Very generous Glenn, and since I have always wanted an example of your work, impossible to resist! So please count me in, and should I be fortunate, I'll gladly pay the shipping. Thank you, and good luck to everyone, enjoying all the posts
I posted
this in Carl's Lounge 8 years ago, the photos are long gone I'm afraid, but the text is still there
Chuffs
Prior to starting infant school at the beginning of 1966, each Friday morning I would go with my mother and my younger sister, to meet my grandmother in Sheffield city centre. Ostensibly, the purpose of this expedition was to go round the market. Back in the days before everyone owned a refrigerator, for many women a trip to the meat and fish market was an almost daily pilgrimage, with the biggest trip of the week being for the weekend's meat. We were a poor family, living some distance out of town, and so during the week my mother would obtain provisions from local shops, often
on the strap. The trip to town on Fridays was an opportunity for us kids to see our grandma, and for our mum to have a gossip with her mother.
My mother would have only been a young woman, but this was prior to working-class people supposing they were still young post-marriage, and to my mind they all dressed and acted like old people, twenty-somethings wearing head-scarves and cloth-caps. No wonder they all went crazy with flares and paisley-pattern shirts when fashion was invented a few years later, the poor dears just didn't have a clue how to dress.
My grandmother was a stout, tough-looking woman, rheumy-eyed, and old before her time. She smelled of dust, cigarettes, and
Victory V lozenges, was always weighed down with myriad shopping bags, and liked to use the word 'chuff' a lot. Some years previously she had had some sort of operation related to her thyroid gland, and blamed "Me thyroid" for, among other things, a gain in weight, which she fought with large amounts of
Ryvita crispbread. She didn't look much like the models in the
Ryvita adverts, with their white bikinis and tape-measure belts, but I loved her anyway.
The market was forever packed and bustling, mainly it seemed with old people, who clustered to stalls, standing up to drink tea from bone-white cups and saucers, and eat tripe, cockles, or mussels from tiny chipped plates. Provisions of every sort could be bought in the market, from loud, friendly women, and men who curiously talked out of the sides of their mouths, but on Fridays people bought joints of meat for the weekend and 'finny' for Friday tea. They'd say, "I'll 'ave a bit o' finny for 'is tea."
'Finny' I think is correctly called finian haddock, fish smoked to a golden yellow, and cooked traditionally in Sheffield by poaching in milk. Unfortunately, throughout the 60's and early 70's the purveyors of this local delicacy often cut corners, by chemically treating it with a carcinogenic yellow dye rather than smoking it. Whether or not this lead to local pockets of finny-induced cancer I'm not sure.
To say that my grandparents lived alone, my grandmother seemed to buy an awful lot in the market. Parcel after newspaper-wrapped parcel would disappear into the voluminous shopping bags. By contrast my mother bought very little. One of my most enduring memories of childhood is simply being hungry.
For what felt like hours we were dragged and frog-marched between the rows of ageing giants, who all smelled a bit like my grandma, dodging shopping-trolleys, umbrellas, and the occasional drunk. From time to time my grandmother would produce chocolate limes and ageing toffees, which she always had cached about her person in ample quantities. She would also give me sugar-lumps, wrapped two to a packet, which she took from cafes to compensate for not taking it in her tea. Often she would urge my mother to buy various things for me and my sister, with my mother replying mantra-like, and with increasing exasperation, "I can't afford it Mother." It appeared to be a sort of game between them.
Inevitably, at least once, my sister would have to go to the toilet, which would entail a mammoth detour, and a search for a penny. By the look of the toilets in the markets, and the numbers milling in and out of their entrance, people came from miles around to use them. I was quite indignant at the thought of visiting the 'Ladies' toilets, and so would stand on the nearby weighing machine, or hang monkey-like from the wooden covered hand-rails adjacent to the steps leading to the lower level of the market.
After an eternity fighting through hordes of damp coats, with feet in plastic sandals or wellingtons sliding on the smooth floors and occasionally dragging through blood-soaked sawdust, my mother would finally convince my Grandma that she needed to return home so that she could prepare a cheese sandwich for my father's dinner (to this day I'm quite sure he hasn't learned how to make one for himself.) At this point we would adjourn to the caff in Woolworth's, an oasis of calm, furnished like a works' canteen with yards of stainless steel and acres of pale-blue formica.
It seemed as if the only people who ever went in Woolworth's caff were people who had just shopped in the market, or at least they looked the same. Mind you, the whole world did back then.
On entering the vast open-plan cafeteria, with its round-cornered formica-topped tables and fixed leatherette benches laid out in regimental rows, my mother would immediately do her best to keep us as far from the long self-service counter as possible. I think this was a ploy to postpone the inevitable requests for food, which would just as inevitably be met by the "You can have something when we get home" mantra.
I would try to get a table near the large window, so that I could stare out at the street-traders and shoppers below, while the adults droned on over the constant sucking-noise made by the 'expresso' coffee frother. From the window it was possible to partly see into the open 'rag and tag' market below, with its multitude of stalls selling everything from the mundane to the mysterious. Stall-holders hawked their wares loudly, men threw sets of crockery high into the air, and people rummaged among piles of garments looking for bargains. There was also an old woman who weighed people on a huge ancient-looking set of scales, and a 'spiv' who sold razor-blades which my grandmother insisted were second-hand. I marvelled at the scale of organisation needed to keep him constantly supplied with previously-used blades.
When the adults returned from the counter in Woolworth's, I would be given a glass of still-orange, filled from a large perspex tank of the stuff, which was constantly being stirred around by some invisible source, making fake orange fruit bob on the surface of the bright amber liquid. My grandmother sometimes had cottage pie, which she paid for with Luncheon Vouchers, acquired from who knows where. Otherwise she would just chain-smoke Player's
Number 6 cigarettes, drink her tea, and talk to my mother. Their topics of conversation rarely varied, being as follows:
1. Students - Seemingly anyone aged between 15 and 25 who didn't wear a headscarf or cloth-cap. My grandmother didn't have much good to say about them. It was only in later life I realised the wisdom of her words, which sounded like twaddle back then.
2. The War - An event of ancient history as far as I was concerned. It was every adult's favourite subject (together with related topics such as rationing and National Service), and they talked about it whenever they could, you just couldn't shut them up about it.
3. How things used to be - Another excuse to talk about The War.
4. How lucky children are today - Because we weren't beaten/starved/didn't have The War - The way they talked about this though we'd clearly have been better off, or at least better behaved, with all three.
5. My father - With the hanging phrase 'You've made your bed' used a lot by my grandmother.
6. My grandfather - With the word 'chuff' being used a lot by my grandmother, but not quite as much as when she was talking about students.
Having guzzled down my orange within a minute of it being placed on the table, I would have nothing else to do but listen to this verbiage and stare out of the window, hoping to spot one of the fantastically interesting-sounding students, or wondering when the next War would be. It was while engaged in such activity one day that my attention was drawn to an old man at a nearby table. He had bought himself a meal and was sitting down to enjoy it. He dusted the food with what he supposed was salt, but which turned out to be sugar from one of those large shakers they used to have in cafes in the 60's. Clearly looking forward to his meal, the old man's face contorted with revulsion and disappointment as he tasted a sugar-spoiled forkful. He took the plate back to the serving counter, where my grandmother was buying another cup of tea. When she returned, she said, "Some chuff's put sugar in the salt-pot and that poor old man's got it all over his dinner. They won' change it though, the chuffs."
I watched the old man quietly return to his table. He sat down and began to stoically eat the ruined meal, clearly too poor to waste it. An old man at the end of his working life. I sat and watched, feeling a combination of anger and intense sadness. I think it is probably the saddest sight I have ever seen.
