Open Writing

My Aunt Nel had a shop very like the one in ‘Open All Hours.’ It was in a back street not far from the centre of Birmingham. It was surrounded by drab streets of little houses, in which lived the workmen who filled the local factories. The shop itself was in the middle of a long terrace and must have been built as a shop because it was much bigger than the others in the terrace, being double fronted. There were two display windows with the door in the centre. I don’t think the displays were changed from one year to the next.

As a five-year-old the door fascinated me because it had a bell which jangled loudly every time it was opened. If I could escape my mother’s eagle eye, I would dash to the door and pull it open to see how long the bell would jangle.

In the shop there was an L-shaped counter with openings at either end. In the centre of the wall behind the counter a curtained door led into the living quarters at the back. This sitting room was lit by a coal fire which I never saw out, either in winter of summer. When I first visited Aunt Nel both the back room and the shop were lit by gas lamps which cast a warm yellow glow over everything in contrast to the brighter, harsher electric light of later days.

In the shop Aunt Nel sold everything. On the left as you went in on the shorter length of the L she had newspapers, cigarettes, tobacco and pipes. In those days quite a few men chewed tobacco, especially those whose work did not permit smoking. She had two or three kinds of chewing tobacco which the men used to slice off the block with special little knives. First on the long side of the L came the sweets, laid out on the counter in boxes and jars. Then came the groceries. Finally everything else that people might need: combs, curlers, soap, hairpins, wool, needles, shoe laces and a host of other things.

I don’t know how she managed it, but she was really open all the time. Uncle Harry, her husband, worked in one of the local factories and used to set off for work at just before seven o’clock every day, but Aunt Nel was up much before that. Her first job was to collect the morning papers. I don’t think she used to sell many, as her working customers tended to read the ‘Birmingham Mail,’ an evening paper, when they got home from work. Her main early morning trade was tobacco and cigarettes.

During the day people dropped in constantly in a never-ending trickle to buy a ha’p’orth of this or a penn’orth of that. She did not lock the door until she was certain that there would be no more customers, usually about ten o’clock at night. In the years up to the war she never took a holiday, and the only time I know that she closed was to visit her son in hospital after he had had a bad accident on his motorbike.

Aunt Nel was one of my father’s older sisters, and she got on well with my mother, who used to visit her once a month to pay back the debt that never was. So as a young boy I had plenty of chances to visit and explore Aunt Nel’s shop.

She always found it very difficult to say “No” to the various commercial travellers who visited her. I am sure she had the reputation of being a soft touch. Over the years the two back cellars (the front one was full of coal) and her attics filled up with unsaleable goods which she had either bought on impulse or had overstocked. To me as a young boy it was like being in Aladdin’s cave.

During the war Aunt Nel came into her own. Everything was in short supply, and the useless stock in the cellars and attics became attractive and sold at greatly inflated prices. Anyone in the neighbourhood who wanted things unobtainable elsewhere made their way to this little huckster’s shop. By the late forties Aunt Nel, who had never had two halfpennies to rub together, was a comparatively wealthy woman.

Unfortunately, she did not live long enough to enjoy it. She died in 1949. To me as a child she had always been an old woman. I remember her as a small, skinny, bent woman with thin, wispy, white hair. Working it out now, as she was born in 1888, she was barely sixty when she died. Possibly worn out by constant hard work.

John Ricketts