From Pyrenees to Pennines

Last week the visit to my London primary school way back sixty years ago seemed to go down quite well, so today for Fandango’s Flashback Friday, we’ll go back to that era again, to the post I wrote in 2016. But this time, we’ll go shopping.

Off to the shops

In 1953, my family moved from Yorkshire to London.  At first  we lived in Earl’s Court.  In the years following WWII, it was where Polish immigrants congregated and lived, so that’s probably how we ended up in this busy, grubby, cosmopolitan area.

It had shops – exotic shops to country hicks like us.  There was an Express Dairy, a supermarket,  one of the earliest of its kind.  Rummaging round on the shelves, my mother found unknown surprises such as yoghurt.  It was thin, acidic, an improbable shade of pink and none of us liked it.  Not even my father. Yet my father taught my mother to set out soup bowls of milk to sour and eat as a cold, refreshing soup.  It was a part of his Polish heritage.

She found chinese gooseberries.  We didn’t like those either.  These days we call them kiwi fruit and realise the ones we had bought must have been rancid and fermenting.

Now let’s go on to Tachbrook Street Market.  That’s where we mainly shopped, once we’d moved to Victoria.  I loved it.  It was a whole community of shopping streets and market stalls.  Even though I didn’t then drink coffee, I loved to pass the coffee blenders’ shop, and smell the rich aromas drifting through the door as the coffee beans gently roasted and toasted on giant metal grates.

I remember the neighbourhood Italian restaurant.  We didn’t have the money to eat there, but I could see through the window and watch as waiters wielded those giant pepper grinders they seemed to like so much.

We’d pass the neighbourhood grocery store – ‘Home and Colonial’ .  I seem to remember we actually got our groceries in Sainsbury’s.  There was a Tesco store, a very early example of a supermarket.  We didn’t shop there  (‘Supermarkets won’t catch on’ opined my mother).

There was a MacFisheries.  I was fascinated by the glistening fish laid out on the marble counters of the open shopfront and watched as my mother’s choice for the day was expertly de-boned and filleted in seconds.

There were fruit and vegetable stalls.  I loved to hoard the richly decorated tissue papers that protected each orange, each tangerine.  Occasionally, in late summer, my mother would buy us a peach each, as an exotic treat.

Once I got to be about eight or so, I’d be sent off to Apple’s the Hardware Store to buy a gallon of paraffin (Aladdin pink, as opposed to Esso blue) to feed our paraffin heaters.  There was Mr. Apple himself, with his bristly grey moustache and his grubby brown overalls.  The paraffin glugged out of its storage tank into our can.  I’d count out the money, then I’d struggle home, the heavy can banging against my shins, the contents splashing my socks, along the street, and across the busy Vauxhall Bridge Road.

Because my father was Polish, we did quite a bit of shopping at the delicatessen near Buckingham Palace Road.

Here were thin sticks of kabanos, the drier the better.  Nobody but me ate this at school, and my friends assured me it was donkey meat.  There was Polish boiling ring – a horseshoe shaped sausage that was my favourite meal, boiled and served simply with mashed potato and cabbage.  Sauerkraut of course, and bigos.  The plain cookery of 1950s Britain was largely unknown to me apart from school dinners, but that’s a whole other story.

Besides Polish foods, we’d often have pasta or risotto or wienerschnitzel.  Oh – apart from two things.  On Saturdays, my mother always bought a pint of brown shrimps from the above-mentioned MacFisheries.  Saturday tea times would see us all sitting round the table with a pile of brown bread and butter, peeling those fiddly shrimps.  And she was very partial to a kipper too.

I can’t leave out ordinary grocery shopping though.  We went to Sainsbury’s in Victoria because it had fresher, better goods according to my mother.  It wasn’t a supermarket.  We’d go into the shop, with its brightly-tiled floor, and there, to left and right were the counters. Dry goods, dairy products, bacon and ham… and so on.

Young women, their hair concealed under net caps, skilfully wielded wooden butter pats to reduce great slabs of butter into manageable half-pound portions..  Others bagged up sugar into dark blue ‘sugar paper’ bags.  There was always a man at the bacon slicer, turning a lethal looking metal disc to slice bacon and ham according to the customer’s particular requirements (Thin?  Thick?  Gammon rasher?) .

There were glass-topped tins of biscuits – digestives, custard creams, Lincolns, nice, arrowroot…..: these were sold loose.  People on a restricted budget would choose a mixed bag of broken ones.  My mother regarded all of these with disdain.  We made our own.

And when it was time to pay, we’d find that all our receipts, from each counter we’d visited, would have arrived at a small wooden kiosk near the centre of the store.  An efficient type would add it all up, we’d pay her ( it was always a ‘her’) and we’d go off with our groceries.

The scenes played out here are so clear in my mind, but I can’t find a single image to support them.  Not one.  Can anybody help?

One thing we never had to buy at the shops was milk.  That was delivered, every single day including Christmas Day, in glass bottles which we rinsed out and returned, on an electric-powered milk float something like this….

I remember our shopping trips fondly. They were time-consuming, certainly. But the rich variety of a morning walking from shop to stall to shop again was quite a highlight in my week.