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hard you had to butter the end of the loaf and then slice it. There wasn’t any such thing as ready-sliced bread in packets then.
    Then you queued at the cheese counter until another white-garbed lady sliced off the exact amount of cheese for you with a wire and ticked your ration book. You queued at the bacon counter and watched the bacon boy (who always wore a pencil behind his ear) use the scary bacon slicer, cutting your four rashers of best back bacon into wavy ribbons on greaseproof paper. You could queue for a whole
hour
in Sainsbury’s and still come out with precious little in your string shopping bag.
    Then we’d go to John Quality’s on the corner by the market. It was another grocer’s, with big sacks of sugar and nuts and dried fruit spread out on the floor, just the right height for me. I was always a very good girl, but Gwennie sometimes darted her hand into a sack and pulled out a dried plum, just like Little Jack Horner in the nursery-rhyme book at home.
    Then we’d trail round the market, maybe queuing for plaice or cod or yellow smoked haddock from the fish stall on a Friday, spending a long time haggling at the fruit stall and the veg stall. You could get bananas and oranges now the war was over, but everything was strictly seasonal and none of us had ever even
heard
of exotic things like kiwi fruit or avocado pears or butternut squash. Fruit meant apples and pears, veg meant cabbage and carrots and cauliflower. The frozen pea hadn’t even been invented. We didn’t have a fridge or freezer anyway.
    The only shop I disliked was the butcher’s – it smelled of blood. The meat wasn’t cut up in neat cellophaned packets, it was festooned all over the place, great red animal corpses hung on hooks in the wall, chickens still in their feathers, rabbits strung in pairs like stiff fur stoles, their little eyes desperately sad.
    I shut my own eyes. I breathed shallowly, trying hard not to moan and make a fuss, because if I’d behaved perfectly, I
might
be taken to Woolworths for a treat. I loved Woolworths. It had its own distinctive smell of sweets and biscuits and scent and floor polish. (When I left home and went to live in Scotland at seventeen, I used to go into the Dundee Woolworths just to breathe in that familiar smell.)
    I liked the toy counter best. I’d circle it on tiptoe, trying to see all the penny delights: the glass marbles, the shiny red and blue and green notebooks, the spinning tops, the tin whistles, the skipping ropes with striped handles. I always knew what I wanted most. Woolworths sold tiny dolls, though sadly not the beautiful little china dolls of my grandma’s childhood. These were moulded pink plastic – little girls with pink plastic hair and pink plastic dresses, little boys with pink plastic shirts and pink plastic trousers, and lots and lots of pink plastic babies in pink plastic pants. The babies came in different sizes. You could get big penny babies alarmingly larger than their halfpenny brothers and sisters.
    I was a deeply sexist small girl. I spurned all the pink plastic boys. I bought the girls and the little babies, playing with them for hours when I got home. I sometimes made them a makeshift home of their own in a shoebox. I took them for trips to the seaside in my sandpit. Best of all, I stood on a stool at the kitchen sink and set them swimming in the washing-up basin. They dived off the taps and went boating in a plastic cup and floated with their little plastic toes in the air.
    I was very fond of the water myself. I hadn’t yet been swimming in a proper pool but we’d had several day trips to Broadstairs and Bognor and Brighton when I’d had a little paddle. Most days in the summer Ga took me for a ten-minute walk to Claremont Gardens, near Surbiton Station, where there was a paddling pool. She stripped me down to my knickers and I ran into the pool and waded happily in and out and round about.
    I wasn’t supposed to go right under and get my knickers