Parish of St Helen Witton Northwich Cheshire - People Profiles: Ann Mallin-Jones

Profile of Ann Mallin-Jones

I am part of the post war ‘bulge’. I grew up in North West London, first at Kingsbury and then at Stanmore, the end of the Jubilee tube line. My earliest memory of church is being taken to Sunday School after lunch and left for an hour or so while my parents had a quiet afternoon reading the papers. After I was confirmed I became a Sunday School helper and had great fun at the Youth Club during the years before I went to Teacher Training College.

My love of geography and independent spirit showed. While most of my friends applied to colleges in the south, to my parent's horror I decided I would travel 200 miles north to York. I thoroughly enjoyed my four years at St John’s College. The college had recently expanded and needed among other buildings a new chapel. By the mid sixties new forms of worship were under discussion. So it was exciting to use the new "Y" shaped chapel for worship based around the modern Communion service. In the 1960s York boasted that it had more churches and pubs than most other cities. This presented a challenge to a group of us, not only did we visit a number of pubs but also attended evening worship in venues ranging from the Minster to the Friend’s Meeting house.

After four years in York I decided to go further afield and was accepted by V.S.O. to be a volunteer teacher in Barbuda, a coral island off the coast of Antigua. This proved a challenging start to my career as the equipment in the school consisted of one copy of each book in the reading scheme, some chalk and a blackboard! V.S.O. also proved a challenge to my cookery skills. Barbuda is a desert island so we had little fresh food. Meat, when available consisted of a slab of goat, a lump of turtle, a variety of rather small bony fish, or, if we were really lucky, a live lobster. To these we added pawpaw, tiny rather dry peas, sweet potatoes and coconuts. Finally there was the ubiquitous Tabasco sauce essential to our attempts to produce local dishes. The rest of the time we ate "spam" or corned beef hash. Forty years later, I still cannot face tinned meat. Not only did living as a minority foreigner in a harsh environment change my outlook on the world, but the experience was to change my life. A year after I returned to teach in Bristol I attended a reunion conference for volunteers and who should be there but Andrew who had spent his service in Sierra Leone. The rest, as they say, is history.

My time in Bristol was curtailed as I moved to Newbury to teach at a school near the then notorious Greenham Common Airbase. We started our married life in a small house at Wash Common. Within eighteen months Andrew was asked by I.C.I. to move to Runcorn and we have lived in Hartford and worshipped at St Helen’s ever since. Soon after our move North Peter was born and when he was three I took him to Sunday School. The teacher in me could not let the helper manage a large group of mostly boys, ranging from eight to three, alone, so I offered to help! So began my long association with Explorers.

At that time Sunday School as it was called was held in church after the morning service. I can remember looking after Marie and Christine Harries at our home while Andrew, Mike and Esther went to church. Then driving a car load of children to church and passing Alison, our new baby daughter, like a relay baton to Andrew to drive home again. Fortunately by the time I had "maternity leave" from Explorers (as Sunday School had become), it had moved to Church School so it could run during the morning service. This enabled families to attend worship together. Later new rules for school caretakers stopped us using the school, so by the time Rebecca had joined the rest of her family in the choir I moved Explorers to the Upper Vestry and then to Cornerstones.

Back to my life! Once Rebecca was settled at school I decided to return to work. First I combined supply teaching with work at the Education centre at St Mary's in Chester. Then I was offered a two term temporary contract at Hartford Manor and last summer (2007) I retired eighteen years later. I have found plenty to fill the days; it is lovely to have weekends free to visit or entertain our children who all flew the "nest" once they graduated from university. Peter and his wife are in West London and both Alison, now married, and Rebecca are working in Cheltenham. The next generation seems to have returned to its southern roots!

Ann Mallin-Jones