Catch a ride to old Dawley with Ann's book

And if you were in The Cosy with little Billy Lloyd, you'd probably have trouble hearing the film.

"There are no characters any more," says Mrs Ann Rickus, whose memories of her native Dawley have been published in a booklet called A Dawley Wench in which she recalls the personalities, shops, and places of the town as she knew it growing up.

"The other day I had a phone call. They said: 'Ann, can you tell us the name of the person who used to jump into the cars at the Cock Hotel.' I said: 'I know who you mean - Benny Wood.' They said: 'That's it!'

"If you stopped at the traffic lights and your door was not locked and he was trying to hitch a lift he would open the door and jump in. That would be in the late 1940s and early 1950s."

Benny would have been making his way home from Wellington to Dawley - she thinks he lived in the King Street area.

"Ken's mum Alice Rickus, my mother-in-law, was a character. She could charm warts off."

One lady came to her with 700 warts on both hands.

"After a few weeks they disappeared, and Alice received a large bouquet of flowers for that."

How did she do it? "It was something she would never tell you."

Then there was Billy Lloyd.

"I suppose he was the only dwarf fellow we knew as children. He had the loudest laugh you ever heard, a really deep laugh. When he sat at the pictures, especially The Cosy, and he started to laugh, you couldn't hear the sound, especially if it was raining on the tin roof and you had Billy laughing all through."

Ann's book is a perambulation, a walk through time, in which she takes the reader around Dawley's streets, visiting the shops, and remembering the people of Dawley of yesteryear.

It is illustrated with pictures of Dawley, including one from the 1950s which captures Ann - Miss Ann Lawrence as she was before her marriage in 1957- about to cross Dawley High Street on her way from home to work at Tommy Ayres' grocers at Lawley Bank, where she was an assistant. She is wearing the same distinctive coat that she is wearing in the picture used on the front of her book.

"It was a camel coat. I thought it was really posh."

Ann lives in Spring Village, Horsehay, but she is indeed a "Dawley wench" having been born in July 1937 only a short distance from where Dawley's most famous son, the English Channel swimmer Captain Matthew Webb, was born.

"I was born at 72 Clee View, Dawley. At the bottom of the High Street where the paper shop is, there's a path going to Portley Road, and there's a block of flats there. Before that block of flats was built there was a long terraced row of cottages, which is where we lived. They were knocked down in the 1960s when they started the new town, which was going to be Dawley New Town, wasn't it?"

Her father Sam worked at Kemberton pit, not as a miner, but as a builder, while her mother Gladys was a housewife.

As to how the book came to be written, Ann says: "Years ago at Dawley Rest Room, which is now Dawley House, we used to have quite a lot of elderly people. When I first started going there, there were between 90 and 100 old people who came every Friday. We used to have speakers, some we had to pay, some who came for free.

"Over the years the numbers have dwindled and dwindled. I said: 'It isn't worth paying anybody. I'll tell you what, I will scribble something out and read it to you about Dawley when I was a little girl.' That's how it came about, and then Dawley heritage group got hold of it and made the book.

"I charge a fiver, but don't take a penny piece - I give the money to the Severn Hospice. I think I've sold about 40 copies or something like that, and only have one copy left at the moment."

Young Ann went to Dawley National School, and then Wellington secondary modern.

In her youth Ann was an attendant for Dawley carnival queen, and she was to have a variety of jobs, including painting dolls' faces at Merrythought in Ironbridge, working at Tommy Ayres' grocers, and working in the kitchens at the old Phoenix School for 19 years.

And what does she think of Dawley now? It could do with more shops for folk wanting to shop locally, she says.

"There's only the Co-op and a couple of shops. There are three charity shops - when I was a child nobody had anything to give to the charity shops. It was a busy town, especially the Fridays, with lots of people and lots of shops. You could get everything you wanted and wouldn't have to go to anywhere else, although sometimes you went to Oakengates or Madeley."

Her book has been well received, she says.

"People who are on Facebook say there is lots about the book. I'm not on Facebook. I'm too old to bother."