GRANNIE Mary Drew hasn't been back to look at her old home since she moved out three years ago.

She walked past it once; when she took a short cut to the hairdresser's. But she didn't look up.

"I couldn't. The house holds too many memories for me," she told me with a tear in her eye.

"I thought it was the end of my life when I had to leave."

Her old home, on a corner of Lower Cross Street, just off Sudell Road, is at the centre of the wasteland which is awaiting the building of the new Darwen Academy.

The colourful curtains have been replaced by breeze-block; the flowers in the back-yard tubs have withered and died.

Tomorrow the High Court in London will hear an appeal against the proposed academy. But Mary, 77, has given up the fight.

"I went to all the meetings but we knew we were fighting a losing battle," she said.

"I have to get on with my life. I have to make the best of it."

Mary Drew was married in 1951 and soon afterwards she and her husband Bob, a miner down from Scotland, moved into the two-up-two-down which had been her mum's.

Their son Jim came along a couple of years later.

In 1990 she retired as a school meals supervisor and then her husband died after a two-year battle with cancer.

She lived there on her own until she finally moved out to a flat at Mayfield.

There are a lot of memories packed into over 50 years in that little terrace house. "We didn't need an excuse for a street party," she smiled.

"We'd have jumble sales to raise a few bob for the ice cream and the pop and we all made sandwiches.

"We always had a big bonfire and everyone made hot potatoes and turnip lanterns. No one had much money but we had a real community spirit. Everyone knew everyone else.

"Most folk thought of their home as a little palace. I certainly did.

"My son is a submarine officer in the Royal Navy but he was never ashamed to bring his wife and family down from Scotland to visit."

It was about six years ago that rumours of a new school started to circulate.

Then came the letters and the knock on the door. "It's been awful for a lot of folk," says Mary.

"They've moved out all over the place and they really miss it."

She told me: "I wish the school well. But you can have all your fancy schools. They won't be any good without good parents behind them."

And she has a little gift for the academy when it does open; a small piece of roofing slate with her neat, hand-painted inscription: "This school was erected on the rubble of the homes of Darwen families who lived and worked in this area - some of them for most of their working lives - who had hoped to spend their retirement days here."

It should hang on the front gate.