Anyone remember the chocolate shop?" asked Sheila in an e-mail from Australia. Of course someone does.

Jill Dewhirst says: "This was what we called the Cadbury's Chocolate Bar. It was in the triangular building at the bottom of Cheapside which had the shop of Sports and Pastimes in it.

"It must have been in the late 1940s to early 1950s because I was attending Bolling Girls' Grammar School at the time. If memory serves me right you could have hot or cold drinking chocolate with a blob of ice cream as an optional extra, cocoa, Bournvita, and ice cream with hot chocolate sauce.

"Schoolgirl heaven! There were small tables and a counter where the drinks were prepared. I remember the staff using tall jugs to mix the chocolate and then using a large balloon whisk to whip up a froth. They held the top of the whisk between the palms of their hands and rotated them at speed to make the froth. Like Sheila I still love chocolate."

Mary Tetlow recalls often visiting the cafe in 1945 with colleagues at the end of their day's work for a chocolate drink. "This shop didn't long remain, being intended only to promote a leading chocolate manufacturers' products," she writes.

That, too, is the view of Frank Holt who says the caf was a means of advertising Cadbury's products which had not been seen during the war and were still on ration. He believes it was called The Chocolate Box. He says it was run by a Mary Hands who came from Cadbury's headquarters. "She got off the train in Bradford in the middle of a pea-souper and thought What the hell is this?'."

He recalls that his late brother-in-law, Ronnie Harrison, who worked for his father as a turf accountant in Piccadilly, used to go there for his cocoa and biscuits twice a day.

Elaine Neale was taken there as a child by her favourite aunt. She remembers painted murals depicting Swiss scenes, "presumably relating to Swiss chocolate," she suggests.

Many thanks for all your memories of this long-lost, short-lived Bradford landmark.

Another reader who didn't want to be quoted recalled another establishment of around the same period, a delicatessen on the ground floor of the Silver Grill in Market Street. It was run by a strict woman who insisted that respectable girls or ladies should never, ever show the backs of their knees.

Mrs Tetlow adds another memory, triggered by a review on April 22 of Ronald W Hough's memoir Our Ronnie in which he mentioned the pre-vacuum days in the 1920s.

"It was no later than 1930 when my granny bought a Gem vacuum cleaner," she writes. "It was upright with a bag, almost the same as my Hoover Junior of today. The difference was that no electricity, not even batteries, was needed to use it. Another non-electric model was the New Maid, sold at this time by our neighbour at his hardware shop on John Street."

And Mrs Neale asks what happened to the stone lion which used to stand at the corner of the Conditioning House roof but disappeared without explanation, as did the talbot dogs which used to stand above the doorways of the Talbot Hotel in the centre of Bradford.

"I used to weave little stories about that lion for my grandchildren and we used to wave as we passed it," she recalls. "When my last grandchild was about two we passed the Conditioning House to see the lion but there it was gone!"

l Mrs Catherine Jowett, whose wartime decontamination drill was featured on this page last week, is keen for me to make it clear that she was only one member of a team of ARP workers who spent their Sunday mornings working in a long hut in front of what is now the ENT unit at the BRI. There they would practise the drill on cub scouts who were passed from one section to another in the hut until they emerged at the other end fully processed.

n Since more space was allocated to it, Past Times has proved increasingly popular with readers. More and more of you are writing in response to items covered on this page, or suggesting new memory-jogging subjects. We're delighted about that, but it does mean that sometimes there's a delay before we're able to carry your recollections or views. Please bear with us. We'll get round to most of them in due course.