Kindness of strangers got Aunty Dolly home

Why, you ask the police to get you a lift, and after they have flagged down a lorry, you get in and get driven home by strangers, piecing together your journey by going from one lorry to another.

If it sounds like something from a different time, that is exactly what it is, as revealed in a letter from the early 1950s.

"It is an extraordinary letter," says June McCarthy, of Greyfriars, Oswestry.

"It reveals a paradigm shift in society and its ways, or mores. It brings home to me why people are so nostalgic for times gone by."

The letter, franked on July 12, 1952, was written to June's parents by her Aunt Dolly. Dolly was the sister of June's mother, Mrs Olive Ledden, nee Pugh.

When widowed Olive moved into a bungalow June had asked if she could have some of the old letters and memorabilia rather than them being thrown away, and when she recently perused them again, Dolly's account of her fraught journey home to Oswestry after visiting the Leddens in Liverpool caught her eye.

"The letter is a historical and social record of how very different things were in the 1950s, how they have in fact completely turned about face and are now completely the opposite," says June.

"What was reality then is unimaginable and unthinkable now. Liverpool tunnel police actually stopping lorries, inquiring of the drivers if they were bound for Oswestry or its environs, and trustingly requesting a lift for a lone woman!

"That was the difference. People assumed and were mostly right that other people, including strangers and authorities like the police, would always be helpful or try to help you out of a fix, out of your difficulties, and they invariably did.

"Most people and the authorities were extraordinarily kind then. That is why there was so much trust and kind courtesy in those olden days. I am fortunate to be of an age to have witnessed it myself, and remember it."

Aunt Dolly was Dora Ivy Meredith, nee Pugh, whose home at the time was Red Lion Cottage, Bailey Head, Oswestry. Her sister Olive and husband Bernard were living in rented rooms in Aigburth.

Dolly writes: "Well my dears, as you can see I arrived back all in one piece, but oh! what a journey it was."

She explains she got to Central Station too late for her train, and the ticket collector told her to get a train to Birkenhead, and she might be able to get a train to Oswestry from there. Arriving at Birkenhead, she found the Oswestry train had left five minutes earlier, and there wasn't another one for over an hour, and she didn't want to wait as she was "worried about the children."

"Anyway I dashed to the tunnel entrance and asked the tunnel police if they would try and get me a lift to Oswestry. They were very kind, one in particular, and they dashed through the tunnel to Liverpool and as they stopped each lorry inquired if they were going to Oswestry.

"Eventually they found one going between Chester and Wrexham, and he said he would give me a lift. I left him and got another lift to the other side of Ellesmere, and then he waited with me and stopped another lorry for me."

This driver was going to Rednal Camp, but went out of his way to Oswestry to drop her off.

Despite her gratitude Dolly reflected that there had been quite a wait between lifts "so I might just as well have waited and travelled in comfort by train."

She also asked Olive to bring her curling tongs when she next came down, as she had left them by the electric fire.

Olive hailed originally from Oswestry and the Leddens were to live at Old Fort Road in the town for over 30 years, and after she was widowed - Bernard died aged 72 in 2002 - she moved to Monkmoor Road, Oswestry.

She now lives with June's sister and celebrated her 90th birthday with family on November 17 last year.

"My lovely Aunty Dolly, the letter writer, died on June 3, 1995," said June.