A 1960's Childhood in Northampton - Part One The Shop

I grew up in 1960's Northampton, at a time when the world was changing very quickly. My grandma was my link to the past, while my parents were forward looking and full of life.

When I was little I used to take a deep breath, close my eyes tightly and almost explode with the effort of forcing a wish to become reality. I gave up on wishes long ago or perhaps they gave up on me, who knows. My childhood is now a distant memory, but if I try very hard I can reach back to the extreme edge of my memory and grasp tiny fragments of my early life. They are not static memories like fading photos shut away in an album; they are more like lost fragments of video, a tantalizing glimpse through the window of time.

St James Road, Northampton.

My first home was above my parent’s Newsagent shop and many of my earliest memories are centred on the shop. My father had big plans for his business and, while I was still tiny, the shop was extended and a modern glass frontage proclaimed that this was a main road business, not a little back street shop. The tiled floor in a light grey provided a playground for me. I had to avoid stepping on the lines between the tiles because of some long forgotten childish superstition. I could hop or jump from one tile to the next or I could walk importantly with my hands behind my back as my grandma did when she was helping a customer to choose a greetings card.

The shop had a long counter; there was room on the part nearest the till to display all the daily papers, then in the afternoon, the Chronicle and Echo (our local evening paper) would take their place. Back then, my parents still had delivery rounds, so the papers would be marked up for each route and put in large shoulder bags ready for the paper boys to deliver- they were mostly boys in those days. I rarely saw the morning paper boys because they had to complete their rounds before going to school and I wasn’t usually in the shop at that time, but I got to know the evening paper boys. My favourite was a boy called Martin who lived in Althorp Road; he was gentle and friendly with a lovely Irish accent. He must have been used to young children because he had several siblings and he used to tell me all sorts of stories about them.

The rest of the counter was tilted at quite a steep angle with glass divisions to display sweets and chocolates. I could not see over the counter until I was older but there was plenty to interest me behind the counter. There was a section with cigarettes and cigars on display but I didn’t pay much attention to them; it was a different world back then, smoking was accepted, but my parents did not smoke and they brought me up with the very clear message that smoking was ‘not nice’. I have never smoked a cigarette in my life. The jars of sweets were much more interesting to me, as it seemed as if the shelving and the jars stretched all the way up to the ceiling. There were sweets of every kind and when a customer requested a quarter of sweets the jar would be taken down and the sweets would be tipped carefully into the shiny silver scoop on the big white scales. Then the sweets were tipped from the scoop into a paper bag and the corners were twisted to seal the bag. My favourites were Callard and Bowsers blackcurrant and liquorice sweets, I loved the smooth hard outer shell which tasted of blackcurrant but best of all was the softer liquorice flavoured filling. Sugared almonds were another favourite and I liked liquorice toffees too.

Jack and Jill comic

Beyond the counter there was a big display of magazines. I was too small to see the higher shelves, but the comics attracted my attention because they were at my eye level.  Every week my father bought me a couple of comics; Teddy Bear, Jack and Jill and Playhour were among my favourites. I loved the pictures and the characters became familiar friends; my favourites were Harold Hare and Katie Country Mouse. My grandma sometimes bought me a comic called Sunny Stories, it was the only comic that I actively disliked. I thought it was boring, it didn’t interest me at all. As I grew up I moved on to Twinkle, Treasure and Beezer, then a new comic called Cor came out; I was a fan from the very first issue. I was never very interested in Bunty and the like- I was too much of a tomboy to be interested in stories for girls. I read Look-in occasionally but by then I had moved on to Pony magazine. I must have been about 11 when I discovered teenage magazines; my favourites were Fab 208 and Jackie. Almost every girl I knew read Jackie, we read it from cover to cover and it remained essential reading until the end of my school days. I was a newsagent’s daughter; newsprint rubbed off on me and I have never lost my passion for books and magazines.

Britains catalogue 1967

The front of the counter below the newspapers and chocolate was a glass fronted display cabinet. Inside were rows and rows of Britains toys, cowboys, Native Americans (Red Indians as we called them in those days), wigwams, totem poles, soldiers of every imaginable kind, knights on horseback, knights in armour, farm animals, farm vehicles and machinery, horses, zoo animals, fencing, trees and gardens. It was just the right height for me to stand and look at all wonderful things and to hope that one day I would have my own Britain’s farm. My wish came true, I had a farm and a garden and they were among my best loved toys. Sometimes when the shop was closed, my parents opened the display cabinet and allowed me to replenish the stock, my little hands were small enough to reach in and line up all the different figures without knocking anything over.       

                                             

Beyond the large display of cards at the far end of the shop was my favourite area, the toy section. I was forbidden to touch, but I could look at the beautiful Wendy Boston bears gazing out from their display boxes. High above me tricycles, scooters and dolls prams were displayed where eager little fingers could not reach them. There were dolls large and small, dressed and undressed; baby dolls, teenage dolls, talking dolls, walking dolls, even dolls that wouldn’t eat their greens! There were tea sets and printing sets, sewing cards and fuzzy felts. Matchbox cars, Corgi and Dinky toys, Airfix models and Action Man figures were there to tempt little boys of all ages. There were all sorts of games from the tried and trusted snakes and ladders, flounders and tidily winks, to the new and extremely popular Mouse Trap.

We sold ‘pocket money toys’ too, there were lots to choose from, including card games, planes made from balsa wood, dolls bottles with milk that disappeared when you tilted the bottle, little tea sets, puzzles of various kinds and many other things that I have forgotten. My favourite was a small box of rigid plastic body parts, it was called a Potato Man, but you had to find a real potato and fix the body parts to it to make the potato man. It was fun while it lasted but the rigid plastic parts broke too easily. I liked the colouring books and sticker books (in those days we had to lick the back of the stickers in the same way that we used to lick stamps). The magic painting books were great fun too and I liked the mystic pencil books, but the doll dressing books didn’t interest me at all.

At that time no one thought that toy guns were unsuitable for little boys, so cork guns, cap guns, and guns in holsters competed for attention alongside bows and arrows and feathered headdresses. The brightly coloured feathers were very attractive to my young eyes and my toy cupboard already contained a rather splendid Red Indian headdress, a bow and arrow and a cork gun that made a rather satisfying popping noise when fired. Toys back then still reinforced gender stereotypes and my grandmother, who made disapproval a way of life, tried by fair means and foul to ensure that I had suitable ladylike toys. I always preferred teddy bears to dolls, but soon after I was born Grandma had bought me a soft bodied plastic doll with moulded hair, I called her Elizabeth and she became my favourite. I enjoyed dressing and undressing her and I remember pushing her around in a little red doll’s pram, but my strongest memory is of her doll’s blanket, it had a silky edge which I liked to hold when I went to sleep.

Thankfully, my parents did not share my grandmother’s old fashioned ideas. My mother believed that a woman could do anything better than a man as long as she thought about it first. That attitude made a big impression on me and my mother’s example of strength and determination has given me the courage and confidence to tackle the many challenges of life. Slacks were popular in the sixties and my mum had several pairs, some of which had a little stirrup to hook under the foot. My grandma was outraged and not for the first time she called upon God to support her argument. She seemed to believe that she had a special closeness to God; perhaps having her birthday on Christmas Day gave her ideas above her station! Apparently the Bible says that a woman should not impersonate a man and Grandma insisted that it was therefore wrong for women to wear trousers. She was lost for words when my mum pointed out that in biblical times men did not wear trousers! Poor Grandma, she lived long enough to see the fashion for hot pants arrive, and she was unable to prevent her daughter in law and her young granddaughter from wearing them. I don’t recall her reaction, but I am sure it would have been vocal.

I spent my first six years living in the spacious flat above the shop. When I was born, an extra bedroom was needed, so the flat was extended at around the same time that the shop was modernised. There was a big front room with a bay window which looked down on to St James Road. There was as a deep ledge like a bench below the window and I could sit there and watch the world going by. When I was very young the milkman still had a horse and cart and I loved to watch it go past. On the other side of St James road to the left, I could see Mr Green’s chemist shop, the post office was directly opposite our shop, and then there were a couple of houses to my right before the pub, The West End Tramcar. Mr and Mrs Baker lived in one of those houses. I liked Mr Baker, he and his little dog came into the shop to buy newspapers and he always let me pet the dog.  Big red buses stopped almost outside our shop on their way into town so I could look down at the people waiting at the bus stop. We had a car, but I sometimes caught the bus into town with my mum when she was going to have her hair done at John London (it was above a shop in the Drapery and it was accessed from a Jitty leading from the Drapery to College Street). 

St James Primary School in background

There was a hall between the front room and the dining room, on one side there was a door where the original stairs from the shop once led up to the flat, but after the alterations it was just a cupboard. Next to that were the stairs that led up to the bedrooms with the bathroom on the opposite side. The dining room was comfortable room with a window that looked out at St James Church tower; that view became almost as familiar to me as looking in the mirror. The kitchen window looked out across our little roof garden and across the back of the houses in Althorp Road in the direction of Victoria Park. When I was out playing on the flat roof I could hear the happy hubbub of playground noises and I could look over and see the children in the playground at St James School. My bedroom also looked out across the rooftops at the back, but it was the sounds that I loved rather than the view- we were close enough to Castle Station to hear the trains and at night when I went to bed, I listened to the familiar railway sounds.  There was a fireplace in my bedroom but I don’t remember ever having an open fire in my room, we had night storage heaters and I don’t remember ever feeling cold.

My world was limited by the main road; I rarely crossed the road except to go to the chemist with my mum, to go to Sunday School at Harlestone Road Methodist Church or to accompany one of my parents on a paper round if one of the paper boys didn’t turn up.  I was more familiar with the roads on our side of the main road. I would often go with my Grandma to Strikes the greengrocers on Harlestone Road close to the Mettoy factory. We would sometimes call in to the butcher’s shop around the corner in Althorpe Road, I think it was called Vickers, and occasionally we would go to Worthingtons to buy one or two grocery items. We had meat delivered every week from Askew’s in Clare Street and I think we must have had groceries delivered too, we certainly didn’t go to the supermarket.

My father rented a garage in Orchard Street from a man called Fred Richardson. I often used to walk round to the garage with my dad to get the car. The outer doors to the garage led under an archway which had a building above it. Beyond the archway to the right steps led up to a door which I think was Mr Richardson’s workshop; in front of us was an open yard and across the yard were a couple of garages, ours was on the left hand side. We had a big white Chrysler with a bench seat at the front, so I usually sat between my parents when we went out in the car.

My parents took me to the library to choose new books every week. In those early days I didn’t know how lucky I was to live right next door to St James Library. It didn’t look like a library from the outside, all you could see was a tall heavy door, but beyond the doors a flight of stairs led up to the library. When you pushed open the door at the top of the stairs you were greeted by a comfortable hush and the special library smell of wood and polish and books. The librarian was a lady called Anne Norman who always wore her hair up in a severe style, but she had a ready smile and a sense of fun; I liked her and I liked the library. I was very attached to my old favourites and I took the same books home over and over again. Best of all were the Bobby Brewster books, about a young boy who had unusual adventures. My parents must have dreaded yet another evening with Bobby Brewster, but they read the stories with enthusiasm and I loved that warm feeling of cuddling up next to them with a favourite book.

I loved to be taken to Victoria Park by my grandma or my dad- oddly, I don’t remember going to the park with my mum. We walked along Althorp Road to get to the park; on a corner, not far from the park, was a little shop that belonged to Mrs Hodges. She sold newspapers too and we would often stop and have a little chat with her. When we got to the park, my favourite spot was not the playground or the lovely little stream with stepping stones- it was the special high bench in the far corner of the park. The bench enabled me to look across the river to the railway line, and I would sit there for ages watching trains. In those days, there was much more traffic on the line- a child doing the same thing today would die of boredom! Steam was already a rarity by then, but I was just as happy to watch what my dad called the 'smelly old diesels'. I liked them, and even as a little girl I was fascinated by freight trains. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, I used to walk across Westbridge on the way to my aunt's house in Albion Place. She would let me scramble up and look down over the wall at the station below, as there was always something to see- I loved the sounds and the smells of the railway. I still do, but the smells have more or less gone and the sounds are different now.