When I was a teenager my grandmother came from
Grandma soon made herself at home and became well known in the local shops. This was in the time just before the supermarkets took over, it was when there was a shop on every street corner that wasn’t occupied by a pub.
As part of her acclimatisation process grandma seemed to have a run-in with just about all of the shopkeepers in the area, she went to the bakery where new people had taken over and complained about the taste of their bread, not that it stopped there, grandma’s criticism was constructive, she told them how much salt to use with so much flour and even came back to give a progress report.
One of the local shops sold just about anything that you could possibly want to eat and one day grandma went in for some sliced meat, being from Yorkshire she was partial to boiled ham and unlike most of the shop’s customers, who would buy one or two slices of meat, grandma ordered half a pound of thinly sliced boiled ham.
The shopkeeper sliced the meat on one of those big, hand cranked meat slicers with a circular blade and the slices of meat fell straight onto the scales as they were sliced.
Grandma had one eye on the slices as they landed on the scales and the other eye was on the needle as the weight of the meat increased.
The needle got to the 8 ounce mark the shopkeeper said, “Is that alright for you Mrs. Lloyd?”
Grandma looked at the scales, then at the twenty-odd stone shopkeeper and in a voice loud enough to be heard outside in the street she piped up with, “I don’t mind paying for the meat, but I’m not paying for your thumb as well!”
Granma came to live with my aunty just at the time when the British money changed over to the decimal system, before that there were pounds, shillings and pence which were still referred to as “£sd” and there were still penny coins in circulation with Queen Victoria’s image on them. There were originally 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings (240 pence) to a pound, the ‘new’ money had 100 pence to the pound making each ‘new penny’ as they were called, worth about 2.4 of the old ones.
One of my other aunties had a pub at the time and she gave grandma a collection of dummy decimal coins so that she could learn the ‘new money’ before it came into circulation. By the time the new coins were in circulation grandma had an expert grasp of the value of the new money, so much so that she would lecture us kids on it.
When my Aunty Ivy was in the shop around the corner from where she and grandma lived the woman who ran it said, “You can’t diddle your mother with this new money can you?”
“No,” my aunty replied, “but it seems like you have had a good try!”
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