JEAN Stirk still remembers the day a man came to her father's house with a copy of a wartime diary.

It was in the years after the First World War. The diary, written by a CA Muscroft, gave a day-by-day account of the operations of the 144th (York) Heavy Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery - in which Jean's father, John Stirk (usually known as Bill) had served.

John Stirk had been 29 - a Rowntrees worker from Redeness Street in York - on the day he was recruited, October 29, 1915. His soldiers' small book - which Jean still has - described him as being 5' 61/2, with a 'fresh complexion'.

Her father was a kind, gentle man, Jean says. He'd married Ada Cuthbert after the war, and the couple had three children - John Edward, Kathleen and Jean herself.

Jean's brother John Edward, who recently moved to London from York to be with his own daughter, remembers his father - a lifelong Rowntrees employee - as a 'quiet, retiring man' and a keen cricketer and footballer.

"He was always conscientious," adds Jean, who still lives in York. "He looked after his children very well."

Her father seldom discussed his war experiences with his children, though. "I think we were really too young," Jean says. So it is mainly from that diary written by CA Muscroft that she later came to understand what her father had been through.

She was just a little girl when the man man came to the door offering to sell a copy of the diary. "He said he had written this diary, and he wondered if any soldiers who were in the battery were interested in buying it."

Jean's father was: and a copy of the diary - a neat, slim volume bound in red cloth - is still in the family's keeping today.

It provides a riveting account of what life was like for an artillery battery in the war.

The Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA) heavy batteries were equipped with 60 pounder (5 inch) guns which fired large calibre high explosive shells. They were mainly used for pounding the enemy's artillery, as well as strongpoints, dumps, stores, roads and railways behind enemy lines.

But getting the horse-drawn guns into a position from which to fire wasn't always easy.

Muscroft - Jean thinks he may have been a captain - describes several occasions in which the heavy guns of the 144th got stuck in the thick mud near Ypres and the horses couldn't budge them. The only resort was for the men to haul on ropes themselves. Such accounts are particularly poignant, she says, because her father once volunteered for just such a duty.

Muscroft describes one occasion, on December 8, 1916, when the battery's 'C' gun was due for an overhaul - which required it being dragged out of its gun pit.

"It was a dark, miserable night," Muscroft wrote. "The mud, chalky and slippery as it was, was thick on the ground and round the gun positions... We had prepared the gun pit for removing the gun when the drivers and eight heavy horses appeared out of the darkness.

"The gunners heaved and pulled on the drag ropes until the gun was moved to the edge of the pit, when the horses were hooked in...

"The horses were not ready, though, and... the gun just remained where it was whilst the horses pranced about in their usual aimless manner.

"Several attempts were made to get them on the move all together, but in the end we had to give it up and set to work on the drag ropes again. We all heaved away and eventually the ropes went slack and then we knew that the horses had at last taken the strain and the gun was moving, slowly at first but gaining speed once the horses really got going.

"It was not easy to stop them or control them. There was some distance of soft muddy fields to traverse before the hard road could be reached, and down this the team of horses galloped, eight massive brutes tearing along with the huge gun behind. We were all left running after them..."

The 144th battery had begun to take shape in York in October 1915. Recruits initially continued to live at home, and paraded during the day in a yard just off Bootham. "Eventually we took quarters in the Nurses' Homes, Monkgate...and commenced out initial steps in training," Muscroft wrote.

It wasn't until June 1916 that, having sailed from the Solent, the battery reached he front near Ypres. Their enthusiasm for the war quickly began to wane.

On July 27, 1916, Muscroft wrote: "The constant hammering away of shells, both near at hand and far away, and all day long; the mud when it rained...the swarms of flies when it was hot; the rats, the croaking frogs, the everlasting abominable shells; the lack of clean water, often in hot weather; the poor and insufficient rations; the eternal sandbag filling; the digging and the navvying work ...was beginning to wear out our enthusiasm... We, even at this early stage, began to welcome any news whereby any indication of peace might be implied."

There were more than two long years of war for the men of the 144th yet to endure, however.

John Stirk was among the lucky ones. He - along with his cousin and brother, who also served in the war - survived, and he lived to a ripe old age in York.

He even became a fire warden in the Second World War, Jean says - when she, as a teenager, would accompany him.

But it is that diary which gives her most insight into what he went through during the first war.

"It is a real eye-opener," she says. "It's incredible how they coped with things."

York Press: ON THE SOMME: The 39th Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery in action, probably near Mametz, in 1916
ON THE SOMME: The 39th Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery in action, probably near Mametz, in 1916