Newey, was at home in nearby Millfield Road when the plane came down. By coincidence, Mrs Deighton's job was patching up the bullet holes of damaged Halifax bombers at Handley Page in Water End, Clifton.

Her six-year-old niece was with her mum in Bishopthorpe Road and they saw the plane fall from the sky. At the same moment Mrs Deighton's railwayman brother, Leslie, was cycling home. He told her afterwards, "I thought it was going to touch my head".

When he got home, the pair headed over to Nunthorpe Grove to see if they could help.

They were horrified by what they saw. "It was absolutely dreadful," says Mrs Deighton, who was 25 at the time.

"The houses on either side were on fire. There were two corpses on the grass verge."

The bombs were still going off. "We were blown off our feet, and this great big iron manhole cover came up in front of us and dropped down again.

"I thought the damn thing was going to drop on my head."

There was little she and her brother could do, so they headed home. Later Mrs Deighton went to the pictures.

"I always stayed until the very last minute.

"I came home and turned into the bottom of Millfield Road. A voice in the dark said, 'Where do you think you're going?'

"I said 'home', and the voice said, 'where do you think home is?'"

The voice belonged to a policeman.

When she told him, he broke the news to her that the whole area had been cordoned off by the bomb squad. She went to stay with a friend in Tang Hall.

Last week we also looked back to the terrible night which preceded the Halifax crash, when German Junkers aircraft shot down bombers as they returned to their Yorkshire bases.

In the fight back, some of the Luftwaffe planes were downed. This brought back memories for Jean Rudka. She was 12 at the time, and set off cycling from her home, Elvington station house, with five of her friends eager to see the wreckage. They saw a German pilot caught in a tree.

"A policeman said 'you get yourselves going', and probably clipped our ears," she says.

Updated: 09:15 Monday, March 07, 2005