Corner-shop wars…
Lesley Webb recalls the frosty relationship between two Irish shopkeeping sisters when she was growing up…
In the early Sixties, two Irish sisters ran competing corner shops in our area. With differences in stock and outlooks, Mary and Norah were in competition not only for customers, but also for the affection of ‘the husband’.
Mary ran a shop where several roads met in a sort of ragged cross. Sometimes I was sent there to buy cigarettes for my sister’s boyfriend, or if my mother was having a really bad week, a Mars bar for her! Mary was an elderly Irish woman, one of many that had emigrated to that part of South-East London, and lived in a small tworoomed flat above her shop. Despite her good fortune as a shopkeeper, Mary was not a happy entrepreneur. I always thought this was because she may have lost her husband behind enemy lines but the ‘enemy’ was her sister, Norah, with whom Mary’s husband had taken up permanent residence. It would have been difficult enough for two sisters to manage their ménages in such circumstances, but even more difficult for these siblings – Norah’s shop was four doors down!
To preserve relative peace in the neighbourhood, we shoppers had discerned a system for keeping both sisters in business, yet apart from one another. For cigarettes, sweets and tinned goods we would go to Mary. She was thin with dark curly hair and an impatient attitude, wore beige twin sets with checked pleated woollen skirts and heavy nylon stockings that wrinkled around her ankles. Rhubarb and custard or sherbet lemons resided in glass jars on mirrored shelves behind the till, sweet cigarettes in cardboard packets – not far from real cigarettes – sat on dusty shelves in glass and wooden cabinets. The chocolate she sold was soft as the sun poured in through the window, illuminating the dust particles. We the shoppers were kept at a distance from the items we wanted to buy so there was no way to check for freshness. She had a sort of take it or leave it approach – if her shop had not been actually on the corner she may have lacked customers. No one would dare ask her to stock anything different… she would never have supplied yogurt or even menthol cigarettes. If you wanted a freshly baked loaf of bread or some cheddar cheese wrapped in greaseproof paper and neatly folded, you would slink past Mary’s shop to Norah’s. What a difference a few steps could make! There were no glass and wooden cabinets here, just a large slab of marble to slap the cheese onto, guarded at one end by a silver bacon slicer.
Norah’s hair was wispy grey, usually pulled back into a bun pinned haphazardly at the back of her head. She was fuller in figure than her sister and wore a floral printed cotton housecoat that wrapped across her ample bosom. She was altogether jollier than her sister, understandable I suppose, as she had
‘the husband’. Instead of staring through a glass diffuser to discern the quality of the goods as at Mary’s, in Norah’s you simply asked for whatever you wanted to buy. There was no need for a quality assessment as it went without saying that the goods were fresh. Flour-dusted white cob loaves were stacked in a plastic crate behind the counter, but you had to be quick to get one of these. They were soon snapped up by hungry customers to accompany their breakfast of fried egg and bacon with doorsteps lavishly covered in the farmhouse butter sold in pats, complete with a milk churn stamp. Sometimes a pale wooden pannier would sit on the marble counter like a trophy, full of freshly picked field mushrooms. Norah would pop these saucer-sized fungi into a white paper bag that she expertly somersaulted, then secured with tiny twists at the corners. At Norah’s the fundamentals of life were on sale – good food, good cheer and lots of love.
How shocking then when the sisters found themselves in competition with a different kind of shop. The local council decided to build something new – a ‘parade’ of shops. It consisted of a hardware store where you could buy brooms and galvanised metal dustbins, a hairdresser, a wool shop complete with yellow plastic window blind that was pulled down in high summer to protect the delicate yarns from the fierce sunshine, and a butcher shop where freshly killed rabbits hung on hooks. Finally, worst of all, a larger, two-block concern called a supermarket. In this retail Aladdin’s Cave a happy shopper could purchase bacon and eggs, butter and bread, cigarettes and confectionery, toilet rolls and budgie seed. Everything that Mary and Norah had sold between them.
It did not take long for customers to succumb to the thrill of supermarket choice... the sisters mourned the loss of their shops but were able to bury their differences and be reunited as ‘the husband’ became manager of the supermarket and left them both for pastures new!
‘There was no need to do a quality assessment for it went without saying that the goods were fresh’