For much of the time that we lived in the mews, we had no fridge. It was normal then for housewives to make small food purchases every other day rather than the present day big weekly shop. Quite apart from anything else, there were no supermarkets yet! Food was bought fresh and cooked immediately. We did however have ceramic coolers for milk and butter for use during the summer. They were of porous earthenware, with two layers, and you filled the space between with water. Evaporation through the pores provided the cooling effect.
Where the Mews ran into Broadhurst Gardens, there were a number of useful shops where food could be bought. On one corner was Mr Hopkins, the grocer, from whom you could buy lard and margarine (both in blocks wrapped in grease-paper), dry goods such as rice, macaroni, sugar and flour, all manner of tinned goods, and something called Wonderloaf (which was a cheap white pappy bread wrapped in dark blue paper). Next to his shop, within the Mews itself, was Mr Gundry’s garage, where my mother bought her paraffin.
On the other corner was Hammett’s, the butcher. Butchers in the 1950’s were fascinating places. Complete animal carcasses hung on hooks from the ceiling and the floor was covered with sawdust to catch any drips. All manner of cuts of beef, veal, mutton, lamb and pork were on display in the window alongside ropes of black and white pudding and other sausages, all made by the butcher himself. There were also plenty of offals available: liver, kidneys, sweetbreads (pancreas), brains, lights (lungs) and tripe, Most of these are no longer eaten; they go into pet food instead. Actually lights were not eaten even then in England. People bought them for the cat, as indeed my mother did too. But she also stewed them for the family, minced and flavoured with lemon juice, nutmeg and a bay leaf, an Austrian tradition.
Towards Christmas, butchers would hang up geese and a few turkeys outside, upside down by their feet. The necks and heads were left fully feathered, so that you could see what kind of bird it was. When you saw those birds, you knew Christmas was coming. Nowadays Christmas starts in October, sometimes even before Halloween and, by the time December comes along, everyone is heartily sick of the whole thing and wishes it were over. But in the 1950’s, Christmas started properly in December.
Poultry was not cheap because there were no factory farms then. People like us had a chicken once a month at the most. The bird came complete with all its innards and you had to take them out yourself. I have never done this but I watched my mother do it often and I think I could make a reasonable job of it if I had to. We threw the guts to the cat, if it was chicken. Duck guts she wouldn’t touch for some reason and they had to be thrown away. Practically everything else was eaten, even the feet. They went into the giblet soup and my mother ate them. I got the neck and the parson’s nose. At Christmas we had a goose and my mother fried with the lard for the next six months.
The liver always received special treatment. After my mother had carefully removed the gall bladder with its bitter contents, she would fry the liver, and then mince it with a hard-boiled egg and finely sliced onion. This was eaten cold on bread and butter, or better still on Ryvita.
A little further down that side of Broadhurst Gardens was a dairy, where my mother bought blocks of butter and sometimes a small tub of cream. And next to it was Lloyd’s, the baker, who sold fancy French bread and all manner of sweet pastries for tea. Opposite was Mr West, the greengrocer, from whom we bought most of our fruit and veg. Like many food shops of the period, it had a metal wall in the front which folded down partially by day to form a display table jutting out over the pavement. In autumn, the displays of fresh plums and grapes were a crawling carpet of wasps. They scared the living daylights out of me but my mother was quite unmoved by them. She hated flies because they were dirty, but wasps (she said) were clean and would not make you ill – or sting you if you left them alone. She bought fruit for preserving as well as eating, and also switzen plums (zwetschken) to make dumplings with. The number of these that my father could eat at a sitting was quite remarkable.
My mother always had to take her ration books with her when we went shopping. She had three: two khaki ones for herself and my father and a pink one for me. Children had different rations because we were entitled to extra goodies like orange juice. Whatever she bought had to be paid for with tokens as well as money. Different kinds of food came off ration gradually one by one, sweets being the last.
West End Lane, at the other end of the Mews, had classier shops. There was an estate agent and a watchmaker who had some remarkable novelty clocks in the window. The one I remember best had a ball on the end of a metal rod moving languidly between two footballers in front of a goal, while the goalkeeper (the actual pendulum) bounced up and down energetically in the background. But a large block at the corner of the Mews and the Lane was taken up by the Decca recording studio. We quite often had coaches in the Mews that had brought performers in to be recorded.
Further down the road, there was a furrier. A lot of real fur was worn in the fifties. There was a social cachet to it. I was always fascinated by his window display: two or three elegant mannequins in floor-length fur coats with price tags on them, and a shelf of smaller pieces such as stoles and hats. I did not realise that these were in effect dead animals. It was not unusual to see a woman on the street with a complete fox fur worn around her neck and shoulders, the head and forepaws hanging down on one side and the hindquarters and tail on the other. The head would be set with glass eyes. I ardently wanted to have a fox fur stole like that when I was grown up.
At least once a week, we went shopping on Kilburn High Road, usually on market day. The market was actually illegal. There were only one or two places in London where there were official street markets. But the unofficial ones were extremely popular with the locals as you could buy food more cheaply than in the shops (and sometimes off-ration). The barrows were crowded together on both sides of the High Road, with the goods displayed on sheets of green baize. There was a lookout boy posted at either end of the street. If he sighted a policeman coming, he would give a loud whistle and the barrow boys would throw up the baize sheeting over their goods and trundle their barrows away, even if it was in the middle of a transaction.
There were also of course a lot of shops on the High Road. It was the shopping centre for the whole neighbourhood. There were shoe shops, clothes shops, a Woolworths and a Marks and Spencer. There was a fishmonger with all kinds of weird-looking fish in the window including live eels on wet newspaper. Once an eel escaped and made off down the gutter at top speed. There was a haberdashery run by Singer, where my mother bought reels of brightly coloured cotton thread, zips, petersham, bias binding, hanks of knitting wool and spare parts for her sewing machine. And there were the gas and electricity show rooms where you could buy both spare parts and new appliances. Our Ascot geyser lasted us for years because the parts that wore out could always be replaced. People also went there to pay their quarterly bills, but we didn’t because we were on pre-payment meters.
| Up | Home | Next |