Kathy Turner
I grew up, from about the age of two until I was six, in the huts on Old Road near the Crown and Thistle pub and Tilly’s shop [see below]. It was known as Old Road Camp.
We used to walk to Quarry CE Primary School where we were known as the children who lived in the huts. We were told the Camp had been a prisoner of war camp. I remember that the hut itself was joined to another one and it had three bedrooms – one double off the sitting room and two singles off the hall. I can’t recollect it having a bath as my sister and I were bathed in the large kitchen sink. It had a stove in the sitting room and we had a settee and two old aeroplane seats. It had a largish front garden in which we mainly grew vegetables. My parents received regular parcels from my maternal grandmother, who ran a pub in Co. Durham, containing food, magazines, and cigarettes.
I remember exciting bonfire nights with a communal bonfire and also groups of us regularly walking up Shotover Hill to the scrambling. My sister and I used to play in the surrounding fields and picked mushrooms which our dad had for tea. We used to shop in Tilly’s and best remember him with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and an indelible pencil behind his ear.
They built Wood Farm Estate around us and this became a new exciting play area for us among the scaffolding and bricks.
In about 1952/3 we moved to a brand new council house in Bracegirdle Road.
Kathy Turner, September 2021
“Tilly's shop” was the general store run by Miss Matilda Kislingbury (1886–1975). Her shop was at the present 123 Old Road (left), which was numbered 109 prior to 1949. It is immediately opposite Titup Hall Drive, which was the new exit from the camp after it became temporary council housing. Matilda Kislingbury was living here at the time of the 1939 Register and was described as the shopkeeper, but by 1952 she was aged 67 and helped by her brother Frank Kislingbury, who must be the man Kathy describes. The shop would then have been much busier because of the 34 flats in the camp and the first 116 houses erected in Wood Farm, not to mention the demand for sweets from the pupils of Wood Farm Primary School.
