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Growing Up In Feltwell in the 1950s & 60s – Part – 16. More Shops
In the High St just past Broadwaters, was Hyam’s baker’s shop. My youngest sister was employed there on Saturdays when just 14 and felt very important being left in charge for hours at a time. Mr Hyam would drop off bread, doughnuts and cream buns baked at the Mill early in the morning and would sometimes make a second delivery of the still-warm, jam doughnuts around midday. At Mrs Edwards stall in St Marys’ Street you could buy fresh cut flowers. You rang the bell for service as her house and land were set well back by the church.
The Post Office was another important destination. Lots of personal letters were written and “new issues” were popular with philatelists. You also purchased your dog licence (7/6d) and your TV and radio licence (£2) there. More importantly, mum cashed her family allowance there each week - 17/6d for us 6 children. The cashier would ink his rubber stamp with a heavy thump on his pad followed by another just as heavy on the relevant page of her book and its counterfoil. My sister assures me mum would then take us to Derby’s “for a little something nice” but I remember no such thing. There were 2 steps up into Derby’s small shop and it sold a mixture of toys, ornaments, ladies’ make-up, cardigans and nylons.
Orange’s newsagents (Hill St, just before the Chequers) would have held little interest for me had it not been for their comics of WW2 stories. When my Welsh uncle visited us he would send me out to Orange’s first thing on a Saturday morning so that he could read his Reveille in bed! (Hill St was not far from our end of Munson’s Lane via the old drift lane and the Hythe Rd). The colourful front covers of the War comics at 1/- (5p) each month, soon caught my eye. These were just a little smaller in size than the magazine you have in your hands right now and told an action story with captioned black and white drawings. “Air Ace”, “War at Sea” and “Battle” covered the various armed forces and once read you could always swap them. Stories had titles like “Kill or be Killed!” and “Fear of the Deep”. My father said I had more money than sense when he saw a pile of them in my room. A year later, aged 44, he suffered a slipped disc (an ailment mentioned far more then than today) and he had to stay in bed with an old door under his mattress. He got very bored doing crosswords and Mum handed him some of my comics. “You never told me you had these!” he said. He read the lot!
We moved to Cambridge House in the High Street in 1961, directly opposite the Old Primitive Methodist Chapel occupied then by Danny and Beryl Wortley’s green-grocery and flower shop. They were a happy, good natured couple selling what was in season or could be imported. We would beg empty orange boxes - ostensibly to build carts, though the wood was a bit thin for that and the rectangular two-compartment boxes were more suited for hens’ nest boxes. But we delighted in dismantling them. We would extract the shiny nails to use again, without cracking the strips of wood. Given its store of earth-covered root vegetables the shop smelt a little of damp. It also had an Eldorado ice-cream freezer and sold small portions of lemon mousse which could be eaten like an ice-cream once partly thawed. My father insisted he could taste the building’s smell in his mousse.
You had to step down into Basil Vincent’s cycle shop – where, in winter, a drip-fed paraffin heater would glow comfortingly and a huge, very old, ornate silver till occupied the left end of the counter. He and my father were good mates in their youth. I once went in for a new battery for my front bicycle light and he took me to his back store where some 6 or 7 brand new cycles had just arrived. They still had their handle bars in line with their cross bars and brown paper wound round them: his assistant Dennis would be preparing them for their new owners as they were all pre-ordered. When I was 15 my older brother gave me the bike he had bought new from Vincent’s some 7 years earlier. As it was tired and a little rusty I decided to spend my new earnings (details in a later article) on renovating it. Dennis said he could easily polish and derust the wheel rims but suggested he should fit a new 3 speed gear system which entailed respoking the entire wheel around the new hub. After adding new tyres, new chrome handle bar and handgrips, new saddle and saddlebag, it was like a new bike – only much, much cheaper.
In Long Lane, Hockley’s was a somewhat unkempt little shop, a perception not helped by the outside aviary visible through the open rear door. It contained the usual budgies and canaries but also a silver pheasant and a peacock! Sometimes, with storage space at a premium, crates of Hubbly Bubbly (pop) would be stacked outside on the pavement – which were soon covered in dust and traffic grime. Just beyond was one of the 2 fish and chip shops (the other was in the Beck, just down from the Post Office) and which later became a little cafe we nicknamed The Binky. Beyond that and opposite the old British Legion Hall was the Blade Cafe – the place in the 1950s for the young to hang out and play the pin ball machines and listen to the Everly Brothers and The Shadows on the juke box; but which was looking a bit tired by the mid-sixties.
Mr Field’s new Central Garage occupied the site of Lovell’s former taxi garage and sold Super National petrol with its very modern blue and yellow sign. They also did MOTs and welding. Not long after opening Tom the mechanic was working on a big American automatic raised up on the new hydraulic lift. He revved the engine while the car was still in “Drive” and it shot off the lift and through the end wall of the new garage! In April 1970 as a student living in Nottingham I booked an MOT appointment with Mr Field for my newly acquired 1934 Riley (£35) which had not been on the road for 2 years and was not taxed and had several (not-minor) defects. Fortunately, Mr Field had replied to my letter by scribbling on it “OK See you Saturday!” So when the policeman stopped me on the A1 dual carriageway I was able to produce not only a Norwich Union cover note confirming the car was insured for 7 days but proof that I was on my way to an MOT appointment and hence the reason why the car was displaying a 1968 tax disc. It got me as far as Hilgay under its own power that day and 52 years later it had yet to run again on the road...
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