|
|
Growing Up In Feltwell in the 1950s & 60s – Part – 19. Early Enterprises
The village’s many shops meant useful employment especially for young girls and women. Orange’s newsagents needed teenagers or pensioners with bicycles, for paper rounds. My eldest sister had acquired a brand-new black Phillips cycle from Basil Vincent’s shop - partly to enable her to do a paper round, which in turn, helped her to pay for the bike! It is hard to imagine a world without credit cards now: Barclaycard, with its daring slogan “Take the Waiting out of Wanting” came along in 1966 but until then, shops like Basil’s often needed to offer some informal credit arrangement to facilitate sales.
One Sunday morning in 1958 when we had deep snow, eldest sister persuaded me to walk with her while she pushed her bike to Orange’s shop at the top of Hill St near the Chequers. She was 16 and I was 8. She hung the two heavy bags of Sunday papers on the handle-bars and pushed it as I walked beside her round by the Church and along a deserted Bell Street. It started snowing hard and I was soon freezing cold with sodden shoes and no gloves. As we walked up Wilton Rd we had to deliver to a nice old lady in the first house on the right and before I walked up the path with the bag of newspapers, big sister had said “If she invites you in say you can’t; we’re in a hurry!” The lady opened the door and said something like “Gracious! you must be freezing cold – come in and have some hot cocoa!” It sounded as if it was already made and waiting but in any case my body was wanting the warmth from the little kitchen within and I responded accordingly. Sister had to join us and bourbon biscuits were produced. We were there almost 30 mins I think: the lady had the ulterior motive of reading as many of her neighbours’ newspapers as time would allow! Sister had been caught like this before and preferred to finish her round 30 mins sooner. She gave me 6d of the 2/6d (12.5p) she earned for the entire round and never asked me to help again. I was so glad of that.
It is difficult to compare remuneration then with now. 2/6d would have bought five 45gm/1.5 ozs 6d bars of Cadbury’s chocolate which I think would now cost 70p each for the same weight (ie 2/6d = £3.50). Big Sis was always “losing” things about the house and would cry out: “The one who finds my hairbrush I shall lo-ove! A few minutes later the cry would change to “To the one who finds my hairbrush I shall give thrupence!” And later still to “To the one who finds my hairbrush I shall give sixpence” and suddenly remembering how I had gently tapped the missing object under the sofa or down the side of a cushion, I would claim my reward. It was difficult earning money when only 8 yrs old. But at the age of 11 when we moved to Cambridge House in the High Street, dad had a plan to keep chickens – lots of them – in the large rear garden and outlined a tempting profit share if I fed them before I took off for school and also collected the eggs on my return. I had to boil up potato peelings and mix them while warm with the layers’ meal for the morning feed. “Hens feel the cold too you know” said one uncle. Dad’s figures were spot on – except for the number of eggs we could expect. We might hit target in the summer months but other times our free range hens were a liability. My grandma insisted as a girl she had watched rats steal eggs: “one rat would stretch his front paws up to the nest box and the other would climb in and roll the egg down the other’s back”. Had birdbox cam-recorders been around then I would have been tempted to buy one. Fortunately, dad did not have the capital to expand big time – and so making a really big loss was avoided.
Around this time us lads struck lucky. Fizzy drinks came in a glass bottle for which you were charged an extra 3d which was refundable when you took back the empty bottles. It was a form of recycling: no-one threw 3d away. As lads we would occasionally cycle to the dump half way up Lodge Road – on the right and opposite the track which led to what we called the sandpits. All sorts of interesting stuff could be found there amongst the ashes spread around the top of a large pit where many fires smouldered and occasionally burst into flame. But one day we discovered a “nest” of about a dozen Coca Cola bottles, almost certainly RAF or USAF in origin. This was treasure indeed! Some had debris trapped inside them or were burnt brown from the fires; but back at home, we washed them and began collecting our windfall from Lister’s shop at Cross Hill. We found many more over the next few days but I think the supply dried up just as Mr Lister became suspicious and demanded to know where we were getting them all from. Money for nothing and all quite legal!
At the ripe old age of 15, I invested in 25, day-old Aylesbury Ducklings for the table (I ordered 24 but they sent one free in case one died in transit on the railways. If 2 died you had to chop their legs off and post them back for a further refund). You had to kill them at around 10 weeks old before they grew their adult feathers which would stop them fattening further. I did not do the killing and I shall spare you the detail as to what happened before the man who did, admitted he was more used to wringing the necks of tough old cockerels and geese! I covered costs but made no profit – nor ate much duckling.
Not deterred I bought 48 day-old chicks (50 were sent! Black Leghorn X Rhode Island Reds - supposedly) to rear to point of lay – say 16 weeks old. I wrote to a breeder in Cumbria merely asking for a price and 2 days later I was called out from lessons at school: father had received a telegram: “Chicks railed this morning arriving 6pm – Benson”. Fortunately I had my brooder to keep them warm and we fed the noisy little things on hard boiled egg (!) until I could collect some proper food. This was better as there was no killing involved but when the time came to sell, my only buyer was a farmer dad knew from Blackdyke who offered me 10/6d (52p each bird). Cousin Malcolm urged me to accept it, advising that: “it never hurts to take a profit!”. I had hoped for 12/- or even 13/- but was prepared to compromise at 11/-. The farmer was having none of it so I took them to market at Swaffham. My birds made just 8/- each at market. Malcolm snorted with a Norfolk chuckle: “you caught a cow-old didn’t you? I said you would!” He had and I had and I never forgot it.
Back to Times Remembered