My mother, Beatrice Pickering, who has died aged 97 of complications following Covid-19, grew up in the harsh conditions of a Durham mining community during the Depression of the 1930s.
She experienced the profound social changes that followed, going on to bring up a family of three daughters, and to become an inspirational primary school teacher. Her store of anecdotes of the events she lived through was inexhaustible, and her attachment to the place of her birth never faded.
She was born in Sacriston, to Beatrice (nee Lumsdon), a dressmaker, and William Kirk, a fireman at Sacriston colliery. Beatrice’s mother made all her children’s clothes and cooked everything the family ate from scratch, while William grew excellent vegetables and fruit. She often attributed her good health to an early diet of homemade bread and leek broth with dumplings.
Beatrice was awarded a rare free place at Durham girls’ grammar school. However, unable to contemplate the expense of university, she left to study domestic science.
In her teens she had met George Pickering, also born into a mining family, but thanks to a bursary he went on to study at Durham University. They married in 1942, when George was called up to join the RAF. As a married woman, she had to leave college, but she served for the rest of the second world war as a police officer in Durham.
It was in the 1960s that she finally found her vocation, as a teacher, for many years in Framwellgate Moor school. Energetic and innovative in her approach to the curriculum, she used the natural world to teach language and numbers.
She appeared in the local press alongside a banana tree that she and the children had grown from seed, caring for chickens they helped to hatch and tending to gerbils, which were then seen as exotic pets. In old age she was often greeted fondly by ex-pupils in and around Durham.
Beatrice retired in 1982 and took the opportunity to travel, read more and go to the theatre as often as possible, especially to Shakespeare productions. Black Dyke Band’s rendering of Gresford (The Miner’s Hymn), which she had played at her funeral, expressed best her love of her home, her resilience, grounded character, strength and grace.
George, her daughter Diane, granddaughter Laura and grandson Edward, predeceased her. She is survived by two other daughters, Stephanie and me, her grandchildren, Hannah, Nicholas and Theo, and her great-grandchildren, Felix, Max and Lucia.
