Excerpts from a Living Memories interview by Yvonne Wass in March 2007:

…Well, my earliest memory was in 1925 when there was a total eclipse of the sun, not quite a total eclipse in Tickhill, but very nearly…

Well the doctor had one and the Castle [the Atkinson-Clarks] had one. There were a few who did but ours was one of the first in Tickhill…

…In 1930, when I was eight, Miss Cynthia Atkinson-Clark started a Brownie pack in Tickhill. She was the daughter of Mr. Atkinson-Clark from the Castle. There had been guides since 1926 but this was the first introduction of Brownies. There are a few of us left who were in the first pack, but not many…

…Everybody went to school in those days until they were 14. They didn’t go on to other schools, like secondary modern schools and things like that…

…The big event was always the May Queen in the spring, not always in May; it varied a little but was always called the May Queen. The crowning ceremony was on the steps of the Buttercross. After the crowning there was maypole dancing…

…Another event at the Cross was the Fair in October [second weekend in October] it was a funfair…

…There was the Harvest Festival at Church at the same weekend as the fair and I mean the Harvest Festival is nothing now but in those days you could smell the flowers and the fruit there was so much…

…Tickhill had a bellman. He came round ringing his bell and giving notices out. If the council wanted to tell you anything he would come round and ring and shout.

… In Miss Goodwin’s School, the last part of the afternoon we always used to sew and whilst we were sewing Miss Grace Goodwin always read to us and it was quite a good idea, in a way, because we got to know a lot of books that we might not have read, in serial fashion sort of thing. The boys sewed as well…

…I think I was perhaps a bit of an awkward girl when I was at school, because I asked Miss Nellie Goodwin, the one who was the Senior Teacher, when we were doing the 10 Commandments, "What is adultery?", so she said my mother would probably tell me and that was the answer I got…

Oh, we played all sorts of silly games. We played made up games mostly…

…The war didn’t really get going until 1940, when the bombing of London started. Hull was one of the early places. In fact Hull, although it is not talked about a lot, got a lot of bombing…

…At the beginning of the ’39 war my father made an air-raid shelter in the garden.

There was nothing serious in the bombing in Tickhill, we heard the bombing in Sheffield but in Tickhill we weren’t affected. A few went off in the open fields but nobody was hurt or anything like that…

…After Dunkirk we had soldiers billeted here in Tickhill and at that time I used to help in the canteen that they had in the Parish Room…