I think that members of the Payne's Shoe Repairs family today will smile at a rather special little tale that I have to tell in which the Firm played a central role in an entirely unexpected way that was only discovered decades later.
I never knew my paternal grandfather who died before I was born, but from around 7 until at least my early teens I went with my father every Sunday to visit my grandmother and also see whatever other relatives - aunts, uncles and cousins - might also be visiting as the family all did much the same.
Nan lived in Devon St., Nechells, just a little way down from the school on the opposite side of the street. It was a 2-bus journey from where we lived across the other side of the City, the first picking up another to Nechells somewhere around Aston.
But that was over 60 years ago, and whatever little amount of notice I actually took of the journey has long since left me apart from two things in particular. One was that I always knew when we were getting very close to our Nechells stop because the bus swung right-hand in to a tight downhill outside curve that made it feel, well to me at least, lol, that it was about to overbalance and topple over flat on to its side!
I have no recollection today of the route number, though for some unknown reason I have always had it in mind that it was the number 8. Others will know whether that is possible I'm sure, but in any case shortly after the bus had negotiated that bend and somehow managed to remain upright, it reached the bottom of its little hill there and soon emerged at a little triangular junction with the Saltley Rd/Viaduct somewhere close by what I now know was called "The Gate", and dropped us at the stop we needed just steps across from the bottom of Devon Street.
Payne's Shoe Repairers? Hold on, I'm just getting to that.
Back in Aston wherever it was that we picked up our bus, directly across the street from the stop was a large advertising hoarding with a poster depicting a smart-looking man striding out. But he was drawn/printed to suggest he was actually stepping one leg out of the poster. So a part of the image of him was of the exposed sole/heel of his forward foot facing outward as he stepped ready, and this was of course HUGE in size just to make the best of the intended effect.
Occasionally since then I have found myself "recalling" that the chap was in fact a cobbler and wearing a brown apron, though this could now easily be entirely in my imagination running in overdrive sparking off the fact that there was large lettering on the poster citing the superior nature of Payne's Shoe Repairs!
It seems to me that I saw that poster every weekend for years and years, lol.
No, that's not the special story. That comes if I now add that the little girl who would grow up to become my wife was born and for a short while lived just in Inkerman street with a large proportion of her immediate relatives around there and Dolman street.
We made the connection of having families close there quite early-on when married and exploring backgrounds etc., but it was only in some random chit-chat about 5 years ago now a half-century later, that I mentioned about the change of buses and my recollection of that advertising poster.
And her eyes became wide, and with a mixture of surprise and laughter she said that she remembered that well because she was there probably just as frequently at much the same time when she was taken by her mother on Sundays to visit her Nan and also pop to see other relatives there too sometimes. She couldn't recall the route number, but the kicker was the same memory of the topply-bus curve, lol close before getting off the bus .
So we figured that although not in any way guaranteed it is not impossible that we could have been waiting there at the same time for the next bus to complete our journeys, maybe seen each other more than once even but that might be pushing it ... though, would it really? I mean, that's a guaranteed 52 times a year from me for sure and my wife says it was much the same with her parents taking her, an unquestioned routine ... as I believe it would have been with many in those days, Sunday visits and treats to see the grandparents ... yes?
So then ..
To the Paynes - For all this time you thought that your Firm's advertising was just a regular business feature and served that purpose. But in fact those installations - well, one in Aston somewhere anyway, lol - had an unburstable link of an entirely different kind from around the mid-50s, and contributed something special to a possibly lovely coincidence but definitely to the bringing together of two completely separate sets of very personal memories in order to create a third and very special shared memory half a century later.
Soulmates and solemates
TQ
