My earliest recollections were coming from the Forest of Dean on Edwards's double decker bus.

It was a real treat. You travelled on then through Tudorville into Ross, thriving market town on a Thursday and a Saturday, and it was totally different from what you were used to in the Forest of Dean. And I moved to Ross in 1963 when I got married and I moved to Tudorville, which was built by Herefordshire Council to rehome people that lived in Brampton and that area.

And to give them a better mode of living, and it was such a community driven state. Mostly all the women there, they stayed at home to look after their children. There was a diverse community there, predominantly very young people.

Life in the 60s as a young mother with two children was totally different than it is now. I never went out to work except for field work to, to enable us to have a standard of living, but the children just used to run free, they used to play in the streets, they used to play football. You used to push a pram to town. And you used to do your shopping, you used to buy what you basically needed for several days, and you bought, you really did buy basics. It was very healthy living style. You did buy cornflakes, you did make your own pies, you did buy the groceries, and it was all basically really nutritional food, and you didn't have all these snacks for the children. They just ate at meal times, really. There were a few sweets bought over to the the local shop, but uh not great wads of money spent because you, you didn't, you didn't have that type of money to spend on that type of thing.

The milkman used to come and put the pints on the doorstep. We used to have a baker. His van came around perhaps twice a week. Mr. Spencer, the green grocery man, he used to come around twice a week. When you went shopping in Ross, you went for the, the, the sort of extras, you know, the, the rice and, and the sugar. Um, you always used to compare the prices, but the coming of the fridge. It was wonderful because that pint of milk used to go in the fridge and, and you never used to have that awful smell when you knew it had gone off, even though though you kept it in in the summer, in in the cold water, cheese lasted longer.

So you could extend the gaps when you hadn't got to go shopping.

I can remember my first washing machine.

It was a very, very tiny tub, and you had to heat the washing. The water in it first and then it had a paddle in the middle.

And it used to slowly paddle the washing, because up until then you used to just put the utensil on the gas, and you used to bring the water to boil for your lights and whatever, and your kids' napkins, because I mean say the days of disposal hadn't arrived then.

So you always had the the the bucket with the napkin soaking in, and then in turn they went in and they were boiled and they were put out on the line.

And everybody was judged by the condition of their napkins.

Even when you went out working on the land, they used to say, oh, did you see so and so? Did you see those things? And it was, it was a marker for how clean you were really. Couldn't afford to buy a television, so you used to hire them from Telebank.

The cost was according to the size. On the side of the telly was a slot. And you used to pay by a slot and a metre, and then once every, maybe it used to be once every month, chap used to come round and empty the metre. And you had a book and he entered the monies in there and he took away the rent and he kept the money if you were in credit and that money used to add up and then you could save up there and within his van he used to have towels and all these sorts of wonderful things that you could buy when your credit matched the price of that item.

When you became affluent enough to buy your own television, it was, it was a real, real credit, it was a real plus that you could, you know, choose your own television and you didn't have to put the money in the slot in the meantime.

To earn extra money, we used to go on the field work.

We used to travel in tractors and trailers to go pea picking and after that. We used to travel in. Cattle wagons, prams pushed in with children intact to do hop tying, rhubarb cutting, potato picking, and at that time. Children used to run free.

They had a wonderful lifestyle running about in the farms. They knew all about farm animals. They played together and they lived together. You still stayed together as a community. If you needed help, it was always there. Children all went to school together because there wasn't a case of putting your name down for a preferred school. You just went and mass to. The local primary or the local secondary, or if you were very lucky and passed with grammar school, you, you access that. Ross at the time had many, many public houses.

And there was also a local cabaret scene called the Top Spot. And then of course the upmarket place was wormlow, which was out. Side Ross, but they used to run cabarets, cabarets there and they used to have quite famous dance bands there. Pub closing hours were at 10:30. They used to have lunchtime, they used to have evening time drinks, but they were never the uh extended hours like they are today. So when people had drunk all they could within those hours, then they had to go home and gradually. With the aspect of um licencing, licencing within shops where you could buy alcohol and you could drink it at home.

There was a demise of, of the um the public houses and slowly but surely, a lot of the ones that were not producing food or changing their mode of entertainment, they just unfortunately, they closed down. Within Tudorville itself, there were 3 public houses.

Now there are none. The actual buildings are still there, but the purpose for use is changed considerably. I became aware of the Ross Gazette when I moved into Tudorville in the 1960s.

It was on a different format then. It was very, very large paper and it always said you had to read the arched, matched, and dispatched. That was important. Then the adverts and then the local news. Many, many people have found. Uh, the jobs that they've had out of the Ross Gazette, but I think there still are people that need to go and get that actual paper to read all the bits and it takes a little while to read it all, so it's, it's, it's really well worth getting. The biggest change for me is the coming of people, their, their finances, and the ability for them to own their own cars.

And the ability for them then to choose where they went and the times they went and not rely on buses, not rely on other forms of local transport. Maybe that's when communities did get fragmented because Groups of people didn't necessarily have to join together to get somewhere. Families used to just go in in in their own mode of transport. And I think, yeah, the coming of of the motor car and um wages, wages, the increase of of monies that you, you earned, it changed complete aspects of life.