Mason Perry; the case of the Family Brick

Prominent sweetshop

Minus one sweetshop

Same view in 2011

E Gamble

Family correspondence, colour coded,  from Christmas 2015.

See the old sweet shop, later compulsorily purchased and knocked down to make way for the redeveloped Victoria House Corner.

Challenge:   Here’s a nostalgic picture to ponder! Alf’s Greengrocers is just out of sight, I think, (but I can smell the beetroots cooking). You can make out the butchers though (but not his name), Phelps the Chemist and Perry’s Newsagents. Spar had a shop along here (‘Doris’) and there was the Wool Shop (run by a delightful Salvation Army couple), just before Rourkes (white goods, electrical and TV rental) and Allen’s Hardware. 

Response:   “Ah yes, I remember a toy shop on the corner. The woman that worked in there looked like Ruth Maddox. All the toys were cheap plastic. I bought a little car that quickly fell apart and Dad sang me a song:
“This is my story, this is my song;  never buy toys, that are made in Hong Kong.
It has prejudiced me ever since.”

Mum would send me round to Alf’s for a pound of greens… what on earth were greens? Cabbage?   When I was about 5 or 6 years old I had a police uniform costume and outside the Spa Grocers a man asked me for directions. I hadn’t got the foggiest clue what he was on about or why he should be asking me… how prophetic.

I do remember Doris, and Alf, and Mr Phelps.

Not a toy shop, it was a tobacconists, compulsorily purchased and demolished when they built the roundabout. Better looking than Ruth Maddox but same box of Betty Boo make-up: she was (I strongly suspected) rather shop-soiled and with an intolerance of impecunious children. The building was very old, jerry-built and dimly lit.When I asked her if she sold chocolate (on her very high counter) she snorted, “What do you think all this is, Scotch Mist?!”
I much preferred Mr & Mrs Mason, at Perrys where, sometimes on a Sunday lunchtime (near the beginning of the month), I was sent round for a Walls ‘Family Brick’ from their freezer. Vanilla or Neapolitan. It was sold wrapped up in newspaper, for insulation, and would cut up into seven equal slices to accompany a large tin of peaches. Masons… Perrys — the quirkiness of this juxtaposition never struck me till many years later.

“Spring greens” is a heartless winter cabbage – dark green and folic-flavoured and, if purchased from chain-smoking Alf, invariably rather tired and frost-bitten limp, and sometimes muddy. Out of fashion now — we just import prettier stuff from warmer climes. He sold two varieties of unwashed potatoes straight into your basket from a sack – King Edwards and Whites, sometimes as cheap as a tuppence a pound. ‘Rabbit’ had the peelings boiled with the dirt and stiffened with bran – it smelled beautiful and Rabbit used to burn his tongue on it, in his impatient eagerness. 

I don’t recollect your policeman uniform: that’s a bit weird. It was a portent of a lifetime spent confusing people with dubious directions.    I remember the Hong Kong Song though, sung to Fanny Crosby’s tune, “Blessed Assurance”.

I’ve added another picture, taken a year or so later, after the Sweet Shop had been adiosed.

{Ed:  and then the colour view from 2011.}