PROFILE
Mad woman with a dog in a buggy
Meet Kerry Pirie Living next to the road named after her Great Grandparents Charles and Edna Thacker, it is hardly a surprise that Kerry Pirie is a Deeping girl through and through. Her growing up has exactly coincided with the development of Deeping from a small rural settlement to the thriving community it is today. Her family home was the bungalow in Park Road next to the ‘blue box’ as the Deepings School was referred to when it was first built. Kerry remembers her mother, Janice (nee Sharpe), taking her through a building site to Deeping St James County Primary School where she was one of the first pupils under head teacher, Mr Flower. A few years earlier and she would have attended the Cross School.
Janice & Malcolm Robinson
Having spent her working life in Deeping, in Reflections the Hair & Beauty salon in the Market Place run by her mother and later at Hairlines in New Row, and after bringing up her daughter, Steph, now 29, here, Kerry has many local friends and acquaintances. It was not until she had to take one of her dogs, Harry, poorly from an operation, out for a walk in a buggy in order to accompany her well dog, Izzy, that she remembered an eccentric lady from her youth who used to push a dog in a pram, that she realised just how far this friendship circle had spread. “I put a post on Facebook’ she explained, “and saw that there were hundreds of people out there with shared memories.” It was her friend, Michelle Randall, who suggested a Facebook page dedicated to the memories of the Deepings and so ‘Mad woman with a dog in a buggy’ was born. Now with 3,000+ members, the site has prompted at least two reunions, one here at the Waterton Arms, where over 100
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members of the site gathered in the Autumn, one retired teacher from the Deepings School, Helen Camm, travelling from Knaresborough for the event. On the other side of the world in Australia another get-together was staged where people living relatively close hadn’t realised their proximity to each other until the page was launched. There are no signs of the popularity of the page waning; each new season brings forth a welter of memories, people affectionately remembering past rituals, characters, buildings and shops. “Jack Blade’s shop was remembered by people who haven’t been back to Deeping for years and lots of people worked there,” recalls Kerry. “It was a real landmark place and one that unites locals.” Janice, Kerry’s Mum, welcomed the growth of Deeping. A business woman to the core, who had started her working life as a legal secretary to Rowland Wade, she saw the prosperity of the village and town being dependent on its potential to embrace the future. It is now left to her daughter to ensure that it is also grounded in the past.
