Some Childhood Memories by Jennie Hart

For Over A Century - Open All Hours

I battled my way through childhood in a small East Yorkshire market town on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds. My mother owned a grocery shop and I lived with my parents and elder brother above and behind it. My life was anything but conventional because the shop dominated our lives. I have been to India a few times and have observed that the life of Indian children was not unlike my own. We were open twelve hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-four days a year, except in a leap year, and only on Christmas day did we close. Even on that sacred day customers would trundle up the garden path to our back door to request vital ingredients for their Christmas dinner; a jar of cranberry sauce or a packet of Paxo stuffing.

Life was hectic because of the shop. Meals were never restful because the shop bell would often ring whilst we were eating and one of us regularly left our meal to serve a customer. I was expected to serve as soon as I was tall enough to see over the counter. Often, before school, I set out the counter and tidied shelves and once I was paraded in front of my primary school class for having dirty hands. Miss Galtry did not know I had been weighing potatoes and I was too ashamed to say. I knew my mother had been too busy to have time to check my appearance. Early mornings were a rush; mill girls called for cigarettes and snacks and mum made sandwiches for labourers and farmhands. We also had discerning customers who appreciated the quality of the fresh produce my mother managed to obtain; locally made butter, freshly made bread and her own pork pies.

My father worked elsewhere in the town and I was constantly embarrassed by people thinking I had no father because no one ever saw him. He went to work early and came home late and never appeared in the shop.

When he came home, he often complained if my brother and I were not occupied with work around the house or shop. He’d had little education himself, so took no interest in ours, and never once attended an open evening or concert. I often had to make excuses for his absence. Unlike our current devotion to our children, he thought the family allegiance was child to parent not parent to child. He did not see his role as looking after us; we were there to see to his needs and he was very needy.

Despite his odd approach to parenting, my father was a generous and creative man. Unfortunately, he wasn’t particularly generous with my brother and me. He’d had a deprived childhood and in his adult life became a lover of expensive clothes and accessories, shopping at Austin Reed and Aquascutum. He subscribed to Tailor and Cutter a monthly magazine for the discerning ‘Clothes Horse’ and he also had a love of the luxuries of the rich and famous. I never remember him smoking but he always had a box of Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes on the coffee table. These were fine, black cigarettes with an exquisite gold tip, almost too beautiful to burn.

When dad died, he left an impressive collection of clothing that I sold to a vintage store near London Bridge station, called Radio Days. He also owned a unique collection of Playboy Magazines and they bought those too. He was a generous man, and every spring, would parcel up unwanted clothing and give it to his work colleagues. This was a man who only earned a meagre weekly wage; having turned down opportunities to have a post of responsibility, preferring to remain on the ‘shop floor’.

My father’s creativity was directed towards our eighteenth century dwelling in a relentless battle to contain the damp which rose up its solid walls. He spent many weekends plastering and then sculpting the walls into patterns and swirls, in an effort to disguise their uneven surface. I remember that my bedroom wall resembled the alps, and when young, my arms were often scratched from turning over in bed and catching them on the spiky moon scape surface!