Village Shops

Village Shops 1950s & 1960s

Anyone no more than a decade younger than me will remember the smell of Woolworths. The heady smell of ‘pick ‘n mix’, or more specifically ‘Dolly Mixtures’ clung to the palate along with the scent of Lilly of the Valley and Fuchsias emanating from the make-up counter, where such perfume could be bought for Mothering Sunday, even by boys like me that had no paper round. Woolworth’s may be long gone, but the smell, as they say, lingers on, at least in my memory. Tucked in the same olfactory niche are the shops where I grew up in West Malling, Kent.

Closest to home and so my earliest independent experience, was the little back-street corner shop that may not be entirely extirpated, but which has long been converted into a private residence. It was run by a chalk and cheese couple, Mr & Mrs Clist – she tall and built like the garden privies of my day, and he small and grey, ferret-faced, bespectacled and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, owned ours. Inside were very small quantities of the everyday needs of a 1950s citizen. Packets of Brook-Bond tea, candles, Bachelor’s processed peas, Swan Vesta matches, a sack of King Edwards and tins of mixed veg. Somewhere out back was a paraffin store and the smell seeped in trying to out-compete the smells of cinder toffee and nutty logs, Smiths crisps and pipe tobacco. I remember waiting to be served with dry-peas for my pea-shooter or a nutty log if it was pocket-money day. Usually the hold-up was the same old lady customer who was as entertaining as she was slow. Toothless and stuttering it would take her three days to order a quarter of tea and a swiss roll and longer of she wanted a bar of soap or a bit of budgie seed, some mixed fruit or a mars bar, as each ‘B’ or ‘M’ would be the stumbling blocks for her staccato gums as she tried to spit out the word… ‘bbbbb bbbbbb bbbbb box of mmmmm mmmm matches mmmm mmmm mmmy dear’. It was more fun to be witness to this than to listen to the ‘Navy Lark’ or ‘Round the Horn’ on the steam radio.

The local ‘chippy’ was owned and run by Mr & Mrs Abnett. At the end of the day it was possible to go in for the cheapest delicacy – a ‘bag of bits’. There were the (mostly) batter bits that had fallen from the fish and would be scooped out when the fryers were being switched off for the day… I can still taste them uuummmm!

Jean remembers the local newsagent where the high street was at its widest and busses used to turn around… and which actually sold advanced bus tickets as well as copies of the Daily Sketch and ‘Titbits’ or ‘Reveille’. Its claim to fame was appearing in the Beatle’s Magical Mystery Tour. She saw the filming with Paul McCartney in a maroon velvet suit… she was disappointed that he was so short.

One family seemed to have cornered the entrepreneurial acumen in my hometown. The  Baldock family owned several, seemingly unrelated establishments. One was an emporium the like of which barely clings on in dusty county towns, away from tourist routes, and beyond the grasp of chain stores. Herein, one could wander from the cobbler’s to the shirt counter via ladies underwear merely by turning a corner or moving up just one step of the boarded floors. Do such places still exist? Places where you can follow your nose from the smell of rich, hard leather and sole-sticking solvent, through fragrant lavender lace hankies and into the super clean smell of a starched cotton poplin shirts in cellophane bags, tucked into slender cardboard boxes. The window of Baldock’s Clothing Emporium held the first fashion item I ever coveted, a blue shirt with white spots sporting a ‘Dave Clark’ collar. I was 14 years old and I saved every halfpenny I earned pumping petrol on Saturday & Sunday mornings (at half-a-crown (12.5p) a day plus tips) until I had the fourteen shillings and sixpence that the shirt cost. Then I wore it to every Saturday hop and ‘teen club’ outing until it was worn as thin as a cigarette paper and its buttons cracked.

The Baldock’s ubiquitous sign also hung above the toy shop two streets away. This was the place of my dreams in the years before sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll were invented. I can still smell its seasonal scents. In the background in any month were the smells of Plasticine and bare floorboards washed grey by years of diligent mopping. But each month another smell would entice and assault. Even with your eyes shut and no calendar or weather vane to aid you, one sniff would tell you the month and season. Nothing on this planet smells the same as a glass case full of fireworks as October’s leaves swirl past the ever-open toyshop door. Choose to believe it or not, but I swear that glass marbles have a smell of their own as May turns to June and playgrounds echo to the sounds of ‘closest to the wall’ and ‘snick it and win’. Early December there smelled of the press-out paper dollies clothes that I eyed when deciding on what my pocket money would buy for my sister at Christmas, and of the unique odour of a china doll’s head.

Something very strange has happened to the town now. I hear that it is now one of the richest postcodes in the country, which it was most decidedly not in my day! Half a century ago it was like any other large country village with the squire in his hall and the magistrate in a high-walled house, but the meaner streets and simple homes were rented by working men and women.  I went back there 2009 and was totally shocked. The centre of the little town is a wide-open area, where, I assume, three hundred years ago carriages and stagecoaches could turn or park up. In my day this expanse of tarmac was a good place to collect the stiff cardboard bus tickets that were discarded at this mini-terminus. It was safe to play or walk to infant school because only the headmaster and the doctor and a few other professionals or businessmen drove cars.

When I returned after nearly half a century the whole place had gone back in time. The wide road had been re-paved with cobblestones! The old paper shop by the bus stop was now called Gun’s & Saddles and sold tack and shotgun shells to the owners of the massed ranks of 4x4s. What had been the general grocer where mum once worked and bought home broken biscuits and wilting veg was now called ‘The Bridal Suite’, the bicycle shop is an upmarket travel agency. Where inner tubes and saddlebags used to hang, are now posters of Umbria and ads for New York shopping trips. The corner café had turned into a brasserie and the George Inn had gone from metal keg beer and twentieth century tat back to its seventeenth century glory with an inglenook fire, wooden stalls and real ale. Molly’s Café now sells ‘period tiles’. The council estate had been sold off and gentrified and the old airbase’s married quarters are now million-pound homes sporting new mock Georgian porches and manicured lawns.

But Baldock’s Emporium was still there in the same faded maroon livery and even the same shirts and ties in the window… I guess the well-made small check cotton shirt and khaki waistcoats never go out of fashion with a certain class of country gent wannabe. They even sell great big spotted hankies of the sort one could knot, string on a pole to carry all your worldly goods if, as an eight-year-old you are thinking of running away from home. Sadly, Baldock’s Toy Shop is no more… it is now a smart Italian restaurant whose portals I would not be allowed to cross in the casual clothes I wear. (This shop is now – 2019 – called ‘Fragolina’ and sells kids clothes)

Back in my day Baldock’s was the first place I bought a plectrum to pluck the acoustic guitar that I never managed to learn to play. But, every May another new smell would entice me in. By the time I was twelve the shop had shrunk to real size. As a six-year-old it was a massive store with high counters, which I could barely peep over to see the Jacks and skipping ropes in their museum glass cases. As an almost teenager I squeezed into the shop and looked down at the small counters, but I still drooled in anticipation. May now smelled of fishing tackle. Crack open the hermetically sealed shop display and there will waft up the distinct odour of whatever lies therein. Thus, it was that porcupine quill and brass, rubber and nylon twine would swirl up in a miasma redolent of silent woodland pools and slow running summer rivers.

The Bow Window has a special place in my memory. It was purely a sweet shop and sold all the stuff that crumblies like me go on about… many of them only now exist in nostalgic reveries. Flying Saucers… pink discs of rice-paper filled with sherbet; sherbets dabs… a small bag of sherbet with a toffee on a stick to dip into it; nutty logs… whole hazel nuts in a ‘split log’ chocolate bar; shoe laces… strips of red liquorice; satin cushions… shiny hard pillow-shaped candy with a chocolate centre; sherbet lemons that, like pineapple chunks and sour cherry cubes left your mouth coloured and sore; dolly mixtures, penny chews, ‘fruit salad’ and black jacks to pull out your fillings and my favourite, chocolate cups… chocolate filled with liquid caramel. All these were laid out in tempting trays and the hard sweets were in great jars on the higher shelves.

Its also special as temptation got the better of me and I took some delicacy without paying… I think innocently as I was still at infant’s school. I was caught by the owner and my dad made me go back to the shop to apologise. I learnt a valuable life lesson – don’t get caught!

Molly’s Café is another memory burned into my barely teenaged mind. It was a place we kids met up. Being in a village and having siblings often our play included an age range, I and my best mates, jean and hers would run in the fields together from infancy to getting into to double figures. Once puberty struck such all-age play disappeared. Initially Jean and Cats Eyes (Carole) and me and my best mate Geoff Harvey would sit around the dusty café on a Saturday afternoon experiencing a primitive sort of freedom from the adult world. Over a few years it was ware my contemporaries and I would pitch-up on our bikes in the days when ‘there’s nothing to do around here’ first was coined on the lips of bored teenagers.

Molly was a fixture behind the counter, a fag hanging from the corner of her mouth ever ready t spill ash onto the confectionary. Bottles of ‘Zing’ or ‘Tizer’ or fluorescent green pop could be bought and used to wash down whatever was left-over from the morning’s trade. Stale scones, stale sponge, leathery choux and clotting cream was discounted at the end of the day and we snapped it up regardless of its peppering of ciggie ash and Molly’s wayward hair. Before West Malling changed from a sleepy village with an air-base and homeless hostel into re-cobbled pretention and an inflated upper middle-class stronghold.