Cross My Heart and Hope to Die Page 9

  It certainly was. By the time I was seventeen I was earning eight shillings a week at the shop, and that money was my lifeline. Most of the others in the sixth form at school had ten bob just given to them as pocket money, and some of them even had an allowance for buying their own clothes, but I knew that our family budget didn’t run to such luxuries. Dad slipped me something extra whenever he had it to spare, and Mum bought me whatever I needed in the way of basic clothes out of the money she earned in the fields.

  My main job in the shop was filling up the shelves. Once or twice, when Dad was extra busy, I’d tried to help him by serving behind the counter, but I hated it. It was very difficult to remember the prices of everything and I was hopeless at adding up in my head. I had to write it all down in a long wavering sum on the back of a price ticket, and even then I was liable to get flustcred and make mistakes, while some of the customers made sniffy remarks about my being so bad at arithmetic when I was supposed to be so clever. I was the only one from the village, girl or boy, who’d passed the exam for the grammar school for several years, and I had to put up with a lot of needling on account of it.

  So what with one thing and another I didn’t much enjoy serving the customers. Anyway, Dad knew their habits, and what they wanted. ‘My usual, please,’ some of them would say. Or ‘A piece of cheese,’ and when I asked which sort and how much of it, they weren’t sure: ‘He knows what I have,’ they said. So it was really easier all round if I left the serving to him.

  Instead, I dusted the two long mahogany shop counters, the grocery side and the drapery side, and I lugged cases of baked beans and sugar and cornflakes from the outside warehouse to the stock-room at the side of the shop, and I emptied the cases and checked the contents for damage. Then I filled up the shelves behind the grocery counter, being careful to rotate the stock as Dad had taught me and put the new things at the back and the earlier tins and packets in the front. In winter I carried the customers’paraffin cans out to the yard and filled them from the big tank. I swept out the stock-room and tidied the warehouse, and dusted the things we didn’t have much sale for, and shook the creases out of the drapery goods and changed the window displays and tried hard to avoid Gran Thacker, though I was always respectful to her when we did meet.

  It was an old-established village shop, going back 150 years at least, one of the properties bought by Dad’s father in the 1920s. It must have been old-fashioned then, and it couldn’t have changed much since except that Dad usually spent his holiday fortnight repainting the woodwork while Gran grumbled away doing the serving.

  Dad longed to be able to modernize the shop to appeal to the younger customers. He wanted to get rid of the counters for a start, but Gran wouldn’t hear of it. I overheard them once, arguing about whether Gran should buy a deep-freeze cabinet.

  ‘The customers want frozen food,’ said Dad. ‘They see things advertised, and if they can’t buy them from us they’ll go elsewhere. We’ve got to move with the times.’

  ‘Frozen muck’s no good to anybody,’ snapped Gran. ‘And I don’t hold with all that advertising, putting ideas into people’s heads. Customers were thankful in the war to take what was offered. Your father always sold fresh food, and what was good enough for him is more than good enough for you.’

  Acutally, though, she did give way over the deep-freeze, and fairly quickly, because her rival Mr Timpson at the top shop installed one and Gran’s customers started making loud comments about how handy it was to be able to get frozen food in the village, and how good Mr Timpson’s bacon was. That really upset Gran because she prided herself on her bacon. She never let Dad prepare it but always boned and rolled the sides herself. She couldn’t bear the though of losing any of her bacon customers to Mr Timpson, so she ungraciously gave Dad the money to buy a second-hand deep-freeze, and within a couple of weeks she was eating fish fingers like the rest of us.

  I agreed with his ideas about modernization. Counter service was hopelessly inefficient, because customers had to stand about waiting to be served while poor old Dad was run off his feet trying to keep them all happy.

  The older customers were very patient; quiet, respectable countrywomen who believed in keeping themselves to themselves, who managed on very little money, never asked for credit and never complained. They called Dad Vincent, because they’d known him all his life. There were some customers, though, those who’d been at the village school with Dad, who always called him Ginger. It was understandable, with his hair, but they managed to say it in rather a sly, unpleasant way as though they were making fun of him.

  ‘Come on, Ginger,’ they’d say, ‘hurry up, don’t keep the ladies waiting,’ and they’d snigger while Dad blushed. I wished that I could defend him in some way, but I didn’t know how. Even their kids called him Ginger, and that made me mad. I’d been brought up to call their parents Mr and Mrs and I didn’t see why they shouldn’t be equally polite to my father.

  Saturday was the shop’s early-closing day and the morning was always busy. Dad was often harassed to death, particularly when any of his least favourite customers happened to be in there, chivvying him and making obscure jokes at his expense. If I were Dad I’d have thrown them out of the shop, but he just went on patiently serving, pale and quiet. And as if the customers weren’t enough there was Gran Thacker, forever calling out to him from her office regardless of whether or not he was busy.

  ‘Vincent! Did the tinned pears come in?’

  ‘Vincent! Have we got any children’s socks left?’

  ‘Vincent! Did you hear me?’

  It was a real madhouse in there sometimes. But every now and again things went quiet, and some customers who came in during these quiet patches would settle down to talk to him, taking it for granted that he had nothing else to do. One of the most persistent was Mrs Marks, a recent incomer with a sharp London accent who always wore high heels. She trotted into the shop every day, to buy cigarettes if she wanted nothing else, just for the sake of having somebody to talk to, and Dad behind his counter was a captive audience.

  You could almost feel sorry for the Markses. They’d paid an astonishing price for one of the few bungalows in the village, but if they’d imagined it would be worth it to retire to the peace of the countryside they were soon disillusioned. Mrs Marks kept complaining to Dad how noisy Byland was, with tractors and haulage lorries roaring about at all hours, cockerels waking them at five, and church bells spoiling their Sunday morning lie-in. She said the village stank of pigs, which is true when the wind blows from Mill Farm, and she was always grumbling about the price of vegetables and saying how much fresher and cheaper things were in London. As Dad could have told her, except that he was too polite, food in the country is fresh and cheap only if you grow it yourself.

  Someone else who didn’t understand that was Mrs Hanbury. Her husband was a retired army officer, and they were both tall and thin with very superior voices. They’d moved into the village a few years ago and taken charge of everything from the Parish Council to the Women’s Institute. They loved organizing things, and to be fair, which is difficult, they did a good job. But that didn’t mean we had to like them.

  The Hanburys had bought a tumbledown old house in the centre of the village to renovate in advance of their retirement. It was a big timber-framed building with a roof of mouldering thatch and cracked plaster walls, and over the years it had been divided into two or three rented dwellings. When the Hanburys bought it, it was empty except for old Fred Wainwright who lived in one end.

  Fred was over eighty at the time, and though the Hanburys told him he would be provided with one of the bungalows the council were building for old people over at Horkey, he didn’t want to move out. There wasn’t a bungalow immediately available anyway, but the Hanburys couldn’t wait. They sent in the builders, and Fred was so upset by the dust and disruption and noise that in the end he was glad to be given a place in the council old people’s home, the great red-brick building on the turnpike that used to
be the workhouse. A neighbour said that after the man from the Welfare had told him he was going away, Fred sat for two days and nights with his coats and shirts bundled and tied, and by the time the ambulance came to fetch him he thought he was ploughing with horses again, and sat calling to his team across the kitchen table.

  The Hanburys certainly did a good job on the old house. By the time they’d finished spending money the place was unrecognizable, gutted and plumbed, with new thatch and plaster, new dormer windows, and carriage lamps outside the front door. According to a signboard it was now called The Glebe, but the Hanburys always referred to it as ‘the cottage’. You can always tell townspeople from country people because they insist on talking about their cottages. Houses, we call them.

  Mrs Hanbury did most of her shopping in Breckham Market, but every now and again she’d call in at Gran Thacker’s to give us the benefit of her patronage.

  ‘Oh, Vincent, good morning to you. I want a dozen fresh eggs, please. No no no, not prepacked eggs! I mean genuine fresh ones, free range. You don’t have them? Really, how absurd it is to live in the country and to be offered eggs from battery hens … No, thank you!’

  Then she spotted me, as I passed her loaded with a case of dog food, and smiled at me benevolently.

  ‘Ah – Janet, isn’t it? The Colonel tells me you’re hoping to go to university! Now which one, I wonder?’

  I was going to say London, but Dad chipped in eagerly, trying to show me off, to tell her that I’d just taken Oxford entrance.

  Mrs Hanbury had very thin painted eyebrows and they rose up to join the wrinkles on her forehead. ‘Oxford? My goodness, how very ambitious. But of course things are so very different these days, aren’t they? What I want, Vincent, is just an ounce of whole almonds. I want them for the top of a cake, so they must be unbroken. Well, could you pick out the unbroken ones for me, please? I am a nuisance, aren’t I? Thank you so much. And well done, Janet.’

  Mrs Hanbury was someone else I’d have liked to throw out of the shop. It wouldn’t have done the takings any harm, either.

  Our least favourite customer of all was Mrs Farrow. She’d married a Byland man, but you could tell from her voice that she’d been brought up in a town a long way from Suffolk. She was big and noisy and pushy, and she hadn’t any time for village respectability.

  She didn’t mind what she said to anybody, in fact she enjoyed causing disruption and embarrassment.

  ‘Well, Ginger, what are you giving away today?’

  She always started off like that. There wasn’t a polite reply, so Dad just said, ‘Good morning Mrs Farrow.’ Then she hustled him along, changing her mind and complaining about quality and price as though he were personally responsible.

  ‘What? A tanner each for them miserable little oranges? Never, I could grow’em bigger meself. You keep ’em. I’ll have a tablet of Lifebuoy soap. The biggest. How much? Not bloody likely, I’ll take the small. They’ll have to make it last. I’m not paying that for flaming soap. And a double Andrex toilet roll. Blush pink, eh, Ginger? Hey, that reminds me –’

  Mrs Farrow cackled and shoved an elbow into the ribs of the person standing next to her. It happened to be Mrs Cantrip, one of our nice elderly customers, a regular chapel-goer who was obviously shocked by Mrs Farrow’s language. She stood with a splotch of red on each thin cheek, holding her limp shopping-bag in front of her with both hands, and at Mrs Farrow’s nudge she started and drew in her hands and her lips, retreating as far as she could without actually moving her feet.

  ‘Well,’ went on Mrs Farrow, enjoying herself, oblivious of poor Mrs Cantrip’s embarrassment, ‘I was in the top shop last week and I meant to ask for a double Andrex. I dunno what my lot do with it, anybody’d think I fed’em rhubarb every day, the rate they use up paper. Well, anyway –’ she looked round the shop, gathering her audience – ‘do you know what I said? I said, “Morning Mr Timpson, I’ll have a double Durex.” Double Durex! You should have seen his face! He must’ve thought I was going to have a good time … Laugh, I nearly cried!’

  I didn’t see what was so funny, and I’m not sure that Mrs Cantrip did either, but she closed her eyes tight and made herself even more thinly concave. Mrs Keysoe, one of Dad’s contemporaries, spluttered with amusement and then pretended she hadn’t. Susan Freeman, who used to be at the village school with me, shook with laughter behind her hand. Old Mrs Dillon, resting on the shop chair, nodded and smiled but she’s deaf anyway, she always nods and smiles.

  Dad, trying to add up Mrs Farrow’s bill, kept his head well down. But she wasn’t going to let him get away with that so she leaned across the counter to prod his arm.

  ‘How about that, then, Ginger? Good job I didn’t ask you, I bet you don’t stock Durex! No call for it, eh?’ She choked with laughter again, and had to wipe her eyes.

  Then I saw that Dad was blushing. His skin was so fair that he blushed very easily. He looked reprovingly at Mrs Farrow and nodded in my direction, but I knew how to be a diplomatic shop assistant. I grinned enough to show Mrs Farrow that I appreciated her joke, but not so much that I might offend Mrs Cantrip.

  ‘Ah, you needn’t worry about young Janet,’ Mrs Farrow chortled. ‘Look at her, she knows what it’s all about!’

  ‘Fetch us some tins of custard powder, Janet,’ said Dad urgently.

  ‘Oh, go on with you,’ Mrs Farrow said to him with scorn. ‘You’ve got a shelf full of custard powder, you old woman.’ But I was already half-way out of the door. Poor Dad had to stay put behind the counter but I could always find a job to do in the store shed.

  Chapter Seven

  Shortly before my finishing time at twelve, the telephone rang in Gran’s office. She treated the telephone casually and never minded using it, but she always assumed that it was deaf.

  ‘Sounds like an order,’ said Dad, and presently Gran called him in.

  ‘Old Miss Massingham,’ he reported when he returned with a short list. ‘We haven’t seen her all week, seems she’s not well. Do you mind getting these things up for her and taking them on your way home?’

  It was an odd sort of order for a week’s groceries, but Miss Massingham was a bit of an oddity herself. Not that I really knew her except by sight, but she was one of the village characters. I packed her order in a cardboard box: 400 cigarettes, half a pound of cheese, a packet of water biscuits, three small tins of soup, six boxes of matches and twelve large tins of cat food. People always said she lived on cat food and I began to think it must be true.

  When I went to Gran’s office to collect my wages it was still a few minutes to twelve.

  ‘You’re off already, Miss?’

  I pointed out that I was going to take Miss Massingham’s order.

  ‘I don’t pay you to ride about the village,’ retorted Gran, but she gave me my eight bob. ‘And mind your manners with Miss Massingham,’ she added, ‘don’t forget she’s a lady. Only don’t leave the goods unless she pays you, or we’ll never get the money out of her.’

  Miss Massingham lived about a mile outside the village, in the opposite direction to Longmire End, up a quiet road that passed the fields where Byland Hall had once stood. That was where Gran Bowden had worked when she was young, when the Massinghams had been important people in the county. But the family had all died off except Miss Massingham, and the Hall had been burned down in the Second World War when Ziggy Crackjaw and his Polish army mates were billeted there, so the old lady lived alone in what had once been their gamekeeper’s house.

  It had rained during the morning, and I cycled gingerly along the tree-lined road, the box of groceries balanced on my handle-bars, trying not to skid on wet leaves. I hadn’t been in that direction for years. The gamekeeper’s house, when I came to it, was smaller than I’d remembered, but even so it was bigger than ours and the Crackjaws’ together. It stood by the roadside, overshadowed by trees, and it looked gloomy and damp. I’d imagined it was genuine Tudor, with its mossy tiles and half-timbering, but now I could
see that the timbers were too regular, and the initials H.P.M. and the date 1879 were picked out boldly in coloured plaster above the front door.

  No one in our village, except probably the newcomers, uses front doors, but I wondered whether Miss Massingham might on account of being a lady. But her front door, like ours, had plastic fertilizer bags propped against the sill with bricks to keep out the driving rain, so I decided that even a lady might prefer not to use it. I propped my bike against the garden hedge, pushed open the gate with my elbow, and carried the box along a muddy path, past various outbuildings, to the back door. There was an old sack lying in front of it as an outdoor doormat, just as we had at home, and when my knock was answered with a creaky ‘Come in’ I was careful to make use of the sack first.

  ‘Good morning, I’ve brought your groceries.’

  It was a superfluous remark, since I was standing there clutching them, but I had to say something. Miss Massingham usually did her shopping mid-week and I hadn’t seen her for some time, so I was shocked by the change in her appearance.

  She never looked like a lady. I remembered her as a large vigorous woman, grey hair flying, dressed any old how, riding through the village on an ancient bike with a basket on the front for her shopping. She always called a cheerful greeting when she passed anyone in the street, and often she could be heard whistling.

  But now a change had come over her. She seemed to have shrunk in height as well as in width. Her hair was limp, her cheeks sagged. She wore a long dressing-gown, mangy with age, and she looked old and ill.

  All I got by way of acknowledgement was a fit of coughing. Miss Massingham had a cigarette stuck in one corner of her mouth and the smoke obviously caused her extreme discomfort. She stood in the centre of the room, peering at me through the haze and breathing harshly.

  ‘From Mrs Thacker’s,’ I added. Miss Massingham grunted, and cleared a space among the unwashed crockery on the table so that I could put the box down. Her kitchen was larger and more comfortable than ours, with a small fire and a wooden armchair in front of it, but otherwise it was almost as antiquated as ours and every bit as untidy.