Sitting in the front room of his daughter Ruby’s home in Wigginton, the 56-year-old former York postman and chef says he and his Ukrainian family - wife Yuliia and mother-in-law Olga - saw ‘horrific sights’ during the course of their epic 1,000-mile drive to safety across the war-ravaged country.

“I saw stuff I don’t want to talk about, stuff people shouldn’t have to read about,” he said.

They are memories that won’t quickly go away. He admits he can barely sleep. And every time a plane flies overhead, he flinches.

But at least he and his family are safe - John at Ruby’s, Yuliia and Olga for now staying with Yuliia’s grown-up son in Poland.

What he can't stop thinking about is the people left behind, he says. “People have had to abandon everything they had. They’ve got nothing. They desperately need humanitarian aid - especially food and clothing. It’s getting very cold over there - down to -18 degrees."

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Another thought strikes him. “There are people in hospital,” he said. “And he (Putin) is blowing up hospitals.”

Ukrainians clear debris outside a medical centre damaged after parts of a Russian missile, shot down by Ukrainian air defense, landed on a nearby apartment block

John says that, despite the TV images and live broadcasts from bomb-ravaged Ukrainian cities, people in the UK still don’t realise the full horror of what is going on. Some things are just too awful to show on TV.

Ukrainian news services, keen to depict the full truth, are less squeamish. “When you’ve seen a body lying out of a tank with arms and legs missing... it is on TV in Ukraine,” John said.

Until the Russian invasion, life had been good for John, an English teacher, and Yuliia, a doctor.

They had a flat in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv which they shared with Yuliia’s 83-year-old mum Olga, and a small cottage - they called it their 'summer house' - in the tiny village of Zidky about 20 miles from Kharkiv.

As Russian troops massed on the border, there were rumours and warnings. But no-one could believe that Putin would order an invasion, John says. “Yuliia said he would be crazy to do it!”

On the morning of the attack, he and Yuliia were at the summer house. They drove back into Kharkiv to collect Olga. It was eerie at first, John said. The normally busy streets were ‘dead quiet’. “And then we started hearing bombs falling.”

They rushed to the flat, picked up Olga, grabbed documents and a few essentials, and went back to their summer house. There, they sheltered for a week, as Kharkiv was besieged.

Damaged vehicles and buildings in Kharkiv city centre on Wednesday. Picture: AP /Pavel Dorogoy

Their food supplies began to run out, and fighting came ominously close. At one point, there was shooting in the fields outside their house. “You could see the smoke coming off the weapons in the long grass.”

Then, one night, the railway bridge near their house was blown up. John thinks that was done by Ukrainians themselves, to slow the Russian advance on Kharkiv from the south.

They couldn’t make up their minds whether to stay, or make a break for it. Then they got a panicked call from Yuliia’s grown-up son in Poland. “He said ‘Get out quick!’” John says.

Yuliia’s son had told them about a convoy that was heading to safety. They decided to try to join it - but it turned out to be just a single minibus.

They headed south first, to pick up the daughter of a friend of Yuliia’s son, then struck out westwards across country, trying to avoid major roads and big cities.

The 1,000-mile journey took them six days. They were slowed by traffic queues, and regular checkpoints outside every town and village. They slept on office floors or the floors of village halls. One night, they had been planning to sleep near an airfield, but decided to carry on. The airfield was bombed that night.

There was a constant fear, John said, about bombs falling from the sky. That made it hard to think straight. “When you don’t whether a bomb is going to drop on your head - that makes it difficult to plan.”

Eventually they reached the Polish border - where they queued for 21 hours to get across. There were two checkpoints, separated by a short space in between, like Checkpoint Charlie, John said. The queue moved so slowly that they were stuck in that no-man’s land for four hours.

Ukrainian refugees approaching the Polish border

But eventually they got across, and drove to Yuliia’s son’s house. The next day he and Yuliia went to a McDonalds together. “We started eating fries and burst into tears.”

Now, back in York, John admits he feels in limbo. He understands, now, how refugees feel. “I have a British passport, but I’m still a refugee,” he says. “I have nothing.”

He arrived at Leeds Bradford airport at 6pm on Saturday, with little more than the clothes he stood up in and £7.40 in cash, after flying from Poznan in Poland.

His daughter Ruby and her friend picked him up by car. It was ‘very emotional’, he admits. “But what would have happened if I hadn’t had family here?’”

That’s the reality faced by countless Ukrainian woman and children who have fled, leaving their menfolk, homes, jobs and lives behind.

For John’s own family, life is in suspension. His Ukrainian wife, Yuliia, doesn’t have a British visa. For now, she and her mother are staying in Poland with Yuliia’s son.

John and his wife Yuliia in happier times

John plans to help Yuliia apply for a visa online, and then says they may split their time between York and Poland. Beyond that, while the war continues to rage, it is hard to plan for the future.

He has been offered work as a chef, he says, but at the moment  feels too shaken up to take it. He’s just hoping for the war to end, so they can go back to Kharkiv and ‘see if anything is left’.

But one thing he is sure about. The Ukrainians won’t surrender. They’re a tough, independent people. “They’re like Yorkshiremen," John said. "Exactly the same, except they just don’t speak English!”