16 Twydall Shops

‘Gerard, I want you to go on an errand. Get me five pound of potatoes from the greengrocers, will you?’

I didn’t always go willingly to the shops, especially at teatime when the telly programmes were about to begin. I might have grumbled, or suggested our Dave was old enough to take a turn, but it didn’t alter the outcome. 

‘Okay Mam.’

‘I’ll have to give you a pound note.’

With Mam’s best holdall I set off, keeping a tight grip on the pound note, which I gripped even tighter as I turned onto Goudhurst Road from Minster Road. There, I’d once had the misfortune to drop two half crowns that rolled off the kerb together and plopped into a drain.

~

At eight years old I knew all the shops on Twydall Green; the one’s that mattered, anyway.

Between the Royal Engineer pub and the little hardware shop was a plot of wasteland. Eventually a supermarket would cover the site but back then it was just a well worn short cut. 

On that side of Twydall Green the first shop of significance, to me, was the International Stores, where Mam bought her weekly groceries and where I ran the odd errand for packets of tea, butter and such.

After the International Stores came a shop dear to many a kid with just a few pennies to spend – Forbuoys Newsagent sold sweets and comics, and displayed a few cheap toys in the window. The stuff they threw out was worth scavenging through too, as my brothers and I discovered on the day we saw a heap of rubbish piled high on the pavement at the rear of the shop. Amidst a clutter of boxes and other junk we found a 1lb box of Cadburys Milk Tray.

‘Hoora -y-euk!’

Display chocolates, made of rubber; we learned when we bit into them.

A penny bought four chews, black jacks or fruit salads. Tuppence bought a packet of sweet cigarettes or a small, thin bar of Cadbury’s. Thruppence bought a Beano or a Dandy, a sherbet dab, a small Toffo or a packet of Spangles. Fourpence bought either a small Fudge bar or a small Flake, or a Beezer or Topper – comics the size of a large newspaper.

Woolworths: suppliers of plastic sandals, baseball boots, snake belts, loose broken biscuits and a grand pic’n’mix selection. The bargain bins were worth a look too, as I discovered on the occasion I picked up an Alamo souvenir brochure for a tanner.

After Woolworth’s came Bourne’s bakers, a place I visited when Mam needed a medium sliced loaf and a large uncut.

At the top of the block was Cross’s butchers, one of three butchers on Twydall Green. Besides being the handiest for us, their policy of giving sweets to the kids (usually a black jack or fruit salad) guaranteed our loyalty and made the wait for a pound of sausages more bearable when joining a queue at the door to shuffle around in the sawdust.

Across Twydall Lane on the corner of Staplehurst Road was Doctor Ashford’s surgery. Good old Doctor Ashford, a portly man that I’d held in high regard since the day he paid my brothers and me a home visit and declared our measles contagious enough to keep us off school for a few days.

Coming down from Staplehurst Road, on the other side of Twydall Green, the chip shop and the library were of some interest to me, but the biggest attraction of all was tucked away in the bottom corner; Arnold’s sold bicycles and scooters and almost every toy in creation, piled on racks as high as the ceiling. So what if my most expensive purchase was a sixpenny swoppet, so called because the parts were interchangeable.

Paul Parker: “The owner must have spent a fortune on stock! I remember you would go in the front where you were confronted with bicycles before turning right by the sales counter. This is where the soldiers, cowboys etc were kept. If you kept going right and bore left slightly you came to where all the cheap Airfix models were. They used to be in plastic bags in those days and left hanging up. Just before then, however, was a passageway through an Aladdin’s cave of magnificently boxed model aeroplanes, ships, figures, etc.  Many a time I lost myself in there!”

Outside of Christmas or my birthday I had little chance of owning anything upwards of 3s 11d but, like many others, I did my share of daydreaming at the window.

Not so much at the side window, perhaps, as behind me in that same passageway the child mannequins in the wool shop window gave me the heebie jeebies once I got it into my head they'd once been naughty children.

At the greengrocers, a few strides from Arnold’s in the direction of the Copper Kettle, I wrestled with a problem as I waited for service in a square littered with cabbage leaves, surrounded by crates of loose fruit and vegetables. How could I buy five pound of potatoes with only a pound note? Mam had made a mistake, surely. Not wishing to appear foolish, I bought a pound of potatoes and got halfway to the door before a lady called me back to receive change I wasn’t expecting. Confused, I went home, leaving the shops by the ramp outside the Copper Kettle, in preference to the steps by the ladies toilets which, for some reason, always reeked of piss. One day I’d drop over the wall like the big kids did. Till then, I could only watch with envy.