MARY SCHOFIELD

CATALOGUE

RECORDING

SUMMARY

BORN: Withypool, Somerset, 1907

LIVED: Withypool, Timberscombe

RECORDING MADE: 2001

RECORDING LENGTH: 2 hours 7 minutes

Mary Schofield was bright at school. She liked learning and reciting poetry and trained to be an infant teacher, teaching first at Withypool and then at Timberscombe. She thinks children make life. She loved reading, Dickens and everything, and dancing; old polkas and set dances, where the boys could sling her anywhere because she was so small.

She was in her late 30s when she met her husband, a cabinet maker from Yorkshire, and became mother to his two young children, Edward and Janet. She gave up teaching and ran their home as a guest house, doing cream teas while he farmed and waited at table. She couldn't believe it when he died.

She lives with Edward and his family now. No longer able to read, she goes weekly to Exford day centre and plays whist at a social club with Leslie Norman. She has been quite happy and contented, she says, accepting whatever came along, knowing she had to.

Mary Schofield died in January 2006.

Photograph by Mark J. Rattenbury