“We had a big public meeting to which
the head of the Education Committee
from Oxford, Mr Charlton, came.”
Apparently Charlton said there were
no plans for another school in the area
and that the committee had not been
informed of the number of children
coming with the RAF.
Mary asked Charlton: “Are you saying
Mr Wilson is telling lies?”
To which Charlton allegedly replied:
“Whoever Mr Wilson is, he doesn’t
know what he’s talking about.”
It turns out Mary possessed a letter
from the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson,
plus another from Reginald Maudling
and one from Dennis Healey. The
letters all said the same thing: the
committee had been informed of
the numbers.
“So they put some temporary
classrooms where the Gateway School
is for the 11-13 year olds. And then we
got the community college,” Mary
informs me.
Our Carterton Great was also yet to
become a town councillor when she
began work on setting up the Age
Concern day centre (now Carterton
Day Centre for the Elderly).
“On my election pamphlet I put the
two things that were dearest to my
heart. One was that I wanted to do
more for the youth club, the other was
the idea of a day centre because there
were lots of old people here.
“I got lots of volunteers signed
up straight away to help with the
fundraising. Eventually, by 1985, we
had a building. The centre was all
run by volunteers. We had a lovely
big sitting room, a meeting room,
offices, a kitchen, bathroom, and a
room for someone who came in to do
hairdressing. We were having about 20
people a day, four days a week. It was
doing very well.”
To raise more money for the centre,
Mary set up the Age Concern shop. “It
was busy all the time”, she says.
Her Age Concern efforts lasted for five
or six years, but due to the death of
her husband, and her own illness, she
had to give it up. “The day centre is
my baby,” she says to me, “but I don’t
have anything to do with it now.”
Going back further, I asked Mary about
when she first arrived in Carterton;
she came at a time when RAF Brize
Norton was in the possession of
the United States Air Force. There
are those who seem to remember
certain activities of the American
servicemen. “At that time there were
a lot of ladies following the Americans
around,” Mary says. “On a Saturday
morning you’d see buses arrive with
ladies from Birmingham and London
and then in the evening you’d see
the police sergeant and the various
village policemen directing them
back to where they came from. And
I think it was in 1963 there was a
double spread in one of the papers
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