MORNING SERIAL

REES’ Chemist, however, came close with its Victorian mahogany counter and shelves and its ranks of shining apothecary jars full of mysterious substances and with (deliberately) indecipherable labels: POTASS:CARB:, CALC:CHLORID:, UNC:SULPH.

If my mother had a prescription to cash, I’d wait impatiently amidst the smell of Germolene ointment and liniment rub, nagging my mother for a penny to put in the machine that you could weigh yourself on, or for a ‘glucose’ lolly, which, since they were sold in a chemist’s shop, must surely have been good for me.

I can still feel the thrill of trying on my first pair of black slip-on daps for school in the shoe shop near Smyrna chapel and how I sniffed their heady smell of adhesive and brand new rubber in their brand new box, lined with tissue paper. The box was almost as exciting a prospect as the daps themselves, and before we had left the shop, I had already planned in my mind’s eye the toy garage I would make from it to house my Dinky car collection.

Just opposite was Hughes’ Newsagent (‘Hughes the News’, inevitably enough). This was run by my adult cousin, another Trevor, and his wife. Thrillingly this was the only shop in the village that sold two precious commodities: Airfix models and, between hard covers, abridged versions of children’s classics.

Just occasionally, I might manage to lay my hands on a 1:72 scale Spitfire or Messerschmitt Bf 109 which I’d painstakingly construct at our kitchen table with a tube of gloriously fragrant polystyrene cement and tiny tins of enamel paint smelling every bit as good as the glue. It was at Trevor’s shop that I took possession of my first ‘proper’ book and I read and reread that abridged version of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea until I had memorised long passages of it.

Down the road next to Berni’s, there was a gas showroom which did good business as more and more people fitted gas cookers and fires to replace their coal ones.