It was pouring when I reached Longport. I attempted to avoid the puddles in my leaky shoes. The Price and Kensington tea-pot factory looked inviting beside the canal, as the rain sheeted into the water. Articulated lorries sped alongside me on their way to the A500 sending up architectural wings of spray with their wheels. A burglar alarm howled on a now deserted potbank – perhaps the wind had set it off.

‘Shall we go for breakfast at Tunstall Market?’ my friend Pam suggested. ‘Good idea!’ I agreed. We settled in at the Market Grill. Behind us, a Salvation Army officer was collecting funds, dressed in full uniform and hat. At the counter a beautiful woman with a beehive hair-do was having a cup of tea. She wore a nylon apron. Maybe she worked on one of the stalls. The market was busy, and the café was thronged with young and old. Beside us an elegant matron with platinum hair and a black fur coat grasped a mug of tea with red leather gloved hands.  Her scarlet snakeskin handbag lay on the adjoining table. Pam and I decided we would have the Full English – eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, tomatoes and toast.

‘Worked in a potbank, a factory or other noisy environment?’ enquired two young men at the market entrance, as I got up to look around. They were touting for business for their deafness tests. They asked twice before I understood the question.

When I returned, two locals had joined us at our table. One of them was wearing respiratory prongs in her nose. I wondered if she had emphysema. It is a hazard of a life spent in the potteries, but I felt abashed to ask. ‘Come up from London, duck?’ the chattier of the two enquired. ‘Have you just finished University?’

‘Well there’s a compliment for you!’ laughed Pam. ‘I would call that a compliment!’ she repeated, so they understood they’d got it a little wrong. Internally I felt the prong woman probably needed her sight tested. She chatted unguardedly about her friends and relatives. ‘My brother has a lovely girlfriend. He met her on the internet. She comes from Macclesfield.’ When we announced it was time to get the bus to Hanley, their faces fell. ‘It was lovely to meet you.’ I said, truthfully.

Crowds queued in the rain to get into the Potteries Museum. Over the past few days 28,000 people have been through its doors, to see the recently discovered Anglo-Saxon treasure, a haul of gold of astonishing beauty,  known as the ‘Staffordshire Hoard’. I skipped the queues, as I was there to see Geoffrey Snow, Treasurer of the Friends of the Museum. He is typical of Stoke people in a different way. Beautifully dressed, patient, intelligent and generous, he puts a lot of effort in to charitable work for the local community. He gave me several hours of his time and expertise, causing him to miss lunch. All morning he’d been hard at work on the Gift Aid desk. If the Staffordshire Hoard is to stay in Stoke – and all the locals are committed to it doing so – the Museum must raise three million pounds. Yesterday they achieved a significant target –  the first million.

When our meeting was over, we went back to the Gift Aid desk. ‘Are you all right?’ Geoffrey asked his colleague. ‘No, I am not’ she said. ‘I am hungry, and I haven’t had a break since first thing this morning’.

Geoffrey wasn’t going to get anything to eat.

‘Show us what to do, and we’ll collect the funds’ I suggested. He did, and Pam and I took our turn collecting donations to keep the Staffordshire Hoard. The generosity of the locals was mind-boggling. From pounds to pence, almost everyone seemed to have something to give. Who wouldn’t value a community like that?