Local History
A VILLAGE SHOP IN THE FIFTIES
When my grandfather died in the late 1950s, he left my parents £10,000, a huge sum in those days. Dad had recently been made redundant from the insurance office where he'd worked as a clerk since he went deaf in the early years of the war, and had to give up his job as a railway signalman.
They decided to use the money to take a small step up the social scale and become shopkeepers. They found an ailing corner shop in the mill village of Yeadon, up for sale at £1,250, which included living quarters. What had once been two mill-workers' cottages had been knocked through to make one building. The walls were of stone, two feet thick, and in the flagged kitchen behind the shop was a vast, immovable table big enough to kill a pig on. The shop's previous owners' pride and joy was their daughter, who worked as an air hostess for one of the fledgling companies that had begun running flights from Yeadon airport. The family hadn't been cut out for business and would spend the takings riotously, not paying the wholesaler's bills, so by the time we took over the shelves were almost bare.
This was before the time of cash 'n' carry wholesalers, and everything was delivered by van. I remember one in particular because it bore such an odd name: 'Philip Dyson & Co. Drysalters and Druggists' Sundriesmen'. Dyson's sold everything from Beecham's Powders to boxes of candles, and their rep called every week to collect dad's order. Geoff was in his late fifties and spoke in the broadest Yorkshire accent I'd ever heard. His staple reading was The Dalesman and there was always a copy sticking out of his pocket which he would pull out and from which he would quote copiously.
At eight o'clock every morning Jackson's Wholesale Bread & Cake van drew up and the driver brought in trays of bread and an assortment of buns; fondants dipped in vanilla icing with glace cherries on top, dark, rich gingerbread, and coconut haystacks. I used to put a few of each on a glass stand covered with a doyley and arrange them in the tiny window to tempt passers-by. Half an hour later the pork butcher's van brought hot pork pies dripping with jelly, and home-roast hams.
Men on their way to work would start to drift in for cigarettes, women for pairs of tights, and children for sweets on their way to school. The well-stocked shelves soon made the business boom, and my parents had to take on a part- time assistant. In the holidays from training college I'd sit and read in the large room adjacent to the shop which had once been used as a cafe. The square tables with hardboard tops were still there and usually piled high with cardboard boxes of tinned goods waiting to be unpacked and shelved in the store room. This was before smoking and cancer were linked and there were always new brands of cigarettes coming out, none of which lasted long again the old stalwarts: Players, Woodbines, and Senior Service.
Although by the standards of the day it was a busy shop, there would often be quiet periods when the bell over the door never jangled and I was free to absorb myself in Dickens or Lawrence, and it was there I wrote my first poems. Sometimes I'd go for a walk around Yeadon Dam which was just a hundred yards away and on a windy day I'd watch the yachts or if it rained, sit in a shelter listening to the lapping water.
The idyll ended when Morrison's opened their supermarket at the bottom of the High Street and one by one the regular customers stopped coming in except for the occasional packet of cigarettes, and always with a guilty, apologetic shrug. Our shop was one of a row three all selling more or less the same things, but within a couple of years of the supermarket opening all three closed. The nearby pub, The White Swan, or Mucky Duck as it was known, is still there forty years on, and whenever I pass on a bus I strain to hear the jangle of the shop bell.