Summary of an Interview with Elva Higgins (née Clarkson) in December 2008 by Jackie Thorns

 To read the full interview click on the link at the end of this summary.

Elva was born in Tickhill and lived only in four houses, and is still happily living here.

She describes her school days -

“The school was just three classrooms.   Incidentally, my Grandma went to that school, my father did, and then me and then my children.  The same two schools in Tickhill all through the generations and they didn’t change”.

- the sort of people who lived in Tickhill –

“Oh yes, they were, oh yes plenty of nice gentry people living in Tickhill in those days”

- the way people managed their domestic economies –

“even in my grandparent’s time people used to keep their own hens and pigs”

- the Clarkson’s shop on Westgate –

"It belonged to my great grandfather, Edward Clarkson …. there were fewer shops going back to great-grandparent’s time in the eighteen hundreds ……. they used to have their own horse and dray to deliver to places these big sacks that people had stone bags or several stone bags of whatever they were ordering, and flour even used to be weighed in big bags, because women used to make their own bread and that sort of thing, and it all had to be delivered to places like Stainton and Maltby, which was a small village in those days, because there was no colliery, and probably Harworth and all the Tickhill ones as well, but apart from the Clarksons there were the Jarvis’s who were doing the same thing,”

- the social climate of Tickhill when it was less populated -

“Because, remember, when I was growing up, we knew where every person lived in Tickhill.  And you’d just about know everybody as well. People didn’t move very much…No, not even around Tickhill.

When I was young married I could often come down to the shops to do my shopping and never lock the door”

Elva also describes a schoolchild’s experience of the war years, her time in the Brownies, a typical Sunday, activities in the Library and Parish Room, and keep-fit classes and the romantic involvement of a certain Michael Parkinson !

To read a full transcript of the conversation, please click here