INTRODUCTION
Dedication
Foreword
The shops
Money in Witham, 1910-1939

THE QUOTATIONS
The day begins
Supplying the shops
Hard work
Delivery
Customers (1)
Customers (2)
Other ways of shopping
The end of the day

The end of the day

In those days it was a regular Saturday night affair to go out shopping - the shops'd keep open till about eight - most people'd go out after they got paid, I suppose - do it Saturday evenings.

I used to take stock of that every Saturday night - sugar - we all had something we used to take stock of - of course we didn't get finished till ten o'clock at night . . Some of it was in sacks, you see, so that was in hundredweights, but you had to count all the loose stuff up, and work that down into hundredweights as well. Some done fruit, some done jams and marmalades, some done biscuits, see everybody had their own job that they used to do every Saturday night. And the men on the other side used to weigh all the bacon and that sort of stuff.

We'd be open till seven or eight. Gradually towards the latter part of the time they used to close a little bit earlier, but at one time they used to be open till eight or nine at night on a Saturday . . And we used to kill by candlelight in the winter time. Christmas time the whole family, or us elder boys anyway, used to be enlisted to hold candles so that they could see to skin the beasts as they were being slaughtered and dressed - very often I've been holding a candle there twelve o'clock at night when they were killing the Christmas beef.

I used to wait for my father to come home off his round, after I'd done my round on a Saturday afternoon - I'd wait for my father to come home, and when we came home I would take his horse and feed and water it. If it was summer time I'd bring it up here and turn it out into the field, and many the time I've been walking past the Church clock at twelve o'clock at night.