THIS week we make our third trip into the recent past of the Stonegate and Swinegate areas of York, courtesy once more of Van Wilson’s marvellous book of oral history, Stonegate Voices.

Audrey Peace was born at 17 Finkle Street, where Victor J’s café is now, in 1927. Her childhood memories of life in the little house “just off St Sampson’s Square” conjure up a vivid picture of what life was like back then.

Finkle Street was then known as Mucky Peg’s Lane. “Tales differed,” Audrey says in a wonderful interview transcribed in the book. “One said there was a prostitute that lived down there, but some said it was called Mucky Pigs’ Lane because when drovers brought stuff from the cattle market, that’s where they drove pigs through into Swinegate.

“My mum and dad had lived there from about 1925, and we left in early 1939. There was two cottages, ours and number 16. It was only one room downstairs, L-shaped bedroom and attic and we had a tiny yard at the back. But we were posh, we had a flush toilet. I had a sister. We had one bedroom and mum had a partition across. We were lucky. We had a gas fire upstairs and quite a big range downstairs.

“I think it (the area) had more character then than it has now.

“In Swinegate we had a little shop called Miss Calvert’s. She was the other side of the road from the Coach And Horses.

“It was only a tiny shop but she sold everything from shoelaces to fresh eggs. You didn’t buy in bulk. She had a book for them that got things on tick. They’d go in, ask for three eggs, and give a name.

“I was that curious, I went and did it and gave my mother’s name. I did get a good hiding for that.

“My dad thought it was amusing but my mother didn’t.”

When she was about nine, Audrey took to wandering about the market and would often get herself “a little job”, such as straightening jumpers for a woman near the Primrose Café in Parliament Street. She also did some work for a quack doctor whose medicines claimed to cure “every ill under t’sun”.

Audrey helped him prepare some of these concoctions. “He’d give me a white envelope with red stuff in it, a compound, and he’d say ‘break this up and put it in a mixing bowl.’ Then he’d send me to Melia’s for a pound of castor sugar. I’d light this little stove and fill the kettle, ‘cos there was a water butt in St Sampson’s Square, and put it on the stove. I had to stir it till it was dissolved, then wait for it to cool, and stick labels on. He had some stones, and he’d say ‘these are what people passed after taking this medicine’. The stones were off the cockles and mussels stall! He’d always give me half a crown so I used to be rich.”

Audrey also remembers the silver jubilee of George V and Queen Mary in 1935.

“We had a photo taken in the yard at the end of Grape Lane. A family called Deamers lived in that house and the party was in that yard.”

• Stonegate Voices, by Van Wilson, is published by the York Archaeological Trust, priced £9.99. It is available from Jorvik and from local bookshops.