Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (6 page)

My great-grandparents' new address was 150 Station Road, Brimington, but, as anyone who walks the mile uphill into Brimington proper knows, Wheeldon Mill and Brimington are not one and the same. For all the years my family lived at or visited ‘the Mill' – those in the know tended to drop the ‘Wheeldon' – a distinction was made between the two. Wheeldon Mill, as
described to me, was the little clutch of houses at the bottom of and either side of Station Road, a short stride from the Chesterfield Canal, just above the Sheepbridge and Brimington Railway Station with its pastry-cutter edging and wooden stairs. It comprised no more than forty houses and stood about a mile north-east of Chesterfield town centre, and a quarter of a mile from the racecourse.

The area grew up piecemeal, a handful of stone cottages probably dating back to the eighteenth-century water-powered mill for which the place is named, others to the opening up of the canal and railway. Its brighter redbrick terraces, including that with the corner shop, came later, in celebration of Queen Victoria's Jubilee. There was nothing twee about these two-up two-downs, with their night-soil middens, communal backyards and strips of front garden. They were not, however, the tight back-to-backs of industrial legend, but short, stubby rows, bordering the road or canal, some comprising no more than half a dozen houses.

Today, summer visitors are drawn to the pub beside the refurbished Chesterfield Canal. This seems about right: for as long as my family was connected with the area, beer played a vital role in this small community. Church and schools were higher up the hill; how much more convenient to have the Great Central Hotel – an ordinary pub – on your doorstep. Corner shop and pub stood at right angles to one another, the rough ground between them serving as a makeshift playground for local children.

The uppermost limit of Wheeldon Mill was its Plantation – a grandiose name for a small copse. There was a brickyard nearby, a sewerage plant (odourless by the 1930s, but historically more iffy), and a small colliery, whose seams were worked for a short time during the 1900s and again in the late thirties. Numerous
small open mines and footrills showed how the immediate area had been mined for coal and ironstone intermittently since the nineteenth century. Some two miles north-west stood the Sheepbridge Company, that bulwark of industry (and sometime employer of my great-grandfather) whose fortunes and enterprises expanded year on year. Two miles north-east, with its own collieries and ironworks, and interlinked activities with Sheepbridge (plus houses built for its clerks on Gentleman's Row), the Staveley Coal & Iron Company reigned supreme. Beyond these dark chimneys and stark colliery wheels, in the distance always, and close at hand, lay the deep green folds of the Derbyshire hillside. Industry might scour and plunder, but harvest reports continued to appear alongside accounts of mining accidents and fatalities.

Like most of its neighbours, 150 Station Road was a two-up two-down, one of the ‘downs', in this instance, comprising the shop with its katy-cornered door on to the street. A contemporary trade directory lists ‘Richard Nash, grocer', though everyone
knew the corner shop was Betsy's. Dick was still at Linacre when they secured the tenancy; his working life always happened elsewhere. The corner shop was definitely hers.

Its windows were smeared with dust when she first set eyes on the shop, and the shelves and floorboards needed a good fettle, but it did not take Betsy long to set the place to rights. Sweeping brush and mop chivvied every corner, the large wooden counter was thoroughly scrubbed and oiled, and the panes rubbed with damp newspaper and a splash of vinegar. By the time she turned the ‘Open' sign on the shop door, my great-grandma had everything organised.

A bank of tiny drawers concealed all manner of things such as matches and gas mantles, clay pipes, nit combs and string. Floor-to-ceiling shelves held every tin and packet you could think of, from mustard powder, pickling spice and candied peel, to Horlick's Malted Milk and Brasso. Bags of poultry spice and pig powders stood near a vinegar barrel fastened beneath a thick, heavy lid; cans of paraffin were grouped nearby, out of the way of sacks containing potatoes, sugar and flour. Cheeses cooled on a marble slab behind the counter, next to the bottles of Pikanti and A1 Sauce.

Betsy opened the door each morning wearing a starched white apron which, like her skirts, practically brushed the floor. Though the apron was often grubby by the end of a long day – in the early years of business, the shop stayed open until ten or eleven p.m. – its crisp white linen was part of her authority: ‘I run this shop,' was the message it conveyed. ‘The corner shop doesn't run me.'

There were generally two or three people in the shop at any one time (more, at weekends): neighbours like Florrie Stokes, who came with her toddler and new baby while her other four were at
school, or Kathleen Driver, who wanted to inspect the new shopkeeper and pick up a loaf while she was there.

Bread came high on every woman's shopping list. For some of Betsy's customers, bread provided breakfast and tea: bread and jam, bread and scrape, bread and dripping, bread and treacle, bread-and-you-just-be-thankful, if that's all there was to eat. My great-grandma traded in half loaves as well as whole ones, stale bread as well as fresh and, sometimes, reluctantly, if someone was particularly desperate, two or three slices at a time.

Potatoes were also a priority, and the only vegetable the corner shop sold. Aside from an onion to provide flavouring, potatoes were the sole vegetable in some Edwardian diets. Other quantities might rise and fall or be crossed off a shopping list altogether, but the pounds of potatoes usually remained secure. Other frequent purchases were tea, sugar, biscuits, currants, flour. Bottled relishes added spice to a grocery list as well as to a husband's plate, a spoonful of mustard pickle enlivening a nice piece of ham.

Boiled ham, brawn and hazlett, plus bacon by the slice, were delivered by the butcher, and stored in a meat safe which did not exactly keep meat fresh, but at least kept the flies off. The butcher also supplied ha'penny ‘ducks': pieces of chopped liver and other intestines stewed in a seasoned gravy. These arrived as a dark, not-quite-solid rectangle faintly quivering on a tray, and were cut into wedges by Betsy, a task she accomplished while holding her breath. (My great-grandma might sell ‘ducks', but she couldn't bring herself to eat one.) As with the relishes and boiled ham, bacon was usually destined for the man of the house, his wife and children making do with bread and dip: the fat that had fried the bacon, mopped up with a slice of bread.

The women of Wheeldon Mill were Betsy's chief customers,
their purchases revealing both the pattern and the detail of their lives, their days determined by the occupations of husbands and sons. The majority of the men were manual labourers, many employed as miners. Mining accounted for the largest portion of Chesterfield's workforce, but there was also a whole vocabulary of skilled and unskilled foundry men, plus general labourers, railwaymen and brickies. Whatever their occupation, the result was the same: most of the men were engaged in filthy work; collar-andtie chaps were the exception.

Wives fought a constant battle against dirt, not just the dirt in poorly ventilated houses but the muck their men brought home. Betsy's stock described their unequal struggle. Borax, Rub-a-Dub, Dolly Blue, Carbosil, Fairy Flakes, Sunlight Soap, Reckitt's Blue, Robin Starch, Persil – she sold every brand of laundry soap and washing soda you could think of, plus donkey stone for whitening sills and doorsteps, and peggy legs for pummelling wet clothes.

Coal dust was particularly pernicious. These were the days well before pithead baths, when men came straight from the mine. There was kettle after kettle of hot water to boil and heavy clothes to dry for the next day. Even the moleskin trousers miners wore were stiff with perspiration by the close of a long shift, sweat and dust intermingling, each rearrangement of their steaming bulk, as they dried before the fire, releasing further coal dust into the room. It was impossible to keep a baby clean with a collier in the house and, no matter how hard you scrubbed them, there was no such thing as clean sheets. Coal dust ground its way into the very grain of the cloth.

Colliers' wives were as wedded to the pit as their menfolk, the timing of colliery shifts setting the rhythm of domestic life: one steel cage descending as another ascended towards daylight, with
the expectation of hot water at the ready and the stew pan simmering nicely regardless of the hour. Those with husbands and sons working opposite shifts could be on their feet from dawn till nightfall, a coat pulled over their nightdress at both ends of the day when they stumbled out of bed to stoke the fire.

Betsy's neighbour Nora Parks had four sons follow their father down the pit. Five loads of pit clothes to darn, wash and dry; five colliers working a mix of shifts, five men requiring hot baths and food; Nora sluicing water into the tub (and out again, once the bathers were through), her skirt and apron splashed with filthy water, perspiration running down her face; the whole room steaming and condensation puddling on the sills. If they were in from school, her daughters Lil and Edna were called upon to swill their brothers' backs, in anticipation of a future like their mother's.

In the early years of the corner shop, at least until the First World War, most wages kept purchasing to a minimum: 3s 3d was the going daily rate for a foundry labourer, while skilled foundry-men might earn the same as a curate or junior clerk. In 1906, the average coalface worker earned £112 a year, approximately £2 a week, though there were frequent slips and stoppages. The majority of shopping lists varied little from one week to the next. Requests for two ounces – of cheese, butter or flour – were commonplace: most customers bought food in small quantities. Many women shopped daily, especially those whose husbands were paid by the day. Weekly wages were easier to manage, but with basic foodstuffs sold loose and weighed out by hand, it was easy for Betsy to adjust quantities to reflect people's needs, or, rather, their purses. ‘Just do me that corner of hazlett, Mrs Nash, and a mouse-size piece of cheese.'

Trade was conducted in pennies and halfpennies more often
than shillings; a half sovereign was something to change down into more useful coinage. You could buy a surprising amount with small coins: a quartern loaf cost approximately 6d, a pound of tea one shilling; a halfpenny could buy quite a lot. Even so, it was impossible to run a corner shop without offering credit; several neighbours relied on tick by the end of the week. But there was nearly always someone willing to risk a little splurge and, for the better-off, temptation came round each Saturday in the form of the few iced fancies Betsy displayed on a tray.

Inevitably, those in straitened circumstances made more of an impression on my great-grandma. Hunger presented a needier face at the shop door, often a woman with young children, like Florrie Stokes. Florrie's daughter, Ethel, ran errands whenever she could, which brought in the odd ha'penny, but the only wage coming into the house was her husband's and him too lippy to keep any job long: a short spell as a hewer, a stint of labouring here and there, some fetching and carrying, while Florrie struggled to raise a family of six. ‘You wouldn't believe it, Mrs Nash,' she said, ‘but my long hair,' (now scrunched into a bun) ‘was once as bright as a new thrupenny bit.'

Several neighbours had to fend for lodgers as well as husbands and sons: young men squeezing into rooms whose table could scarcely accommodate a growing family, let alone another pair of elbows. One lodger after another (and sometimes more than one at once); a nephew or other relative, perhaps; a stranger, quite often; someone sharing the same shift as husband or son (and complicating matters even further, if not). There was talk of lodgers breaking up families – and probably some did – but a boarder whose inky bathwater you threw across the yard and whose chamber pot you emptied soon took the shine off temptation.