Monica Huckwell interviewed by Arlene Ellis 10th July 2018
I was born in Brigg, in Lincolnshire, a long time ago. My connection to the village was my two great aunts lived next door to each other, one in the house that I live in and one next door. When my aunt Monica died, she left the house to my mum. It sounds very posh this and it wasn’t. We used to come up here for our holiday. I would be about ten or eleven. It wasn’t very far, it was quite easy on the train because we didn’t have a car then. We used to come up here for a few days or a week or so for our holiday from Lincolnshire. That was when I started coming up, I suppose in the early sixties when my aunt died. I only go back that far and my mum’s family goes back a lot further. When we first came here somebody mentioned a quoit pitch. I never played but I remember it being there. Same with the water pump. The only thing I did do when we used to come up is meet up with some of the youths on the green and go mushroom picking. At some stupid time, why you have to go at stupid times to pick mushrooms, I don’t know if they disappeared during the day or whether it was just a ploy to get us to go down the fields, I’ve no idea. That was Jean Hardy’s son, David, and Phillip Binch, bless him he died. It was a nice time, every time we came up, you’d meet up with a little gang. I don’t think we knew what we were picking to be perfectly honest! But it was an adventure, at 5 o’clock or some stupid time. Otherwise you didn’t go out anywhere, you just made your own fun, of course you did in those days. You weren’t really encouraged to go down to the fields very much, although people did. The farmer used to have the most beautiful racehorses, which he trained, and of course you know how spirited they can be, so we weren’t encouraged to go.
In 1968 I came to live up here. At that time, we’d rented the house out to my ex biology teacher and her husband, whose name was John Slack. He got involved with the amenity’s society. They moved out and I moved in. So that was the start of me living in this area. I did move out and come back again a couple of times, as you do, marriages and things.
It was a very slow village then, very slow. Everybody knew everybody else. There seems to be an awful lot of elderly people, I suppose I’m one of them now, but at the time there was a lot of elderly people living in the village that were real characters. Lovely, lovely characters. You knew them all and there also seemed to be an awful lot of children, which there aren’t anything like as many now, or they don’t come out to play. It’s very different now. The main thing is three quarters of the people work. I think they’re all out, that’s the problem. There isn’t as much community as there was.
I started in ’68, when I was 18, I started my life up here and it was very different to Lincolnshire. The Post Office was there where Janet Hardy lives now. Her mum ran it and it was a little shop and Post Office. It was very handy because there was only Yarm then, there wasn’t Orchard Estate, there wasn’t anywhere. If you couldn’t get it at the local shop you didn’t have it basically. There are other people I remember, like Mr. Bretherton the coal man. I know a policeman used to come to the village but I don’t remember one actually living in the village.
I got a job and then my mum came to live up here to look after my daughter. It was the first job I’d