CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Roy the Greengrocer

Our shop was called Roy’s High Class Fruiterer and Greengrocer. My father obtained his stock not only from wholesalers but also from private growers and Jean and I often used to accompany him when he drove into the countryside to buy produce from market gardeners. In those early days, when he was fired with enthusiasm, he would even drive all the way to Penzance to meet the ferry, The Scillonian, which brought passengers and produce from the Isles of Scilly to the mainland. Sometimes, elderly gentlemen would call into the shop with vegetables of prize-winning quality they’d grown themselves and, with modest pride, offer them for sale. Occasionally, they brought flowers and I can remember once opening a box in which, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, were the most beautiful ranunculus flowers, themselves not unlike tissue paper, in an array of the loveliest rainbow colours. In Cornwall, when I was a girl, fields and fields of brightly coloured anemones were a common sight and when they were in season, our shop was full of the bunched, tightly budded flowers. They are seldom seen these days and probably never will again be grown in the same profusion because they were attacked by a devastating virus and growers replaced them with daffodils. My father sometimes acquired stock cheaply because it was not fresh and often, when a customer came into the shop asking for a lettuce, he’d say:
‘Hang on a moment - I’ve got some growing out the back so I’ll just go and cut you one.’
In the yard he had a bucket of water in which he kept a supply of none-too-fresh lettuces and, having selected one which wasn’t too far gone, he’d pull off the browning outer leaves and cut a slice from the stem. Then he’d take the lettuce to the customer and say:
‘You can always tell when a lettuce is freshly picked because the stem is nice and white, like this one.’
He had nicknames, most of which were very silly, for all his regular customers. For instance, there was Fur-Cuffs, a woman who wore a fur-trimmed coat; then there was Flop-Out, whose décolleté , however inclement the weather, displayed an ample bosom; Slimcea, whom he named after the low-calorie bread, was a woman of enormous proportions while Promiscuous had an inordinate number of children of dubious paternity. Nut-Case, an ageing widow, was in the habit of donning her best finery on fine, Sunday afternoons and, with erect back and swinging arms, would stride around Castle Drive - monkey parading, my father called it. She favoured full skirts in bold prints of loud colours and fitted, white blouses worn with a wide belt. She was very tall and with her dyed black hair, painted red lips, rouged cheeks and mannish gait she looked so much like a not-very-successful transvestite that passing motorists used to stare in astonishment. There was also The Ginger Tart, a divorceé who had once propositioned him when he’d been to her house to deliver her order of fruit and vegetables. She was wearing a loose robe which, when he stepped into the hall, she opened to reveal the fact that she was totally naked underneath.
‘What do you think of this?’ she asked him.
If my mother had ever found out about that encounter, there is no telling what might have happened.
When the shop was well-stocked it looked fresh, bright and colourful; if, however, my father was hard-up and couldn’t afford new stock it looked dingy and depressing. There was quite a lot of space to fill so he thought it would be a good opportunity to indulge one of his interests and keep tropical fish. The tanks were large but he couldn’t afford to buy all his fish at once and so Jean and I were sent every so often to buy them in twos or threes from the aquarium on Falmouth’s Customs House Quay. He wasn’t allowed to go there himself because my mother had accused him of taking too much interest in the woman - that tart with half Timothy White’s on her face - who sold the fish. When he had the cash to purchase new specimens he’d say to us:
‘Go and get us a Siamese fighting fish, will you?’ or:
‘Get us half a dozen guppies and a couple of kissing gouramis, will you?’
He was very fond of his fish and on one occasion, when he hadn’t been able to afford to pay the electricity bill and our supply was consequently disconnected, he sat huddled in a corner of the shop, head in hands and brow deeply furrowed, racking his brains to try to think of a way to fiddle the meter and restore the electricity before the water in the tanks started to cool.
‘Go away and leave me alone!’ he’d groan if anyone tried to speak to him.
In the shop he kept a barrel of vinegar which he used both for the pickling of onions and for selling to customers. Later, he obtained another, identical barrel but this one contained sweet sherry from which he regularly fortified himself with a surreptitious nip. He told my mother that the second barrel was full of vinegar, too, and, curiously, she believed him; in fact, I don’t think she ever discovered his secret although he lived in perpetual terror that she might unwittingly serve a customer with sherry instead of vinegar. He would sit in his corner sipping sherry and peeling shallots with the same grimy penknife he used for removing dirt from his fingernails and cutting lettuces: Roy’s pickled onions were very popular with the customers and at Christmas the shelves groaned under the weight of all the jars he had filled. Once, during a particularly acrimonious argument, my mother hurled one of the jars of onions at him; it was a particularly large jar and as it broke, onions and vinegar flew in all directions. It took many weeks for the smell to disappear. During slack periods he would sit reading from one of the volumes of the complete works of Dickens which he kept in the back of the shop and he often bemused customers by quoting passages or referring to characters from the novels. He had a subtle sense of humour but, like the literary quotations, his jokes went over the heads of most of his clientele.
Not infrequently, representatives of insurance firms or other, similar concerns would come into the shop trying to sell him policies and he always had difficulty turning them down. He was even persuaded to suscribe to a funeral expenses fund ( he called it his ‘coffin money’ ) which was collected every month by a shifty-looking old man who bore a disturbing resemblance to Fagin. He was also unable to resist buying goods, particularly watches, from itinerant traders. Indeed, word must have spread far and wide because, before very long, he was invaded on a regular basis by swarthy, mysterious-looking men speaking in rapid, unintelligible, alien tongues, selling an assortment of dubious merchandise. Whenever charity collectors ( he called them ‘tin rattlers’ ) came through the door he would groan and, if he could, make a hasty disappearance.
My mother accepted her share of the work involved in the running of the shop with very poor grace. The Cornish dislike those who boast almost as much as they dislike those who criticise and since she was in the habit of doing both, it was inevitable that she would make enemies. Once, a woman came into the shop when she was serving and asked for a turnip. When she replied that they didn’t have any, the customer could hardly believe it because in Cornwall the turnip - or, to be exact, swede - is an essential ingredient of the pasty and so to a Cornish person a greengrocer’s without turnips is as scandalous as a pub with no beer. My mother quelled the poor woman’s protests with one of her crushing retorts:
‘Where I come from,’ she said, coldly, ‘they feed them to the cattle.’
Amongst my father’s regular customers was a Cockney couple, both of whom were very much of the ‘you don’t want to do it like that!’ ilk, and since my mother disliked intensely anyone she considered a ‘know-all’, she made no pretence of concealing her contempt for them. However, being Londoners, they were impervious to her derogatory remarks and withering scorn and seemed to enjoy taunting her. The subject of shoe sizes came up one day and, staring pointedly at my mother’s feet, the woman said:
‘In my day, if you took more than a size two you were considered a clumsy cow.’
At this, my mother, who was a size five, could only seethe with tight-lipped fury.
Because the shop was ‘open all hours’ my parents took their meals in shifts. My mother would have hers first then stomp into the shop with an ungracious:
‘Do you want this or not?’
That signified that his was on the table. He suffered badly from indigestion and would often send Jean or me to the chemist’s for slippery elm or other, old-fashioned remedies: he knew he would get little sympathy from our mother so he never consulted her. It was shortly after we moved into the house in Killigrew Road that they finally stopped sharing a bed and although she blamed it on his snoring, I think the truth was that she just couldn’t stand him being near her any more. In winter, in order to warm his bed, he made himself a most bizarre and dangerous contraption. He obtained from the chemist’s a large, flat, lozenge-shaped tin that had once contained the vile-tasting Hack’s lozenges which, in those days, tended to be favoured by heavy smokers for the relief of their coughs. The tin was just wide enough to accommodate a low-watt light bulb and this homemade bed-warmer produced such a great deal of heat that every night the smell of scorching sheets would pervade the house and on several occasions the bed nearly went up in flames.
As well as mice, my sister and I had acquired a pair of rabbits. Very soon, they had babies which were so enchanting that we promptly went to buy another pair of a different variety. These, too, very soon produced young and before long we found, like the mice, that we had a great many rabbits. There were black ones, white ones, brown-eared ones and mixed ones and because we didn’t have enough hutches to contain them all, we let them loose in the garden where, as free-range rabbits, they existed very happily. Often, our father used to open the door at the back of the shop and call:
‘Come on! Come on!’
and the rabbits would come hopping down the steps into the yard for tit-bits. One day, a cutomer saw one of them actually inside the shop.
‘Mr. Walker!’ she shrieked, ‘There’s a rabbit in the shop!’
Their mating habits were nocturnal and their favoured place for this very noisy operation was in the back yard directly under the window of our father’s bedroom. Fed up with disturbed nights, he devised a means of frightening them away. Using a long piece of string, he joined together a number of empty tin cans which he hung out of the window. When he got into bed at night, he attatched the end of the string to his big toe so that when the rabbits began their mating activities all he had to do was wriggle his foot and the rattling of the cans would scare them away. When the rabbits began to make burrows in the garden and our mother found herself disappearing down holes every time she hung out the washing, she declared that enough was enough and the rabbits would have to go. Regretfully, Jean and I had no choice but to give all of them away to our friends.

After the initial burst of enthusiasm, my father lost interest in the shop and although he kept it going for a number of years, he was always in debt and bailiffs called on a regular basis. He could not afford to tax or insure his car so that when he went anywhere it had to be by way of what he called his ‘anti-fuzz route’ which included most of the back streets of Falmouth. Every Saturday, my mother did a weekly shop and he would work himself up into a state bordering on panic if the takings were down and he thought he might not be able to give her the housekeeping money. When she was ready to go out, she would fling open the door which separated the living quarters from the shop and demand:
‘I want my money!’
If he wasn’t able to give her the full amount, she would repeat:
‘I want my money! I’ve got to have my money!’
and even though he pulled open the drawers of the till to prove to her that they were empty, still she would insist:
‘! want my money!’
A bitter row would ensue but, eventually, she’d storm out of the shop with whatever he was able to give her and with dark threats as to what would happen if he didn’t come up with the rest by the time she got back.
Before my mother would venture out of the house, a complicated, almost ritualistic, procedure had to be carried out beforehand. Firstly, she would perform a ‘strip wash’ which involved removing all her upper garments and sponging herself down at the kitchen sink. Why she never used the bathroom for this operation, Jean and I could never understand and, strangely, my earliest memory of my mother is of her standing at the kitchen sink stripped to the waist. The second stage of the preparation was the putting on of her newly-acquired rubber girdle, for which she needed the assistance of Jean and me. This was not an easy undertaking because the girdle was extremely tight and the rubber inflexible. Jean would attempt to pull up one side and I the other while simultaneously pushing in bits of bulging flesh. It was very difficult to avoid laughing but we daren’t because she would take offence and say:
‘What’s so bloody funny?’
When at last, after much struggling, broken fingernails and suppressed mirth on our part, the girdle had been fitted, she would go upstairs to sit in front of the dressing table to attend to her face. This would begin with a vigorous patting of the cheeks with the palms of her hands; no doubt she’d read somewhere that doing this was good for the circulation but to us it looked painful, rather like a form of self-chastisement. Next, she would perform extraordinary contortions of the face which involved pursing the lips and stretching the chin as far forward as they would go, like some weird species of deep-sea fish filtering plankton. More face-patting followed, only this time for the application of Nivea cream and powder. Lastly, she would apply a dark red lipstick. We had come to learn that the dark red lipstick was a good sign because it meant that she was in one of her better moods; if, however, she appeared at any time wearing lipstick of a pink shade it meant that she was in a bad mood and we had all better watch out.
Jean and I had come to dread Saturday afternoons because our mother always demanded that one of us should accompany her to help with the shopping. She was so convinced that she was being overcharged that, at the supermarket checkout, queues of impatient customers would form while she insisted on going through every single item on the bill. We would have no choice but to stand and wait, cringing with embarrassment, while she argued. There were a few shops she wouldn’t go to because she’d had a row there and a few more where she was on the point of having a row and we hoped, fervently, that there wouldn’t be an eruption while we were with her. She was always on the lookout for a bargain so, when all the shopping apart from bread and cakes had been purchased, we had to hang about until almost closing time because there was a particular baker who often reduced the price of any remaining stock. She was very fond of cakes but suffered from an allergy to almond essence and this required Jean or me to act as tasters before she could eat any kind of purchased confectionery. If, by any chance, she happened to eat even the smallest morsel of anything containing that flavouring her face would immediately start to swell in a manner which was most alarming and it would remain in that state for several hours; those were the few occasions when we actually felt sorry for her.
The stress of living with my mother for all those years, financial worries and the fact that he was a heavy smoker, took their toll on my father’s health and as well as digestion problems, he also suffered from bouts of bronchitis which were so bad that he would be confined to bed for several days. My mother was not at all sympathetic and complained that not only did she have to mind the shop but also she had to keep running up and down the stairs all day after him. I felt very sorry for him at these times and I was concerned because he was obviously very ill.
‘It’s his own fault,’ my mother would say, ‘smoking that stinking shag all the time.’
He rolled his own cigarettes and ‘stinking shag’ is how she referred to the tobacco he used. Jean and I thought she had a nerve to criticise his smoking habit when she, herself, smoked just as much as he did. He was hardly ever able to relax. He was seldom allowed to go to the pub and if he did, it was usually in the company of Uncle Cliff who favoured dingy establishments in the vicinity of the docks. One of these was a hotel, overlooking the Customs House Quay, which was run by a rather dour old gentleman who had a compulsive habit of pursing his lips and pushing his chin forward in a manner similar to the curious facial contortions which our mother performed as part of her beauty routine. He had a black cat called Tinker who used to sit on the bar and to whom he was devoted; if he made conversation, it was nearly always about what tinker had been getting up to. The lavatory was situated at the end of a dark corridor and was so old that it must have been antique; it had a wide, wooden seat and a long chain which you had to pull several times to make it flush. The guest accommodation was above the bar and the clientele more often than not included adulterous couples. In those days, extra-marital affairs were considered far more scandalous than they are today and a good many boarding establishments tended to be suspicious of couples whom they suspected were not married or conducting affairs. Such was the reputation of this decidedly insalubrious place that it was not uncommon for the proprietor, while he was running the bar, to receive telephone calls from angry husbands or wives trying to locate the whereabouts of their erring spouses.
There was another equally gloomy bar in which Uncle Cliff and Auntie Frances, our parents, Jean and I once saw in the new year; apart from ourselves, the only other patrons were some foreign sailors who spent the entire evening staring, much to my discomfiture, at me. At midnight, they got up from their seats, came over to where we were sitting and each one kissed me solemnly on the cheek. I blushed so much that I think it must have taken some considerable time for my complexion to return to its normal hue. To honour the arrival of a new year, the landlord passed around plates of haggis. Jean turned pale at the sight of it but I took a cautious bite and declared that it was disgusting and smelt of old socks; our mother said, in her opinion, it was off.
The only times my father was able to relax were when my mother went out for the evening. Some time after we’d settled into the house in Killigrew Road she discovered that they held bingo sessions in he crypt of the Catholic Church just down the road and soon became addicted. This gave him the opportunity to settle down in front of the television with his sherry in the knowledge that he had at least a couple of hours respite. Jean and I were usually in our rooms and every so often we would hear him bellowing at the screen. He could not abide female singers in any shape of form and the sound of a woman’s voice in song was torture to his ears. If he was watching a programme and one happened to put in an unwonted appearance he would consider it a monstrous outrage.
‘They’ve worked one in!’ he’d wail. ‘They’ve gone and worked one in!’
On Sunday afternoons he was obliged to take our mother for a drive so that she could ‘get some air.’ She spoke as though she lived in some polluted inner city and we thought it very strange that she should consider herself deprived of ‘air’ considering that we lived in such a clean environment. We generally ended up in the car park of Castle Drive overlooking Falmouth Bay and although she said it was because she liked to look at the view, she seemed to prefer glaring at the other people sitting in their cars.
‘Some people don’t know how to park!’ she’d mouth at them.
In the evening, we were in the habit of visiting Auntie Frances and Uncle Cliff for a game of cards. Jean would sit happily drawing horses and chatting to Auntie while I joined in the rounds of whist or nap. The cards were very old and greasy from so much handling and our mother said that the reason Uncle Cliff refused to play with new ones was because he was an old cheat and that they were all marked. Nevertheless, those evenings, despite the choking atmosphere of cigarette smoke, were enjoyable and at least our father was able to forget his worries for a short while.
He had always enjoyed driving and loved cars, particularly Jaguars; his dream was to win the pools and buy an E-type. During the fifties he’d owned a number of different cars including an Armstrong Siddeley saloon which, I remember, had running boards and another, rather handsome car, a Riley, which I think it must have been quite unusual because it was frequently admired by car enthusiasts; he also became the proud owner of a racy, red, convertible Jaguar which once lost a wheel while we were driving down a hill in Falmouth and, later, another Jaguar, a big, powerful, beast of a thing in which he once touched one hundred miles per hour ( not many cars could do that in those days ). At one time, he’d belonged to the Automobile Association during the days when A.A. mechanics drove around on motor bikes, saluting members; Jean and I always felt very important when our car was acknowledged in this manner. One winter’s evening he showed off by driving on to the beach at Gunwalloe, a deserted and inhospitable place, and promptly became stuck in the sand. After several, futile attempts to reverse the car he realised that there was no alternative but to walk to the nearest farm to see if a tractor was available which would be the only means of towing the car off the beach. Outside, a fierce gale was blowing and driving rain was pelting the windscreen; worse than that, the tide was coming in, fast. Jean, our mother and I were too terrified to remain in the car watching the great, foaming waves rolling in and breaking on the beach, only a few feet from where we were sitting, so we decided it would be better to face the elements and try to seek shelter somewhere. I ran to a telephone kiosk and shut myself in there while they sought refuge in the public conveniences; apart from the church, there appeared to be no other buildings in that bleak and lonely place. After what seemed an eternity, a tractor turned up and with an expertise born of experience ( many a foolhardy motorist had got into the same predicament ) attatched a rope and towed the car away from the incoming tide in the nick of time.

My sister was fond of her father and had a much better relationship with him than I’d ever had. By now, she was a pupil at Clare Terrace School and, under the strict regime of Miss Prince and pressure from our mother to pass the eleven-plus, was suffering the same anxieties as I had. But at least, out of school hours, she had a means of escape because, to Jean, there existed on earth only one thing of importance: the horse. She lived, breathed and had her being in horses and every moment of her spare time was taken up with activities involving them. In our hall, secured to the banisters at the bottom of the stairs, the makeshift saddle she’d made and on which she would spend hours astride, became a permanent fixture. She persuaded our parents to let her have riding lessons and was promised that if she passed her scholarship they would buy her a pony of her own. Our father had a supplier, a local farmer, who owned an old dobbin and for ten shillings he’d allow Jean to ride it. I thought this was an outrageous waste of money and the farmer an old crook. Our Sunday afternoon family outings would, at Jean’s insistence, involve driving into the countryside outside Falmouth laden with bags of fruit and vegetables which were so past their freshness that there was no way they could be sold in order to feed three horses she considered were neglected. Considering the amount of time they took ambling up to the gate and the disinterest with which they regarded our offerings I didn’t think they could be as neglected as she would have had us believe. We had to park by the gate of the field in which they lived and sit patiently in the car while she called:
‘Misty! Fir-cone! Jenny!’
It seemed to me that she knew the name of every single horse within a five-mile radius of Falmouth and her obsession was beginning to get on my nerves.At weekends, I hardly saw anything of her because she was accustomed to getting up very early in the mornings in order to walk the not inconsiderable distance to the riding stables where she had her lessons. On the way, she would often stop opposite a certain house to observe the curious behaviour of a man who was in the habit of standing in an upstairs window and masturbating. One day, she was accompanied by a friend who, being considerably more enlightened than Jean, realised what was happening and promptly called the police from the nearest call-box. My sister thought it was hilarious when the policewoman who interviewed them asked:
‘Did you see his privates?’ In matters of sex, she was as ignorant as I had been at that age but through spending so much time at the stables in the company of boys as well as girls and through witnessing the frequent couplings of a variety of farm animals, she soon acquired a knowledge which was far more comprehensive than mine.

Although our next-door-neighbours were quiet, pleasant people it soon became apparent that my mother had conceived totally unwarranted feelings of jealousy towards the woman and was biding her time for the opportunity to pick a quarrel. This actually happened after Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, as they were called, built a bathroom extension in which there was a window overlooking our back yard. Since the window was of frosted glass no-one could look out of it but this mattered little to her and she railed against the couple with all the ferocity of which she was capable. She had no sense of humour whatsoever and the only things which made her laugh were other people’s misfortunes. She made up silly words to popular tunes and would expect us to laugh with her while she cackled with glee over her own wit. She made a point of looking down into next door’s garden while Mrs Thomas was hanging out her washing.
‘Don’t throw your falsies away!’ she’d sing in reference to the padded bras which our neighbour wore.
Poor Mrs. Thomas’ wardrobe suffered a good deal of criticism. It was quite undeserved because she was, in fact, a smartly dressed woman and when, one winter, she appeared in a rather nice new coat, my mother could barely contain her envy.
‘Hasn’t that woman got anything else to wear?’ she asked, after the coat had had a few airings.
Mrs. Thomas’ coat became a good distraction ploy because if, at any time, Jean and I suspected that we were about to suffer maternal ire, before she had the chance to open her mouth we’d say something like:
‘We’ve just seen Mrs. Thomas down town and guess what! She was wearing that coat again.’
It was a cunning stratagem that always worked. Our neighbour was not the only person of whom she was jealous. She made catty remarks about various customers who visited the shop and harboured dark suspicions about women to whom she thought our father was paying what she considered undue attention. Jealousy is the worst kind of emotion because it festers in the mind and eats away at the soul; gradually and irretrievably, as her obsessions became worse, it altered her appearance. Because her eyes were so often narrowed with suspicion, her brow became creased and furrowed; her compressed lips pulled down the corners of her mouth, thrusting her chin forward and causing deep scowl lines on either side of her face. It is no wonder that the very thought of our mother’s glowering countenance was enough to strike fear into our hearts.
Not only was she a very jealous woman, she was also inordinately superstitious. We were accustomed to seeing her throwing spilt salt over her shoulder, touching wood or un-crossing knives; once, we’d brought home some may blossom that we’d picked and when she screamed at us to get it out of the house, we thought she was joking and did the same thing again a few days later; this time, her reaction to what we regarded as mere playful fun was so violent that we were left dismayed and puzzled. On another occasion, I came home with a peacock feather I’d been given; it was one of the loveliest things I’d ever seen and I was very proud of it but when my mother saw it she shrieked:
‘Get it out! Get it out at once! It’s unlucky!’
The house in Killigrew Road had a long, narrow garden and every morning she would walk up the path to the back gate, open it, peer into the lane and glare ferociously at the world in general. When she had satisfied herself that everything was as it should be, she would make her way back down the path touching, at intervals, the wooden fence which divided our garden from next door’s. After a while, it became evident that the touching of wood was not so much a habit as a compulsion which grew worse with the passing of time.
Ethel, Harry and Judy continued to holiday in Falmouth almost every summer but after we’d moved to Killigrew Road and there wasn’t room to accommodate them, they had to rent a caravan on the outskirts of the town. My mother had knitted identical, Fair Isle sweaters for my father and Harry and it amused them both to wear them simultaneously. They thought that it was hilarious when in the shop one day, clad in their sweaters, a customer remarked:
‘You can tell you two are brothers!’
No two men ever looked so unalike.
To Jean, Ethel’s visits were not welcome and mealtimes in her presence were a purgatory which she would have given anything to avoid.
‘If I were you, Ivy, I’d make her eat that,’ Ethel would remark as my sister pushed to one side most of what was on her plate.
I used to enjoy accompanying Ethel and Harry when they motored around the county visiting all the most popular places but Jean would have nothing to do with them and would escape to her riding school at the earliest opportunity.


One of my father’s suppliers lived in a manor house, on the Lizard peninsula, which had recently been converted into a country club. We accepted his invitation to visit it and so one evening, not knowing quite what to expect, we drove out there. It was a rather beautiful old building with many oak beams, latticed windows and wooden panels. In the bar, in keeping with the atmosphere of quiet dignity, the clientele conversed in low tones and was of a class which my mother considered superior and more worthy of her presence. Definitely not like the sort of low company you found in ordinary pubs and later, in the shop, she took pleasure in telling customers that she and her husband had been invited, by its owner, to a very exclusive country club. There were quite a few, similar establishments in and around Falmouth and she persuaded him that it would be good for business to be seen in such places. Jean and I enjoyed these excursions and I took pains over my appearance because there were sometimes boys of my age with whom I could flirt. On one occasion, a boy asked me if I’d like to dance and, although I would have liked to accept, I couldn’t because I’d broken a bone in my foot and my leg was encased in plaster up to the knee. The boy would not accept my refusal to dance and pulled me up from my chair; when he saw my leg, which had been out of sight under the table, he was mortified with embarrassment and, stammering apologies, scuttled off. He had seemed a nice boy and I cursed my broken foot for putting to an end what could have been an interesting encounter. Once, at another country club, I glanced up and met the eye of a boy on the other side of the room. Immediately, I looked away and pretended to be disinterested but, every so often, I gave a sly look in his direction and saw that he was still staring at me. Assuming an air of nonchalence, I got up and sauntered into the garden, knowing that he would follow me: sure enough, he did.
‘I saw you looking everywhere in the room except at me,’ he said, reproachfully. ‘I wanted to meet you because you’ve got green paint on your hand and that means you must be an interesting person.’
This was a novel approach and I was impressed. This boy had an air of maturity that I hadn’t yet come across in other boys of his age and I was deeply disappointed when he said he was holidaying in the area and he and his family were due to return home the following day. He asked me about myself and after we’d chatted for a while, he suddenly caught me by the shoulders and kissed me. Since there can be no setting more conducive to romance than a Cornish garden on a beautiful evening with the rhododendrons all in bloom and the singing of blackbirds filling the air, I was unable to resist. This was my dream of romance come true! But the next moment, it was rudely shattered with the sudden materialisation of Jean who had been sent to find out where I’d got to and to tell me to hurry up because we were about to go. I had no choice but to make my excuses and leave. It was only when we were in the car on our way home that I realised I hadn’t even asked the boy his name.

Every year, with the approach of autumn, my father would buy several boxes of small, green grapes which, said the wholesaler, were from a region of Spain called Almeria. When you bit into the firm flesh, the juice from the grapes would explode on to the tongue with a delicious burst of sweetness and I think Jean and I must have surreptitiously consumed between us as many grapes as were actually sold. Not for a moment did I ever imagine that one day I‘d come to know very well that mountainous and arid province of Spain from where those grapes came. At Christmas, the shop was filled seasonal stock and the smell of tangerines, oranges and grapefruits would reach every corner of the house. This was the one time of the year that it looked really nice; there were boxes of chestnuts, big hands of bananas suspended from butchers’ hooks, bunches of celery, sacks and sacks of Brussels sprouts, bags of mixed nuts and mountains of apples and pears. Because he had the reputation of being open all hours, customers would think nothing of knocking him up on Christmas Day for something they’d forgotton. He regularly made up a hamper containing a generous selection of fruit and vegetables on behalf of a neighbouring pub for their weekly raffle and on one occasion, a disgruntled woman came into the shop brandishing an apple; she said that it was in the hamper she’d won in the raffle and demanded a replacement because it was going rotten.
Soft fruits were widely grown locally and in summer the shop would be filled with punnets of raspberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries and, of course, strawberries. If the weather was warm the fruit deteriorated quickly and so we had to help our mother with the fiddly task of stripping the small berries from the stalks and topping and tailing the gooseberries so that they could be made into puddings or jam. She regularly cooked beetroots to sell in the shop and since we both enjoyed peeling off the skins when they had cooled we used to fight over who should have the pleasure. When apples were cheap and plentiful, we made toffee apples for the shop but, again, I think we probably ate more than we sold. In those pre - Common Market days, there were many productive orchards in Cornwall and lots of the varieties of apples which were grown then probably no longer exist today. Every one of these apples had its own, characteristic smell, taste and colour and even the names - Cornish Gillyflower, St. Edmund’s Russet, Beauty of Bath, for example - seemed to conjure up images of the kind of picturesque, rural England which those of my generation remember with nostalgia. Nowadays, the only variety of cooking apple seems to be the Bramley; in our shop there were several, such as Early Victoria, Rev. W. Wilks and Crawley Beauty. My father was a daydreamer and one of his most frequent reveries involved his being chosen to take part in a television or radio quiz programme in which one of the questions would be to name a specific number of English varieties of apple. He would also confound the other contestants by being able to name the world’s largest rodent and giving the correct answer to the question:
‘What is the square root of minus one?’
My mother was infuriated by his daydreaming and told him that he was useless and had no go in him. She railed at him continually but it had no effect other than to make him even more detached. The shop ticked over but the financial situation was not improving and I realised, for the first time, just how hard-up my family was. Guiltily, I reflected that I could have been less
unwilling when I’d been asked to lend a hand in the shop during busy periods. I was in the habit of entering the house via the shop and there had been several occasions when, as I’d barged past without even acknowledging him, he’d called out after me:
‘Make us a cup of tea, will you?’
And I’d replied:
‘Make it yourself!’
I was filled with contrition. Perhaps if I’d helped in the shop more often he’d have been able to organise himself a little better and our money troubles would not have been so serious. I knew that he had problems with the bank because he was under an obligation to pay in a certain amount each week; Jean and I usually did this for him and it was a chore we disliked very much because of the way we were treated by the supercilious bank clerk who dealt with us. He would take the cash and the paying-in book without a word and regard us, unsmilingly, over his spectacles as if we were the lowest form of life. The thought of my family being subjected to this humiliation filled me with such resentment that I resolved to turn over a new leaf and do something to try to help the business to improve. Inspired with sudden zeal to render myself useful, I decided that I would spend, in future, all my free time cleaning the shop, dressing the windows so that they always looked nice and helping to serve customers. Such was my optimism that I was certain, before very long, our troubles would be over.

Margaret Merry lives in Spain if you are looking to buy a property in Spain please visit http://www.cheappropertyspain.net