Lenna's first book "Memories of a Cheshire Childhood" was launched a few weeks after her husband Jim Bickerton's death. Lenna was devastated by widowhood, for she and Jim and been married for 59 years and they had been together since she was a teenager. As she wrote about the second part of her life, from leaving school to the war years, she was able to remember their long 1930s courtship during which Jim was out of work, and the joy they felt when he found a job and they were able to get married. When the war started, he was called up and served in the bomb disposal service of the Royal Engineers, where his life was constantly in danger. The young couple had little money to spare and their pleasures were simple: walking and cycling in the Cheshire countryside, picking wild flowers and gathering lilacs...
This book is a hymn to their enduring love affair as well as a fascinating description of Cheshire in the ’thirties and ’forties.
Lenna died in November 1999 when she was writing the last chapter. The book has been completed by her daughter, June Hall.
When Lenna Bickerton left school in Northwich, Cheshire, England, at the age of 14 any plans for her future were dashed when her father lost his job and struggled to set up his own greengrocery round. Financial pressures frustrated her hopes of becoming an art student and like scores before her, she had to take what work was available with no prospect of training or bettering herself. When she married her beloved Jim in 1937, she become a fulltime housewife and mother, later helping her husband when he took over the greengrocery from her parents.
It was not until the early 1980s that she was able to combine her twin loves of writing and social history by penning her early memoirs, spending hours discussing the old times with her late mother, then nearly ninety. She also took up painting again.
Extracts from the book were published in the now-defunct "Northwich World" and the librarians at Northwich were so impressed that they arranged to have two copies of the manuscript typed up and bound. Lenna kept one and the other was placed in the reference library. It was read by many local history enthusiasts and used by Northwich schools as a source for projects.
More than a dozen years later, in 1996, the book was published as a paperback called "Memories of a Cheshire Childhood". It has been reprinted many times and made the octogenarian writer a local celebrity. A new edition was printed after her death in November 1999.