More tales from the corner shop
Yours writer Marion Clarke recalls simpler times when the local shop supplied all our festive goodies
Among my earliest memories are of Friday evenings spent helping my grandfather count the weekly takings from the village shop my grandparents owned. This was long before decimalisation, so my job was to sort the coins into separate piles that equalled one shilling – twelve pennies, two sixpences, four threepenny bits and so on. It took longer than usual in the weeks before Christmas when everyone spent more on extra treats such as sticky dates in a box or Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates.
When Joan Norfolk’s parents had a corner shop in Leeds, they raffled a large box of chocolates every Christmas and the proceeds went to charity. “Dad bought fresh turkeys and geese in the market. They were ready-plucked, but he had to clean the insides out himself. What a messy, smelly job that was!
“Mum and Dad worked long hours as the shop was open from 7am to 7pm six days a week and on Sundays from 7am to 1pm. There were still many
‘Dad caught a resident putting a packet of butter under his cap’
times when there was a knock on the door in the evening or on a Sunday afternoon by customers who had forgotten to buy something they needed.
“Shoplifting was quite common. We had apples displayed in the window and when groups of children came into the shop one of them would take an apple while the others distracted the person serving them. Dad once chased a boy down the street and took him to the school headmaster.”
David Pittaway’s father, who owned a shop in an Oxfordshire village, had a less energetic way of dealing with would-be shoplifters: “On one occasion, Dad caught a local resident putting a packet of butter under his cap, intending to steal it. Dad kept him talking for 15 minutes in the warm shop, waiting for the butter to melt!
“Everything we sold was loose so it had to be weighed and put in brown paper bags, including broken biscuits. If broken biscuits were in short supply, we would spend an evening breaking up biscuits from a packet.”
Gloria Aldridge (née Jenkins) used to rush home from school to help in the family’s shop: “I loved going to the warehouse with my dad to choose jars of sweets. We weighed out large blocks of Danish butter and cheese which we cut with a wire string. The bacon was cut on a slicing machine to the exact thickness the customer required.
“We provided chairs for the customers to rest and tell us their stories. The only thing I didn’t like was stocktaking once a year when we had to count every item in the shop.” Her family didn’t own a shop, but
Jean Fieldhouse enjoyed helping out in her local store on Saturdays: “Dried fruit and rice were weighed into different coloured paper bags while bars of soap and blocks of salt were wrapped in newspaper – no plastic back then. Bills were paid in cash – only posh customers paid by cheque.” Contactless payments have made my Friday evening job at my grandparents’ shop very much a thing of the past!