WHEN I was looking for material for my Gazette & Herald article on the Over-60s Club, I was told that the present premises were built on the site of a derelict farm. I was puzzled how there could ever have been enough land there to make a viable farm. But because I knew my informants had all been closely involved with the project of a club, I thought they must know.

After the article appeared, a reader called Mrs Mason, of Ebberston, rang up the editor to say that I was mistaken. A cousin of hers had lived on the site, which also housed the workshops for his joinery business. His garden ran along the left bank of Pickering beck about as far back as where Safeway now stands.

He was called Billie Appleby, known everywhere as 'Blackie', probably because he was very dark-haired. He had lost a leg in the First World War, but managed to ride about the town on a bicycle, using one leg on the pedals, his artificial leg dangling. Artificial legs were less sophisticated in those days, and wouldn't bend at the knee.

He ran a successful joinery business for years, making and mending furniture, and grandfather clock-cases. He also replaced sash-windows, and with a colleague called Frank Humble, re-upholstered furniture. His shop windows looked out onto the main road, just east of the river bridge on Hungate. There was also an arch leading to his workshops.

They must have been there during my first five years in Pickering, but I remember neither Blackie nor his shop. In fact, I can't picture this area of the town at all clearly.

Perhaps this is because it is in this area that there had been the biggest change when my husband and I returned to Pickering in 1976.

When we left, the railway still ran right across the town, necessitating two level crossings, with gates of course: one set very close to the Hungate river bridge, where the only town traffic lights now stand; the others across the end of Market Street. There were smaller gates at the side of the double gates to allow pedestrians through.

All the land hereabouts, as far as I can remember, seemed to be filled up by railway sidings and railway sheds. Access was extremely limited - I don't think you could glimpse the beck at all between the Hungate bridge and the Railway Station. You could certainly not get to it.

We came back in 1976 to find lines and level crossings and gates had all vanished. In their place was the broad new road called The Ropery (though I believe there was never a ropery there), the Ropery car park, and a pleasant little riverside walk on the right bank of the beck, with young trees and seats and a growing colony of mallard ducks.

Where Blackie had once had his business, was now the purpose-built Over 60s Club and its car park.

Blackie's garden used to be well-cultivated, his cousin had told me, mostly for vegetables, but he had liked to walk along the beck and feed the trout who came to know him and leap expectantly for food.

Blackie, she said, had a brother Tom. He also had joined up in the First World War. He had survived through all that terrible carnage, whereas his brother was unlucky enough to be shot in the very first "action".

Tom returned to his pre-war job in the railway police. Eventually, in 1962, he received a medal for his war service. Billie got nothing but a wooden leg!

The Ropery area was where Pickering had altered most of all while we had been away, but we found many other less conspicuous changes.

For instance, a roundabout had been made near the Forest and Vale Hotel. What we had known there was an old-fashioned crossroads with a much more built-up look, particularly at the end of the road from Whitby where the old police station took up a lot of room.

In 1948, Pickering still had a decidedly country air about it, despite the railway and the level crossings.

There had been several unmistakable mills, not I think, still working. There had been two or three corn chandlers, and at least one blacksmith's shop. Some of the contents of Cooper's shop, then in the middle of the Market Street, sprawled out all over the pavement. Some of these were of a distinctly agricultural nature.

And tucked away behind the main streets, disguised by the rows of old cottages, were still several small but viable farms.

One such, with its frontage on Eastgate, near to what was then the United Bus Company's depot, belonged to a farmer called Mr Wardle. We had bed and breakfast there on our very first visit to the town. His daughter, Vida, became one of our daughter's playmates at the infants' school on "Jack Built".

The Wardle's land stretched quite a long way back southwards from Eastgate, far beyond "Outback". Only last August, my daughter remembered going with Vida to help to harvest a big old walnut tree in the Wardle's orchard.

"And I suppose you helped yourselves to quite a few of the nuts?" I joked.

"Oh no," she told me, "they were being picked before they were ripe, for pickling."

I don't know if any of the Wardle family are still around, but their land, like that of all the other hidden farms in the town, has long since been gobbled up for housing.

Just after the Second World War, we had found it difficult to find a house to buy. But since then, Pickering has almost doubled in size and population, growing from a large village to a small market town, a centre for retired people and a tourist centre.

New housing estates, especially to the south and west, have catered for all the incomers like ourselves who bought a Barrett bungalow at a price nearly ten times what we had paid for the house in 1948.

Big changes! Yet somehow they have none of them destroyed the fundamental character of the place. Long may it be so!

Dorothy Cowlin

Updated: 09:21 Wednesday, February 26, 2003