LAST week we left York great-grandfather George Bye as a teenage farm labourer, working at Brecks Farm in Huntington for 6d a week and his keep. He was 17, and it was the beginning of the 1940s.

One Sunday, after all the cleaning, milking out and feeding had been done, his boss Fred Pearson told him he could go out. It was a rare treat. George washed up in the horse trough, then decided to walk into York.

“Cutting across the fields, I had soon covered the ground via Huntington Road, Rowntree’s and Clarence Street, when I heard music,” he wrote in his memoirs Those Were The Days – Thank God!

“Rounding the corner into Gillygate, I saw a large Salvation Army band, with flags flying and a host of children behind.”

He stood and watched as the band went into a building through some iron gates. A man in uniform invited him to go inside. “Being very conscious of my rather shabby, and farm-smelly, mode of dress, I hesitated, but the man, whom I later was to know as ‘Pop’ Perrin, was very persuasive, so in I went.”

It was the start of a life-long association with music and with the Salvation Army. George was given a brass baritone instrument, similar to a euphonium, to learn, and took it back to the farm, where he practised scales.

On March 12, 1941, he turned 18, and was released from his work at the farm. Wilfred Bristow, a side-drummer in the Salvation Army band, offered him lodgings in his house, and he got a job delivering coal by horse and cart for Rutherfords. He also met the Bristows’ daughter, Elsie. Romance was in the air.

Soon he was working for coal merchant Blundy, Clark and Co unloading the coal barges which plied the Ouse. Then the war intervened. He was called up, and after basic training at Harrogate, was sent on cavalry training.

Eventually, a member of the Royal Army Service Corps, he was sent with his unit to France. “Our job,” he writes, “was to round up the hundreds of horses and mules left running loose by the retreating German forces and to hand them over to the Allies.”

He witnessed the carnage caused by an airborne drop at Arnhem, and moved into the bomb-flattened town of Wessel, where “we took charge of more horses, which were the only living things to be seen.” He also became a member of the Brussels Salvation Army Red Shield Band.

At the end of hostilities, he was given a week’s leave to return home and get married.

He hadn’t seen Elsie for nearly two years. He arrived home on Friday, and the wedding was at Clifton Church the next day. Elsie, he wrote, “looked beautiful in her white wedding gown.”

It was to be two more years before he left the army.

George remained in the Salvation Army Band for 45 years, worked for Rowntrees for 15 years, and then for more than 20 years at printers Ben Johnson.

He and Elsie were together for 50 years. They had two children, four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

In 1994, George took his wife for a short holiday to Bridlington. She died there, in his arms. But for George, now 88 and living off Tadcaster Road, the memories live on.

• Wartime photos and photograph of Blundy, Clark and Co courtesy of imagineyork.co.uk