Family Links To Ashbourne

A Memory of Ashbourne.

My mother was a Woolley and she was born and brought up in Ashbourne where most of her wider family still lived when I was a child. I was brought up in Uttoxeter, my father's home town, but I was born at Ashbourne maternity hospital in 1944. The ammunition dump at Fauld blew up just after I was born and Mum remembered the beds careering around the ward as a result of the explosion. It was always a treat to go to Ashbourne on a Saturday afternoon when I was a child. We used to get onto the red Trent bus at the Three Tuns in Uttoxeter and get off just outside my Uncle Jim's shop, which sold paint and wallpaper, in Church Street, Ashbourne. We usually popped in to see Uncle Jim but the real purpose of the visit was to see Grandma. She lived on Bellevue Road at the top of Smith's Yard, in a tiny flat that looked out over the town and across to Derby Road that snaked up the hill on the other side of the valley. Grandma had an open fire with a hob and she always had the kettle on the boil when we walked in. Her flat was over the railway tunnel. We used to rush to the window when we felt a train go underneath so that we could watch it puff into the station below. The other thing we used to do was to kneel on her bed and look through her bedroom window onto the outdoor swimming pool, which was just next door. My Grandma died when I was eight and her flat is long gone but I remember my childhood visits to Ashbourne as if they were yesterday.

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