Shoes Were For Sunday (6 page)

Eggs were very precious when I was a wee girl. They were so scarce and so expensive that no grocer would guarantee to replace a bad egg without evidence that the egg hadn’t been eaten. Like doubting Thomas, he
had to
see
the offending egg, which often stank to high heaven. Many of the older women would reel back, holding their noses, and call appealingly to the grocer, ‘For goodness’ sake, Jimmy, let the wean take that egg roon’ the back afore her turn, or ah’ll be seeck!’

The rotten eggs had to be taken round to the midden in the backyard next to the shop, where a boy was stationed to make sure the eggs actually went into the foul-smelling bins. This was to ensure no unscrupulous person would offer the same egg twice. It was my delight to volunteer to take the rotten eggs of the older women to this reeking depository, an offer which was thankfully accepted, and I enjoyed tossing the egg with unerring aim straight into the centre of the bin. No wonder I was so good at coconut shies when ‘the shows’ came round to our district – I’d had regular practice with rotten eggs.

Syrup and treacle, which we loved, weren’t always easy to get, and I remember one day when we were all playing with our marbles on the pavement the cart arrived piled high with jams and jellies in their unmistakable boxes, and, at the side, two huge chests marked ‘Syrup’ and ‘Treacle’. There was a wild scatter as we each reclaimed our store of ‘bools’ before we rushed home for the store books and the netbags, then out again to form a noisy, chattering queue. After at least a two-hour vigil, for the cart had to be unloaded and checked first, we had our reward. Black treacle was a passion with me at that time and I’d cheerfully have stood all day if at
the end of it I could have had a piece on treacle. Well, this particular consignment had been delivered in cartons – not tins – and I laid mine carefully into my netbag. Alas, in my ignorance of the weakness of the new container, I put it at the bottom of the bag, upside down. And the tragedy was revealed only when I felt something warm and sticky running down my ankles.

The skelp I got from Grannie when she saw the mess and realized the waste, wasn’t entirely responsible for my tears.

Everything that was bought at the Co-op was marked in the book, and no money changed hands until pay-day, when maybe a pound would be paid in towards the week’s shopping, and the mothers usually attended to this payment themselves instead of leaving it to the children. On one bitter occasion, when I was entrusted with a pound, I put it into my coat pocket and stood quietly in the shop, not daring to go outside to play in case I’d lose it. And then, while I was waiting, I got so carried away with the new stock which had arrived, and with my stupendous success at ‘guesses’, that I didn’t notice a thieving hand quietly rob me of the precious note. Only when I came to pay was the loss discovered, and we all searched the sawdust till our eyes and noses stung with the particles and the dust. But I knew with sickening certainty that we wouldn’t find it. I knew I had been robbed. It was a terrible moment having to tell my mother, for she had just lost her job and had only ten shillings in the world after giving me that
pound. It says much for her understanding that, in spite of her thin purse, one look at my stricken face told her I needed no other punishment. Tenement children didn’t have to be told the value of money, we knew it only too well.

Two doors down from the grocery section of the Co-op was the drapery department, which also sold shoes. My grannie bought a pair of shoes every summer, before we went on our holidays, and I felt very important when I was sent down to bring back several pairs ‘on appro’ so that she could try them on in the privacy of her own home. I never really knew what ‘on appro’ meant. I only knew they were magic words which, once uttered, entitled me to obtain three or four splendid cardboard boxes containing spanking new shoes, and that nothing was marked ‘in the book’ until we had made our decision. The excitement of trying to persuade Grannie to have the ones with the buckles, which she instantly dismissed as far too frivolous, and the responsibility of taking back the ones she didn’t want, and then, and only then, having the price marked in the book, had me fairly bursting with importance and a sense of occasion.

When it was our turn to have shoes bought for us, shoes which we wore only on Sundays, we were taken to the central branch, at the other end of Springburn, where there was a bigger selection. How proud we felt as we sat on squeaking chairs, only to be whisked out of them the moment an adult was seen to be standing.
My mother stood no nonsense, but we didn’t mind. Sitting or standing, we entered into the full drama of each stranger’s purchase with as keen an interest as though the shoes were for our own feet. We criticized the quality, the colour, the price, the suitability of the shoe for its purpose. Nobody felt rushed, for we all knew that shoes had to last for a very long time, and money was scarce and we couldn’t afford to make a mistake. When our turn came we tried to kick our battered and scuffed old boots under the chair out of sight. How shaming they seemed compared with the splendid new leather which now stiffly encased our feet. But their scuffed comfort lent wings to our feet as we ran home with our new shoe-box, and climbed on to a chair to lay the new shoes reverently on top of the wardrobe, out of harm’s way until we drew them on on Sunday when we went to church.

There was a Co-op about every five hundred yards in our district, but you got to know your own Co-op as though it were a club, and how alien other Co-ops seemed if you were sent there by a neighbour. But your own! Ah, that was different. So cosy. So chummy. The girl clerks in our Co-op lent me a new pen nib, shiny and smooth, for each school examination, and later for those I sat at college, and they rejoiced in my successes all the more because they had supplied the nibs which had written the answers.

They actually encouraged me to act my little stories as I waited my turn. This was amazing to me, for
Grannie discouraged ‘showing off’ and described me as ‘a Jezebel’ if I dared imitate anything I had seen on the screen at Saturday matinées. And I found the packed Co-op a marvellous source of fun when I’d play practical jokes, the favourite being covering myself with sparkling frost and running in, panting, as though for shelter, pretending it was pelting with rain. This was especially mystifying when the sun was shining, but in our temperamental climate the trick worked every time, to my joy.

But for certain items my mother had her favourite shops, and I felt positively breathless with patronage as I went into those little specialized establishments. The one nearest our home was owned by a father and two daughters. The father was dark and saturnine, and the daughters placid, plump and fair. The father looked permanently in a seething temper. He probably had a bad stomach, but we took him as we found him and decided he was just naturally bad-tempered. ‘Mean as get out,’ my mother assured us. ‘He’d take a currant off the scale to make sure you didn’t get a skin over weight.’ But his home-cooked boiled beef ham was her passion, and his spiced pork delicious. I was fascinated to watch him shake the spice from a canister with a pierced lid, and my mouth watered as I raced home, hardly able to wait to get my tiny portion spread on bread and margarine, and savour this aromatic food. I always liked it when the daughter with her hair done up in earphones served me. She was dreamy and far-away and quite
capable of ignoring her father’s sharp glance as the scale wavered past the quarter-pound to give me an extra half-slice with my order. Oh that was bliss indeed! The other daughter, though, hair in a bun on top of her head, was her father’s own child. Exact weight and no more, and I avoided her when I could, and gazed intently at the coloured boxes on the shelves until the earphoned goddess was free.

For home-cooked gammon we went to the little cooked meats shop at the top of the hill. It was always a pleasure to watch the owner-cum-cook slice the perfectly boiled gammon with his thin, viciously sharp knife, and lay it reverently, slice by mouth-watering slice, on the fine grease-proof paper, and then transfer the savoury load to the marble scale. This was a splendid character, rosy-cheeked, with a mop of wiry, curly black hair, a man who obviously enjoyed his work. Sometimes, to my joy, he passed over a sliver of the gammon on his knife, to let me drool over its flavour while he cut the quarter I’d ordered. Not every time, for this would have been spoiling indeed, but often enough to make an errand to his shop have all the excitement of a lucky dip.

We knew every mannerism of each assistant to the last nose-twitch. We had plenty of time to observe them, warts and all, in those busy shops in pre-refrigerator days, when shopping had to be done every day. One of my favourites was the man behind the cheese counter in a big store, privately owned of course, in the centre
of Glasgow. He clearly loved his work. He reigned over the cheeses like a captain over his ship. He stood, white-aproned, behind his counter, and surveyed us all calmly, a brooding responsibility keeping his face very serious. Behind him, a vast range of swelling rounds of cheeses were arrayed. On the marble ledge in front of him smaller cuts rested, with wire-cutters neatly to hand. Each transaction was a little ritual. No plastic-wrapped portions for this expert. A gentleman in a trilby, inquiring about the merits of a particular cheese, would have a tiny portion removed by the wire-cutters and handed to him to savour. The cheese salesman would stand back, mouth pursed, eyes watchful, as the customer slowly chewed the morsel, while the rest of us awaited the result with keenest interest. We weren’t impatient. This thoughtful consideration seemed absolutely right to us. At last the trilby-hatted gentleman would nod, ‘Mmmm. Yes. Excellent. I’ll take a pound, please.’ A sigh from the cheese-man and from us, the audience. ‘I thought you would like it, sir. A very mature cheese, and excellent with a drop of port.’ Port! This was high living with a vengeance, and the humble purchaser of two ounces of Cheddar felt for a moment exalted to undreamt-of realms of luxury.

This cheese salesman was a wizard with the wire-cutters, and could cut a huge virgin cheese with the speed and accuracy of a circular saw, and extract an exact two ounces or four ounces to a milligram. He would have been chagrined beyond words to have to
add the words: ‘An extra ha’penny, or a penny under or over.’ You asked for four ounces and you got four ounces. He was admired by all of us, for we knew an artist when we saw one.

Another exclusive grocer’s in town was an Aladdin’s cave to me. I loved going there with a chum who collected a weekly box of special biscuits for the minister. There was a little stone bowl at the door, filled with clean drinking water so that customers’ dogs might be refreshed. The mahogany and plate-glass doors had the weight and opulence of a bank entrance, and the well-polished counters were ranged with strange, exotic foods. Things I’d never heard of, much less eaten. Truffles. Foie gras. Peaches in brandy. Calves-foot jelly. This last particularly fascinated me, and I couldn’t for the life of me decide when this should be eaten. ‘It’s invalid food,’ somebody assured me when I whispered my puzzlement over this delicacy. But what was an invalid? I’d never heard this grand name used to describe somebody in poor health, and I continued to puzzle whether or not the invalid would spread the jelly on bread, as we did with my mother’s home-made black currant, or whether she would sup it with her dinner; calf sounded like meat to me.

But I had no doubt whatever that the owner and his son were the two luckiest men in the world to be able to preside over this wonderland every working day of their lives. Fancy dealing with scented China tea, chicken in aspic, curries, spices, and even stem ginger!
Father and son were immaculate in their dress, as befitted the stock they handled. Dark suits, sparkling white shirts, perfect bow ties and gleaming shirt-cuffs. The food was parcelled in thick, expensive, crackling brown paper and fine strong string, and the son had a fascinating mannerism of shrugging his shoulders in sharp little movements as he deftly stroked down the corners of the paper to form a perfect seal to the package. I watched him with unwinking gaze, admiring every movement of those expressive shoulders, and envied him nearly as much as I did the Principal Boy in the pantomime, for it seemed to me they both lived in magic worlds.

And in our own much humbler district the shop we all loved best was owned by a somewhat frightening spinster lady always known as ‘Miss P.’ Nobody, not even the most chatty grown-up, ever called her by her Christian name, and nobody had ever seen her without a hat. She always dressed in black. Black silk blouse, held at the neck by a gold and Cairngorm brooch. Black, highly polished shoes and black lisle stockings. Surmounting a head of rusty auburn hair, she wore a black felt hat in winter and a black straw in summer. She had rosy cheeks and fierce black eyes, and knew her stock to the last shoelace. I liked her shop best of all in summer, with its rows and rows of sand-shoes hanging temptingly at the door-front, fastened to a long line of strong twine from top to bottom of the door-hinges. I would stand mesmerized in front of them. White ones
wooed my heart, but, of course, they’d never have kept clean enough to be practical. Navy ones would match my gym slip. Black ones looked exciting and grown-up, but the grey ones, with little speckles of black, looked most elegant and were my favourites. Oh the excitement when my mother would take us in on a chosen Saturday, to rig us out with our sand-shoes for summer holidays, and for running about at our games during the long long days of summer, to save our heavier more expensive boots and Sunday shoes. Although our sand-shoes cost only about two-and-eleven a pair, Miss P. treated us with the courtesy due to honoured clients. We were seated on brightly polished chairs, our noses filled with the delicious scent of the rubber soles carried to us by the breeze from the shoes by the door. She consulted my mother as to colour and size, then with unerring eye she would cut off a pair of shoes from the rows hanging at the door. The very stuff of summer holidays was in the sensation felt as those soft shoes encased the feet, so different from the rigid leather of the long-legged boots which were my workaday schoolday wear, or the formal splendour of my black patent lacing shoes for Sundays. A pair of new shoelaces would be threaded through, and I would stand before the little floor mirror, ready to leap into the air like a shorn lamb, drunk with the feeling of lightness in my feet. The shoelaces cost an extra penny, but sometimes Miss P. was in generous mood, no doubt realizing how precious every penny was to my hardworking mother,
and she would present us with the laces free of charge. My mother’s eyes would glow as brightly as Miss P.’s, at this generosity, and she would say, as we left with our parcel, ‘Aye, a real lady, Miss P. It’s a pleasure to be served by her.’