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AOSA ANNUAL REPORT 1999 |
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As a small boy of Quaker parentage, in short trousers, a day scholar at The Friends' School, I lived at ‘Highfield’, (now ‘Meadowcroft’) halfway up Station Road. High up in the neighbouring trees, my carved initials probably remain. It was past this house that the daily pageant of the villagers took place; the ironstone miners, and to the 8.00 o’clock morning train to Middlesbrough the concourse who worked on Teesside, some having walked more than a mile, breaking into a trot when those at its head shouted the sighting of steam from the engine passing through Battersby woods. The engine driver would never leave until the last straggler had boarded his train. There was also the coach which in winter took Henry Kitching to the station from The Grange’ beyond the Low Green and the gig on which he sat in the summer beside his coachman, in cockaded hat, long whip held at arm’s length, who awaited his return on the 7.00 o’clock evening train from Middlesbrough. Those of the ordinary folk too tired to walk home might pay for a ride in Dunning’s cab, the horse which pulled it having plodded from its stable at the far end of the village. Of all that passed our house, the most spectacular was the mines’ ambulance, its two horses at full gallop, taking a seriously injured miner to the doctor. Ayton Station and its large signal box was a busy place, with a stationmaster, porter, ticket office and waiting room warmed in winter by a coal fire. In the marshalling yard behind, tank engines assembled the trucks of ironstone from Rosedale brought down ‘The Incline, which scarred the Cleveland Hills behind Ingleby Greenhow, and from the mines at Roseberry and Captain Cook's. Trucks of coal were shunted up a ramp from which they were emptied into bays beneath where the coal was weighed into sacks and loaded onto horse-drawn flat carts for delivery throughout the village. To my home, ‘Highfield’, unpasteurised milk was delivered by a huge, horse-drawn churn between two large wheels from which a can was filled to be hung on the roadside gate, sometimes with bits of grass floating on it. Fish, of doubtful origin - “their eyes were glazed,” I heard my mother say, - was sold from the sidecar of a man on a motorbike. Every Friday, a bowler-hatted man from Hintons, the Teesside grocers, would call to take my mother’s order for the following week, delivered on Mondays. She baked her own bread. Eggs, bought from local farms, were kept fresh in a pail of preservative (Isinglass). Go to Page
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