Free Dolly's Mixture by Dorothy Scannell Page B

required. The cheese must be from the middle of the large cheese, therefore rindless, and the back bacon also from a spot in the animal to her choice. She was arrogant, didn’t worry about the trouble she caused, and I was nervous of her. One day, after I had cut many pieces of cheese, not one piece to her ultimate satisfaction, Chas read the riot act to me. Then this lady took to waiting outside the shop by the large window, peering in at the cheese I was cutting and the bacon I was weighing up for other customers. When both were to her liking she would tear into the shop and make her demands, pressing her face almost on to the scale while, with trembling fingers, I laid cheese and bacon gently on it, praying that the scale would not register above the quantities my thorn in the flesh required, and I always wrote the exact weight and price on the paper. In the end we took to dashing into the back room when she entered, hoping she would go away; but she never did and Chas usually gave in first and served her, grumbling at me for my timidity. Release for us came in the shape of a bridegroom for this difficult lady.
    We were surprised and delighted when she came in to bid us goodbye, thanking us for our charming service to her for so long, and departing with her final middle piece of cheddar and prime lean short back smoked Danish rashers. ‘Cor,’ said our dear friend the butcher, hearing of the lady’s nuptials, ‘who’d ever take on that old tart? He must be a bleeding madman.’ But he wasn’t a madman, he was positively charming, and I knew with such a fastidious wife he would be assured of choice cuisine. They went to live in a tiny village in the West Country where there was one shop which embraced post office and general store!
    Our own little shopping parade was really a village in the centre of a busy town and, like a village, there were undercurrents or aloofness between some shopkeepers. Emotions bubbled like a cauldron because some shopkeepers were competitors, and not sporting competitors at that. There was talk when one shop obtained the post office licence when another shopkeeper had applied for this. We heard all the gossip, for, in a strange way, we were friendly with all the other shopkeepers. Perhaps when we started in business I was too naive about competition. I had so many things on my mind, my children for one thing, that it never occurred to me to think before I dashed into other grocery shops nearby (and there were four) to purchase something I was short of for an urgent order. At first they were aloof – they may have thought I was spying out the land and their prices – but they soon realised I had no ulterior motives and I was accepted as a friend. They returned the compliment when they were short of goods that hadn’t been delivered.
    One shopkeeper would tell me that his competitor stood in his doorway opposite and watched his customers go in and out. I said that should please him and not annoy him, for it proved his competitor was not busy. I did not tell him Chas and I had no time to stand and stare. At first some of our customers were a little embarrassed if they were shopping in a competitor’s shop when I visited, but in the end they relaxed and we heard interesting bits of news about our competitors. There were some Jewish grocers and I loved to hear about their family life. One son went to Israel on a kibbutz and I would hear how the desert was being made fertile. Chas, a gardener at heart, would have loved to go to see it all. They were a jolly family, giving comical names to some of the things they sold. Prunes became ‘black-coated workers’, baked beans ‘shirt lifters’.
    We laughed about the amorous milkman who would pop into bed with his favourite customer every morning, even on a Monday morning. I thought he must be a Hercules to carry on after such exhausting dawn beginnings and complete his large round with such