When I first came to Pickering in the summer of 1948, I found lodgings at a house in Westgate. From my bedroom window, I looked down into the large garden of the house next door, very secretive looking, with its high wall. Somehow I was not surprised when Mrs Keast, my hostess, told me it belonged to a convent, called 'Sisters of the Presentation'.

During the next five years, I was only in occasional contact with the nuns - in fact with only one of them - Sister Cecilia. But I learned that behind the unecclesiastical-looking frontage of number 5 Westgate, there hid not only a convent, but a school called St Mary's, run by the nuns for girls and boys up to 11 and for older girls.

It is over 25 years since the convent closed, and even longer since the school finished. Many later arrivals in Pickering have no idea they ever existed, and even older inhabitants find it difficult to put any dates to their history.

As far as I can make out, however, the convent itself was probably here as early as 1910, though not in Westgate. The nuns then lived on Potter Hill, near to the church, itself built in the first decade of the 20th century.

By the 1930s, the nuns and their school had moved to Westgate. I was recently told by a farmer's wife who has lived in Pickering all her life, that she went to the kindergarten there in the mid-30s. Late in the 1950s, a friend of mine sent her daughter to the senior school. By that time, she says, there would be about 100 pupils, too many for the house to hold. They had to add some prefabricated huts to the garden.

In a fascinating reminiscent talk, these two women were able to recall for me as many as 14 names of nuns they both remembered.

Some names were a little odd - Sister Scholastica, and Sister Pious - even odder a Sister Joseph. You'd think that would have been feminized to Josephine? Most came from Ireland, not unusual in convents, of course. But there was one called Monica from Rhodesia, and another called Stanislaus, from Poland: in early days, Mother Superior.

Though so many names were recalled, most of the personalities had grown dim over the years, though Sister Margaret, the convent housekeeper, was well remembered for her kindness and generosity to the sick and old of the town. There was one nun who, at a time when it was taken for granted they were all poor, would apologise to lay people for wearing odd gloves. An elderly sister left her mark as the one who invariably presented every child with sixpence at the annual school outing to Scarborough. Mother Gerard, Mother Superior for quite a time, used to teach the older girls folk dancing.

But Sister Cecilia was the nun they remembered best. In fact, nobody in Pickering who ever encountered Sister Cecilia seems to have forgotten the experience. It is generally agreed she was a "character". Many ex-pupils have told me she was a "battle-axe" - by which they probably only meant she kept good order.

As her name indicates, she was the musical one. As well as teaching music in the school, she was the headmistress. With a gift also for poetry and drama, she was in charge of school concerts and plays. She regularly sent pupils to compete in the Whitby Festival of music and verse speaking. She was able to sweep people along with her enterprises, charming you into doing things before you knew what she was after. She was tall and quick-moving. Her father had been a doctor, and she had been in India before coming to Pickering at about 40 years old. Her complexion showed signs of that.

I only once encountered her myself. At a convent fund-raising event, I had bought a toy sewing machine for my eight-year-old daughter. It was sold as a "working model". But it simply snapped the thread at every attempt, productive only of tears and tantrums. It had cost all of a pound, still at that time, pre-inflation, no negligible amount. Indignant at the disappointment of a little girl rather than the cost, I took it back to the convent. Sister Cecelia sympathised and apologised most sweetly, but did not offer the money back.

"I tell you what I'll do," she said graciously. 'I'll give you two free tickets for our school concert next week. Your daughter will enjoy taking her little friend, Jane!" (Jane was one of her private piano pupils).

For a number of years, she was learning to drive, with difficulty in passing the test. People unlucky enough to land themselves under any kind of obligation would be told: "Oh well, you can give me some practice driving!" Having eventually passed, she became a well-known peril on the roads of the town.

"Look out," other motorists would cry - "here comes Sister Cecilia."

When St Joseph's primary school was built on Swainsea Lane, she was on the staff there as well as at the convent. And there must be many people still around who, like my daughter's friend Jane, went to her privately for piano lessons. In her prime, she must have been a very busy women.

But numbers both of nuns and children were falling by the 1970s. Presently, number 5 Westgate was sold to some people called Francis, who ran it as a guest house. The nuns that were left moved to their other property, Keld Head Hall, along the Middleton Road.

In 1982, Westgate changed hands again, to become a nursing home called Alba Rose. And in 1985, Keld Head Hall followed suit. By now the sisters had dwindled to three - including Sister Cecilia, now well into her nineties. She was so attached to Pickering, she declared, that she could never bear to leave it alive. For her sake the other two, probably nearly as aged, had stayed on. When she died in 1985, they left for their original headquarters, in Glossop, near Manchester.

The only visible reminder of the convent nowadays is a graceful statue of the Madonna and Child, still standing in the grounds of Keld Head Hall.

Dorothy Cowlin

Updated: 09:29 Wednesday, September 25, 2002