Nostalgia of Shopping- Part 2

The main shop for our family was done in Bedford. Before supermarkets grocery shops were run on old-fashioned lines, whereby there would be a shopkeeper standing behind a counter and you would select your shopping with him taking items off a shelf. Items such as cheese were weighed, having been sliced off large blocks. I remember being able to taste before you buy, although some supermarkets will allow you to do this now, but cheese and other items of food weren't wrapped as they are today in vacuum packs, nor was meat in those polystyrene trays you see on supermarket shelves with cling film over them. Even bacon would be sliced on a machine and then wrapped separately, as would chops and even chicken portions. You could select the meat straight from the refrigerator. Dick Wood (who I mentioned in the earlier post) made the most delicious sausages. He would often bring us a packet when he came for tea. A good deal tastier than the packets of sausages you get today, and no doubt containing a good deal more meat, too. 

My mother did the grocery shopping, from what I remember, in a shop called Fred West (please, not to be confused with the murderer!) which was in St Cuthbert's Street, just off St Peter's Street in Bedford. I think she would take a list of what she required and the shop would make the order up and put it all in cardboard boxes, and then we would go in and collect the order in the car. I presume they had a carpark at the rear, but to be honest I don't remember. West's was one of those old fashioned grocers where they had tins of such things as broken biscuits along the front of the counter as well as chairs on for the customers to sit. Why, I used to think, would people want to buy broken biscuits, particularly? Why not buy whole biscuits? This was a time when you could buy your food in measured quantities, as I've already mentioned about cheese. I imagine you could buy biscuits in packets, but there must have been something great about being able to select those biscuits and have them measured out by the shop keeper. 

Living on a farm we were never short of vegetables. My father grew potatoes and Brussel sprouts on the farm. Once they were picked, they were bagged up and a lorry came and took them off to London, to Covent Garden. The company was called Bennet and Hawes. They still exist. I have just Googled them. They are based in Spitalfield's in London. In return for taking our produce we got fruit in exchange, such things as boxes of oranges and grapefruit as well as melons, so we could have orange or grapefruit for breakfast. I don't think I particularly liked them as a child but I grew to quite enjoy them as I got older, but having had a heart attack I'm not supposed to eat them or drink the juice as it's supposed to interfere with the medication I'm taking, but that's another matter. My father always seemed to eat a grapefruit for breakfast himself.

The garden at Malting Farm produced a wide variety of fruit and vegetables. We had asparagus and the bed in the garden always produced a fine crop. Also, we had strawberries and raspberries and there was an orchard which produced both apples and pears, although the last time I visited when my brother Robert lived there, the garden had been dug up, the apple trees cut down and replaced by pens for sheep and cattle. Sad in a way, but probably more sensible when you're running a farm on profitable lines. Also, salad vegetables such as lettuce, tomatoes (grown in a greenhouse.) as well as carrots and other root vegetables. So, you see, we really had no need to buy most of our vegetables. Our milk was produced on the farm. It used to come straight from the cow, a couple kept specially for that purpose. I don't expect you'd be allowed to drink 'raw', un pasteurised milk now, if I know anything about E.U. agricultural policy.  It never did any of any harm, and to be honest, it definitely tastes far better than what we have to drink today. Although the cows were tested for whatever diseases they might have (which they didn't, naturally enough.) As a result of this milk we always had a supply of cream which was occasionally made into butter.

My grandmother had lived at Mill Farm in Cardington. When my grandfather died my uncle Michael took over the management of the farm and my grandmother moved to a house which at the time, (which would have been the early 1960's.) just happened to be the first house going into Bedford along Cardington Road. She used to shop at a grocer's along London Road, called Bass's, another old fashioned grocers which sold all the usual products. Almost directly opposite was a newsagents, Desmond's. The daughter of the family was a keen rider and my brother Sandy and Robert used to bump into them at gymkhanas and horse shows at various venues in and around Bedfordshire and the neighbouring countys. Further along London Road, towards Bedford town centre, there was another shop, Elsie Currah's, which stocked knitting wool, cotton for sewing and all the haberdashery requirements necessary for sewing, knitting, crochet etc etc. My mother was a very keen knitter and owned an electric sewing machine as well as a knitting machine (both Singer machines I remember.) She made a lot of her own clothes as well as knitting us the most amazing sweaters. My father detested the knitting machine, particularly as the thing was set up in the dining room at Malting Farm, which was where we sat to watch television, and he hated the sound it made. I suppose it was noisy, but as I say, she managed to create some really amazing knitwear of the machine. Elsie Currah's was where she bought most of her knitting wool.

Another grocer's was in the centre of Bedford, in the High Street. This was Dudeney and Johnston's.  (Now Lloyd's Bank.) They had several smaller shops dotted around the outer suburbs of Bedford, one being opposite where I went to school in Kimbolton Road, opposite Walmsley House, at one time a Co-Op but I think it's now a Budgen's. Dudley and Johnston's was quite an 'up-market' grocers, perhaps in the same mould as Waitrose today. They stocked quite a good range of products. Upstairs there was a restaurant and a large dance hall/function room where wedding receptions and dances were held. As a child we seemed to go to a lot of birthday parties for school friends and I went to several birthday parties in there. The shop also had a bakery although I can't remember my mother buying anything in there. I have a suspicion that Dudeney and Johnson was perhaps the first self-service supermarket to open in Bedford, but it may well have been Safeway in Greyfriars which I imagine was opened when that area was redeveloped along with the bus station in the late 1950's or early 1960's. It used to intrigue me as a child because they had one of the first automatic doors, something that we take for granted today. You stood on the mat or something which made the doors open, but today no doubt done with the aid of motion sensors or something similar.

Cars I've Owned- Part 1

Over the years I've owned many cars. Some I've loved, but many I have hated. You have a definite love/hate relationship with the car you own, basically because when they run smoothly, get you from point 'A' to point 'B' without any problems, when they decide not to behave, for example, refusing to start, or breaking down unexpectedly, they are more hated than loved. Most, if not all, the cars I've had have been second hand. I never seem to be in a position financially to afford a completely new vehicle, so the old cars I've had were prone to the usual faults such as refusing to start in cold or damp weather and one-hundred-and-one other problems. I suppose an older car is going to cause more problems than a brand new one because the bits and pieces, such as brakes, tyres, water pump, starter motor and so on are the bits that wear out fastest and so cause you the most problems.

Having been brought up on a farm does have it's advantages, particularly when you're starting to learn to drive. There is always space, or at least there was at Malting Farm in Cardington, I don't know whether all other farms are the same, allowing you to be able to drive a vehicle along farm tracks or across meadows and fields without encountering other vehicles. I was able to drive tractors which aren't exactly like driving a car as they have so many gears and sub-gears and far more levers to shift into these sub-gears. But at least I was able to drive such vehicles as Land Rovers which gave me a chance to do some driving, although off-road, before I was able to start driving lessons. 

The first car I owned was a Ford Anglia, the classic car from the 1950's- 1960's. I was working at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham in 1969 (see earlier post on here which gives a full  description.) Before I'd gone there I had been doing driving lessons and hadn't yet done my driving test. I don't know how many lessons I'd had, quite a few I seem to recall. My test was set to be during the summer break in the theatre's season so I went home to Bedfordshire. I probably took a few more lessons and then did the test. Unfortunately I failed miserably, on something quite trivial, like not turning right or left when told by the examiner, or keeping up with the traffic. I went back to Cheltenham and did a few more lessons there and did my test and this time I passed! As a result my parents bought me the Ford Anglia, which cost all of £75! I know, looking back, it doesn't seem possible that you could buy a car for so little! It was two-tone green, light on the top half and dark on the bottom half. It had quite a few quirks. One being the windscreen wipers. When you put them on, and you drove slowly, say, up a hill, in a rainstorm, they moved fast, but if you drove faster, for some strange reason they moved slowly. Why? Seems odd thinking about it now. On those old cars you had the headlight 'dip' control on the floor near the clutch pedal, unlike in a modern car where you control the 'dip' with a lever on the steering wheel column. I think it might even have had indicators which actually stuck out from the side of the car when you were going to turn either left or right and not just a flashing bulb on the four corners of the car. It's a wonder they never got knocked off when a bicycle or someone went past. Goodness, how cars have changed, but this is a good 45- or more years ago.

Of course, having a car was made use of as part of my stage management job. Moving on to work at Greenwich Theatre a few years after working at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham, as part of my work I had to return a lot of items which were used as props in a show we'd done. I had to load up the little Ford Anglia with no end of items and then drive into the centre of London and return the things to some of the prop hire companies around Covent Garden in particular. I had not been driving for very long and it was quite nerve wracking driving through Marble Arch, not knowing exactly where I was supposed to go and no sure which lane I was supposed to get into as well and looking at an A to Z Atlas of London which was open on the passenger seat beside me. It was quite hair-raising, to say the least. The best way to learn to do something that might be difficult is to just get on and do it, a good motto for life I always think. Spending to much time mulling it over is a good way of talking yourself out of it, so that incident driving through Central London certainly taught me a thing or two and came in handy a good deal later when I used to go in to London in my car when I used to do TV walk-on work and had to get to, say BBC Television Centre or any of the major television or film studios such as Pinewood or Shepperton.

On another occasion I had to drive a large van with a load of furniture into central London and was going to return it all to the various hire firms around the city and beyond. It was a rainy day, which didn't exactly help matters. I don't think I had ever driven such a large vehicle before and I think it must have been the largest vehicle you could drive on an ordinary driving licence. I soon found out that stopping the engine was no easy matter. You couldn't just use the key to turn it off when you wanted to park the vehicle. The only way to stop it was to stall it by shifting the gear stick and the clutch at the same time or something weird which made the lorry shudder horribly. I went with another stage management member to help me unload the furniture, which included a piano. Somewhere in Covent Garden (at a time when the fruit and vegetable market was still there.) it was a real knot of small alleyways and roads and I accidentally got into a one-way street- the wrong way, so I had to reverse the lorry quite a distance so as to get out and so get back into the correct flow of traffic. Not an easy manoeuvre at he best of times, but not helped by the fact that it was raining. My vehicle-driving experience was increased several times over that particular day.

I was always very keen to keep on the right side of the law. For some reason or other, one always gets somewhat edgy, almost guilty, for whatever reason, when you are out driving somewhere and you see a police car, when you're absolutely sure you've done nothing wrong. On one occasion, when I was working at Greenwich, when I'd gone home for the weekend and was driving back to work fairly early one Monday morning. The route required me to go through the Blackwall Tunnel. I never like driving through tunnels at the best of times, but I had to go and ignore an instruction on a reading or one of those overhead gantry things, which told me to move over into a different lane. I just drove on and didn't move over to a different lane and I got stopped by a Police car, pulled over to the side of the road. I didn't have my driving licence with me and was told I'd have to go into a Police station and show my licence. I was numb with fear. I don't know why. I don't think, up until then,  had ever set foot in a police station. So, I did as I was told and a few days later I did just that, produced my licence at the police station somewhere in or around the Greenwich area, was told to not do 'it' again, and went away, fully warned off. I don't think, after that, I ever ignored an instrucion as regards driving in the right lane ever again.

As for hating any cars I've owned one was a bright red Ford Escort estate. Bought from a neighbour. It was a real pain to get started, particularly when the weather was damp or cold. I tried to remedy it with such things as new spark plugs, battery leads and other bits and pieces that I replaced, but all to no avail. It was worse when it was damp, even when there was no rain. Those cold, misty mornings, a slight drizzle, you name it, the confounded thing refused to start. Even having a tow from someone else's vehicle and jump starting, it would not start. So much so I just lost my temper and gave the confounded thing a good kick. A bit like that famous scene in "Fawlty Towers" when Basil Fawlty can't get his car to start and hits it with a branch of a tree. It's almost always when you need to get somewhere in a hurry, early morning, have to get to work. The thing had an almighty dent in it's side for ever after. I'm not surprised I lost patience with it. Stupid thing.

Learning To Drive, Lorries and First Cars

I was learning to drive at the time I went off to work as a Student A.S.M. at the Everyman Theatre in 1969 (details of which are described fairly fully in an earlier blog post.) During the season break I returned home and did my driving test in Bedford but failed miserably. Not keeping up with the traffic and failing to turn either right or left when I should have done were the reasons for the failure. On returning to Cheltenham I continued with some more driving lessons and then passed successfully. My parents bought me my first car, a Ford Anglia which came in two shades of green and cost the princely sum of £75. Amazing when you think about it, but I suppose in 1969 with amount people earned per week, that was probably quite a lot of money. I think my first proper wage was somewhere in the region of £10 per week. The cost of a gallon of petrol would probably have been in the region of 30p. That little Anglia, christened Henrietta, got me about quite successfully. It had one peculiarity. When it rained and you needed to use the windscreen wipers, they went fast when you drove slowly and slowed down whenever you drove fast. Don't ask me why. Just the way the car operated. So, if it was raining and you were driving up a hill and in a low gear, the wipers sped up. Going down the other side of the hill and you went a good deal faster, they slowed down. 

It took me a good deal of time to pluck up courage to go off and drive on my own, probably because when you learn to drive you always have someone in the driving seat next to you. When you first learn to drive on the public highway, it takes some time to get used to having cars coming towards you, even if they are on he opposite side of the road. When I did eventually get used to driving myself then there was no problem. That little car lasted a few years. I had it when I worked at Colchester Rep, then Midlands Arts Centre and drove me up to Liverpool. I think that was the first time I'd driven on a motorway. At that time you had to drive through Birmingham because Spaghetti Junction hadn't been opened then so to get from the M1 to the M6 you had to negotiate the centre of Birmingham. It seems so simple now when driving north. When I went to work at Greenwich I had to drive into the centre of London, after one of the shows we did, because I had my own car, it was decided that I could use it to return some props to the suppliers around Covent Garden. I'd never driven into the centre of London before and had to go round Marble Arch during rush-hour which was not something I had ever contemplated doing before (and, frankly, don't really want to do now, as it happens.) I think I just more or less shut my eyes and just went for it (metaphorically, not really, you understand.) I do remember once when I worked at the theatre in Watford having to drive a large lorry into central London with a load of furniture on the back, including a piano. Unfortunately this lorry had a fault. You could only turn off the engine by stalling it. I went with another A.S.M. in pouring rain and we got lost in Covent Garden and went the wrong way down a one-way street and ended up having to reverse out, which wasn't something I wouldn't wish to repeat.