by Maggie B Dickinson Based on a true story. I had a similar version published in Northern Life When it comes to secrets, the tiny village of Sunderland Point leads the field. Growing out of a peat bog, lashed by westerly gales, cut off by the tide twice a day – and with its only…
Category: Nostalgia
For Valour
JAMES HEWITSON VC OF CONISTON 1892 – 1963 Originally published by Cumbria magazine November 2018 On November 11th 2018 Remembrance Sunday falls exactly one hundred years to the day since the Great War officially ended with the signing of an armistice between the Allies and Germany, at Compiégne in France. For four years thousands of men had…
Three Fur Coats
Originally published in Lancashire magazine The first time we saw granny, auntie Margaret and mum together in the American cast-off fur coats, that granny had brought back from America in 1950, my father named them The Three Stooges. He ached so much from laughing that he made them promise never to appear simultaneously in the…
Memories of Wartime
Memories of Wartime When I was a kid during WW2 we didn’t have sell-by dates and elf and safety, we just had the war to contend with. It became so much a part of our daily existence that after it was over a friend said ‘I didn’t know wars could end’. Our family had a…
Lakeland’s Last Box Standing – The AA in Cumbria
Lakeland’s Last Box Standing – The AA in Cumbria Originally published in Cumbria magazine July 2015 Braving the elements on Dunmail Raise, an exposed mountain pass between Grasmere and Thirlmere, is the yellow and black Automobile Association ‘sentry’ box number 487 that has stood its ground for eighty three years. If only the box could…
Road to Freedom for Girl on a Golden Rudge
Road to Freedom for Girl on a Golden Rudge Re-published by kind permission of Down Your Way from their issue of June 2012 One extremity-numbing Saturday morning in November 1953 a friend and I set off on our bicycles for a weekend at Aysgarth Youth Hostel, a YHA buzzword on the strength of the warden’s…
Miss Hartley’s Peanuts
Miss Hartley’s Peanuts Originally published under Margaret Drake in Lancashire Life – 1970s Miss Hartley, who taught third-year infants at Barrowford Council School (now Barrowford Primary School), was everyone’s favourite teacher. In her classroom were a piano, a grand wooden desk on which she kept a box of Ink Eradicator and the register. Huge windows,…
Billy Blacksmith of Barrowford
Billy Blacksmith of Barrowford Published in Countryman magazine August 2011 Whenever I think of William Henry Whitaker, aka Billy Blacksmith, one of my strongest memories of this burly jocular man is of him reading our newspaper, but we took his evening visits in our stride because, as a staunch Yorkshire man, he derived great pleasure…
The Morris Eight
Maggie B Dickinson – Published in Best of British June 2014 In 1951 five of us squeezed into a tiny 1934 Morris Eight. Its registration was AKA 738 and the suspension was wicked. None of our neighbours owned a car and, considering few travelled more than the thirty-odd miles to Blackpool for their Wakes Week, they…
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