Peter Walker
gone but not forgotten
I'm afraid this is a bit outside your area, but my great aunt Tizzie (Elizabeth) inherited the place from her parents, who had moved there from a shop in Cecil Street, off Newtown Row in about 1908.
You went up a step though a glass panelled dorrinto the shop itself, about 14 feet square. The counter was on the left, and behind it ann incredeible collection of articles on display, from sweets, chocolates and pop to soaps, ironmongery and stationery. There was a cast iron paraffin heater for nthe winter. The shop was normally deserted as you opened the door and a bell sounded. "Yerss?", her voice would come from behing the bead curtain screen the living room to the right. Out would shuffle "Our Tiz" as her sisters called her. She said very little, and in response to anything unusual or funny she would just say "teh!". But she was a kindly person, and every child that went in got a sweet.
Her living room was like a museum, with nothing thrown away. Two sideboards crammed with bric a brac.
I don't know whether she was widowed around the time of World War 1, or whether Mr Smith went missing (she was a formidable lady) - anyway she ran it single handed from the 1920s until April 1952, when my grandmother, who had just belatedly retired from teaching, ran it for two weeks to close it down properly, and poor old Auntie Tizzie died. I do remember the following two weeks clearing out the stock and family heirlooms, inclkuding her mother's wedding dress (they would have been married in the 1870s!) In the end it took five dust-carts to clear the place.
You went up a step though a glass panelled dorrinto the shop itself, about 14 feet square. The counter was on the left, and behind it ann incredeible collection of articles on display, from sweets, chocolates and pop to soaps, ironmongery and stationery. There was a cast iron paraffin heater for nthe winter. The shop was normally deserted as you opened the door and a bell sounded. "Yerss?", her voice would come from behing the bead curtain screen the living room to the right. Out would shuffle "Our Tiz" as her sisters called her. She said very little, and in response to anything unusual or funny she would just say "teh!". But she was a kindly person, and every child that went in got a sweet.
Her living room was like a museum, with nothing thrown away. Two sideboards crammed with bric a brac.
I don't know whether she was widowed around the time of World War 1, or whether Mr Smith went missing (she was a formidable lady) - anyway she ran it single handed from the 1920s until April 1952, when my grandmother, who had just belatedly retired from teaching, ran it for two weeks to close it down properly, and poor old Auntie Tizzie died. I do remember the following two weeks clearing out the stock and family heirlooms, inclkuding her mother's wedding dress (they would have been married in the 1870s!) In the end it took five dust-carts to clear the place.
