I WAS moved by Haydn Lewis's article on how Yorkshire people felt about their accent (January 17).

I was born in a village during the Second World War to the youngest daughter of a builder and cabinet-maker from a proud Yorkshire family. Soon after I left my birthplace when my mother chose to marry the "well spoken" son of a Chester Cathedral School headmaster, an Oxford University graduate, who chose to demean my grandparents by quoting to them French philosophers in their native language.

My mother died a couple of years later yearning for her home and family in Kirkbymoorside. A lost, little illegitimate four-year-old, I was returned to my moorland home to be cared for a foster family, Gladys Wilson and her parents.

Gladys's dad worked hard in the stone quarries while her mum cooked wonderful meals over a coal fire.

At 62 I have come to realise that it was the love of this broadly-spoken Yorkshire family that saved my life emotionally by allowing me to grow up as the Yorkshire boy for the next three years while giving me all their love and attention.

It was this kernel of experience that kept me alive as I returned to my stepfather and his new wife, to the ridicule of my pronunciation of "noots and boonie rabbits", to hour upon hour of head slapping and the recitation of English poetry "the correct way".

Living for almost 40 years in Canada and then the USA, my greatest joy and most rooting experience is to make my weekly calls home to soak up the voices and accents of those who care for me the most: to know where I belong and who I really am.

Jim Rivis,

St Paul Street,

Montpelier,

Vermont, USA.

Updated: 11:28 Saturday, January 22, 2005