My Mum and Dad built Rokeby when they married in 1953 having bought the plot from the Estate for £65. Dad had grown up in the village at Field House and I was born at Rokeby in 1954.

The village shop opposite us was run by Martha and Joe Coates and was simply known as Martha’s. The door opened straight into the Coates’ front room which doubled up as the shop – Joe sitting in a chair by the fireside. Sweets were on the table to the right hand side (Fruit Salad or Black Jacks 4 for 1d) and cigarettes were in a sideboard on the left. Baking ingredients had to be fetched from Martha’s own kitchen cupboard and other items necessitated Martha making a trip to a bedroom. Unfathomable decimalisation eventually brought about Martha’s retirement and the shop closed its doors in 1971.

I attended Everingham School from the age of 5. We were divided into two classrooms, the smaller (now the village hall bar) for infants and the big room for juniors. The infants were taught by Mrs Kitty Woods who lived in the far half of the adjoining building and the room also housed the big coke boiler which heated the whole school. 

Aged around 6, we progressed to the big room and were arranged by age into groups around 4 or 5 desks. Mr Joy was our headmaster and lived in the near-side adjoining house which connected with the schoolroom by a corridor through which he would often appear in a morning still in his pyjamas. 

There was no timetable. The only regular ‘lessons’ in the week were spent gathered around a wireless listening to ‘Singing Together’ or ‘Time & Tune’. We wrote our diaries, and then did an exercise from a book of sums which we marked ourselves.

The playground reached all the way across to Avaker (it was many years before we realised it was actually ‘Halfacre’) Lane in those days and, as the grass was never cut, was a great place for making dens. We girls played skipping – always with a long rope swung between two ‘endies’ and we had songs for each game – I wish I could remember more of them.

“On a mountain stands a lady

Who she is I do not know.

All she wants is gold and silver

All she wants is a nice young man.

So come in my (choose a friend’s name) x dear, x dear, x dear

Come in my x dear while I go out to play”.

The singer then ducked out under the rope just as the new girl jumped in from the other side.

And

“Raspberry, Strawberry, Gooseberry jam

Tell me the name of my young man”

You then skipped faster and faster as the other girls shouted the letters of the alphabet and, when you tripped over the rope, the last letter gave you your imagined young man’s initial. I wasn’t good at skipping and usually ended with Alan or Brian.

We played kick-a-tin, and ball games against the big wall facing the playground, Queenie o’Coco being my favourite.

Dinners were cooked in a lean-to abutting Mrs Woods’ house and eaten in the half of the big room nearest Mr Joy’s house. Boys and girls entered the building through two separate doors and cloakrooms, and the toilets were in a shed round the back.

Village social life revolved around the school and the churches. The WI met in the schoolroom and jumble sales, bazaars and whist drives were frequent. 

The family that owned the estate had been Roman Catholic for centuries and had, in the past, only let their farms and houses to Catholics. By the ’50s there was more of a mix, but the school was still titled RC School and the priest was a weekly visitor. We processed in May and for Corpus Christi. Dressed in white, we would follow the Priest as he led the congregation through the main double doors at the back of the church and around the gravel path in front of the Hall. We girls had small wicker baskets filled with petals and would strew them along the way, muttering under our breath ‘one, two, kiss and strew’ in order to keep time with one another. 

The winter of 1962/3 was extremely cold and, one by one, every house in the village lost its water supply as the pipes froze underground. I remember my Dad filling the bath to the top with water while we still had a supply and that had to last us for everything until the thaw came. The lake at the Hall froze solid for weeks and became everyone’s playground. The lake was twice as long then as it is now and you could skate nearly all the way to the woods up by Low Park. Our skates were hand-me-downs from a previous generation and those without blades had just as much fun sliding around and bringing people down like skittles. I still have an image in my mind of the Reverend Henry Stapleton skating gingerly across the lake pushing a helpful dining chair, when my uncle, Bill Layton, swiped the chair and left His Reverence to crawl back to the bank on his hands and knees.

Darkness didn’t stop the fun as those who had come in cars, switched on their headlights and illuminated the ice.

Families often changed houses. Nowadays it would be thought high-handed that a landlord would swap people around but, in practice, it was practical and accepted.  Growing families were offered bigger houses; those whose children had left home or who had retired were moved to smaller ones. With The Estate owning most of the village, it was easy for them to organise.

There’s a well-known saying that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. People worked in the village – for The Estate or on the surrounding farms and everyone knew everyone … and their parents, and their grandparents. No misdemeanours stayed secret from your mum and dad for long (they’d usually heard about it before you got home) and I often had a clip round the ear from friends’ parents and never thought it odd. Looking back, we were incredibly well-behaved: the height of our naughtiness occurring on Mischief Night (November 4th) when we would swap people’s front gates with someone else’s and think ourselves extremely wicked.

The local Home Guard was made up of men too old to be called up and lads in reserved occupations. They met usually on Sundays and either did manoeuvres around the village or went to Springwells up past Market Weighton School for ‘Hilly Warfare’ - and then to the Carpenters Arms afterwards.

Everingham, Seaton Ross and Bielby formed one joint force.

The Army Medical Corps had Everingham Hall (the Duchess had an apartment there) while North Lodge (white house at the Park gates) was the Sergeants’ Mess. Major Murray of the Corps was billeted with us at Field House together with his wife: they had the smaller bedroom at the front of the house and a private sitting room below.

The Home Guard was run by Mr Storey and Mr Whitelock, a farmer from the Wolds we called SwanNeck. Jack Sayer, Bill Layton and Web Featherby were the NCOs. The Guard also included John Thomas, Harold Toes, Tony Miller, Sonny Radford, Norman Featherby and Tom Hunt.

Everingham Park was the local base for ammunition and we were envied by other forces because we were never short of ammo. Dumps were made all around the Park and it was at this time, when openings were knocked through the high fences, that the herd of deer escaped.

We experimented with ammunition … took the tops off cartridges and filled them with candle grease … tried them out from 40 yards against the wall of the hen house built of railway sleepers and shot a hen sitting on a nesting box inside.

These cartridges proved excellent for shooting deer (now legitimate prey as there were 40 or so eating crops around the village). We skinned deer, jointed them and then distributed them around the village where, as meat was rationed, it was very popular. The village’s only Lewis Gun was stored in the cartshed at our farm and we brought down skeins of wild geese with tracer bullets – again adding to the village’s scant meat supply.

The triangular field at the end of Waring’s farm drive used to be filled with tree stumps so, with the order going out from the WarAg that more fields must be brought into cultivation, the brigade brought plenty of explosives to get the stumps out of the ground … but we over-estimated and took out all the telegraph poles and wires running along the roadside as well.

My brother and me in our garden c 1941 with the POW nissen huts just on the other side of our fence.

“I arrived in Everingham early 1941. Hull was being badly bombed and my school St Vincent's RC School was hit and damaged. The party of evacuees from that school came and were billeted in Harswell, Everingham, Bielby and Melbourne. Miss Dunwell, who later became the headmistress of Everingham school in 1942/3 was with the Saint Vincent children in Melbourne. Another teacher with us, Miss Greystone, began teaching with the nuns [1] at Everingham school.  There were also children evacuated from Sunderland also billeted with the nuns at the convent adjacent to the school.

At that time Gwendoline, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, was in residence at Everingham Hall. There was still a little of the old feudal system in the village, as the villagers bowed and curtsied to the old lady when they passed her in the village. Reverend Father Austin Pippets was the Catholic priest and the Reverend King was a Church of England vicar.

Mr Storey was the estate agent for the Duke of Norfolk: there were many girls belonging the Women's Land Army working on the farms in the area and Mrs Storey was very much involved in this. The Storeys had just lost their eldest son [2] in the Battle of Britain.

The army took over Everingham Hall, I think it was the Royal Army Service Corps [3]. I was billeted with the Lunt family. Mr Lunt was the estate head gardener and we had one of the RASC officers wives staying with us. The Army moved away from the Hall and the next arrivals in the village with the Italian POWs. There was a Searchlight battery situated in the fields on Hayton [4] road; we children watched with great interest at the exercises and mock battles fought by the local Home Guard unit each Sunday.

After the death of the Dowager Duchess, the nuns left the convent [5] and, as mentioned earlier, Miss Dunwell became the headmistress of the school. The village had many fundraising weeks for the war effort, one being Wings For Victory week - can't remember the name of the weeks supporting the Army [6] and Navy.

In 1944 the village became an arsenal as both sides of the road between Everingham and Harswell well were built corrugated iron shelters in which were stored thousands of shells which duly disappeared just before and after D-Day in 1944. In late 1942 we found we were unable to attend school one morning as there had been a particularly heavy raid on Hull and the school had become temporary accommodation for Hull residents who had been bombed out of their homes the previous night. Most returned to Hull but some remained and found accommodation with Everingham residents.

In late 1942 the RAF bomber base was built at Seaton Ross/Melbourne and from then, until the end of the war in 1945, lorry loads of bombs passed through Everingham every day from Everingham station on their way to the RAF station. I suppose the nearest Everingham came to the war itself was on two occasions:- on one night a German bomber jettisoned bombs a couple of miles away [7] and caused some excitement, also a British night fighter crashed one night in flames in the woods next the estate office. The village men were recruited to search for the pilot but, unfortunately, he was found in the woods dead.

The Italian POWs moved away and were replaced by German POWs: these were apparently not considered dangerous and seemed to wander around at will. A couple of them did not go back after the war and married village girls. Some were quite elderly in their 50s; one Fritz, became quite friendly with my dad; it appeared they had been close in the front line in the 1914/18 war and had probably fought against each other.

After 1945 the Hall at Everingham had been badly damaged by the military residency and a complete wing was demolished: some of the bricks were used to build some cottages nearby [8].

The sister of the Duke of Norfolk, Lady Katherine Phillips and her husband Colonel Phillips began living in the Hall [9], this enabled the village to begin playing cricket once again on the excellent pitch in front of the Hall. When the Queen’s Coronation took place in 1953, the village were given permission to celebrate in the Hall ballroom on Coronation Night with a large marquee outside as a beer tent.”

Mrs Mary Sherwood was born in 1906. Mary remembered walking toward Seaton Ross one Sunday aged about 8, with her mother and elder sister, Winnie, to see ‘the holes left by bombs dropped from an airship’.

Mary was born at Elm Cottages, her father was under-gamekeepeer and the family moved to Park View when she was about 8 years old. The family moved again to Keeper’s Cottage when Mr Young, the keeper, died and her father got the job. She attended Everingham School until age 15 then went into service in York.

There she met Frank Sherwood. They married and took a house near Frank’s mum on St Paul’s Terrace: but, on the outbreak of war, Frank was called up and Mary could no longer afford the rent so moved back to Keeper’s Cottage.

When Frank was demobbed, he approached the then agent Mr Nichols about renting Elm Cottage and Mary returned to her childhood home.

She remembered going to Mrs Norwood’s every fortnight (estate workers were paid fortnightly) with the milk money. The Norwoods lived at Rose Cottage (now renamed Deepwell Farm) and kept two cows. Mr Norwood was a cobbler but Mary couldn’t remember getting shoes repaired there. She remembered a Mr Duffield who came in a Ford from Market Weighton and who took shoes away to sole.

She did some cleaning at Baulker Farm on Carr Lane and, one winter, was asked to come and help with a day’s threshing too. All the workers sat round a big table for a midday meal and were served stew and a big hunk of bread. Having been in service and recognising good manners, Mary was the only person who didn’t mop the plate clean with her bread. Too late, saw her mistake as the girl came around again serving out the rice pudding and dolloped it on the same plates … sadly, she didn’t get any pudding.

Mary moved to Market Weighton in 1994 and died in 2008.