After 41 years as postmistress in Crosby Garrett, Heather Harper is finally retiring.
She took over from Bernard Howe in 1983 when a first class stamp cost only 16p. Today it costs £1.65. Heather has run the post office in a small extension of the family home at Hill Farm, combining it with a newspaper delivery round and also stocking some groceries, including a sack of potatoes under the counter and fresh local eggs.
Heather was born and brought up in the village and attended the village school. She was one of about 12 pupils and recalls that good handwriting was part of the curriculum. When she left school she went to work for Michael Slack, a butcher in Raisbeck, and learned to make sausages and prepare cuts of meat for sale. After being made redundant, she worked in the Little Chef on the A66 between Appleby and Brough. In 1983, the post office job became available and Heather took over.
The biggest change she saw was switching to computers in 2001, during the foot and mouth epidemic. She remembers it as a sad time, with all the local farmers being affected.
The number of people collecting their pensions from the post office has dwindled dramatically as the money was paid directly into their bank accounts. She has always been conscious of the elderly people living alone in the village and checked up on them if there were no lights on, or drawn curtains. Now she is serving their children and grandchildren, especially as she keeps supplies of their favourite sweets on her shelves. Heather has only ever closed for a short while, during Storm Desmond in 2015, when postal deliveries were affected by floods in Carlisle.
Snowy weather in the winter never stopped her, because her friends the Handleys made sure she got through to Kirkby Stephen to collect the newspapers for the village. During the Covid epidemic, she remained open the whole time, with customer numbers increasing, because the post office in Kirkby Stephen was closed.
Heather has always been the local weatherman, as she gets many telephone calls from people asking her if the road to Kirkby Stephen is open, during particularly frosty or wet weather, as she is generally the first person out of the village in the morning to collect the papers.
Over the years the number of parcels has doubled, due to online shopping. Heather has also provided banking services and dealt with foreign currency for travellers.
The round has halved for daily papers, although numbers have remained steady for the Herald. Heather has been a familiar figure on her early morning rounds. She is retiring with her mother to a cottage built by her brother and next to the one where she was born.
