Twixteen

In 1961, I began my first paid school holiday job at my aunt’s posh Essex chemist shop.  A naive sixteen (as was commonplace in those days), I would soon learn a lot about people in a few short weeks.

Aunt and Uncle were acknowledged eccentrics. She a bossy and outspoken thoroughbred Anglo Welsh filly, he a dapper ex-army mumbler with a pencil-thin moustache and a penchant for cigars and blazers. And bossy fillies. They sniggered a lot in corners over risqué double-entendres, as yet mercifully wasted on my tender young ears. They lived, childless, in a grand house with an unruly pack of five huge chow dogs. Because of this, no matter how lavish they were with the expensive colognes they sold, they always wafted pure eau de chien with a topnote of cigar. 

Both were pharmacists, and it soon became apparent that their lives were fuelled by brandy at home and mellowed by random medications in the day. Though they strove to be brusquely kind to me, I never succeeded in feeling altogether comfortable around them, although I grew oddly fond of their foibles and their vulnerabilities. It isn’t easy to forget the day she called me into her bedroom to show me her untreatable breast cancer, which she would, remarkably, survive for seven years. And he, for sure, struggled with what we would now recognise as post war ptsd.

I soon learned my way around the mahogany counters, glass cabinets, and rows of wooden drawers. I would get to know the pale and fidgetty older ladies who shuffled in a few times a week for a couple of bottles of the kaolin & morphine that came in small ridged brown glassware. Others came in, often feigning a cough, to purchase endless bottles of a particular old brand of linctus. I thereby learned about the scale of inadvertent middle class opiate dependency. 

Every Saturday, a particularly awkward and badly dressed woman would sidle shyly around the shop, sampling perfume testers and working up to requesting any spare cosmetic samples, such as were then carried by posh chemists. Auntie always spotted her, and would proffer a small bag of girlie bits that she had already put aside. After the woman had mumbled her gratitude and tottered off, my aunt confided to me “That should keep him happy for the weekend. I’ve popped in an eyeshadow that matches his eyes.”

I had observed that sometimes men would come in and ask, in a certain conspiratorial way, for ‘the man’ - the pharmacist, my uncle. I observed these occasions, when, after taking up a small brown paper bag, he would go to a drawer below the till, withdraw a small packet which he would slide into the bag, which he would then offer up to the male punter, and say “That’ll be three and nine, sir”. This, I learned, was the going rate of three shillings and nine pence for a packet of three condoms. Job done. 

In time, I began to identify these chaps from their approaches to the task. Sometimes, if Uncle was unavailable, they would lurk awhile, browse around, and finally lunge at the counter, rolling off a random hasty list, like “um - I’d like a tin of toothpaste (yes, it came in a tin before plastic), a roll of um, elastoplast, a bottle of milk of magnesia, and, um, apacketofdurexplease. And I would glide, so professionally, paperbag in hand, to the small drawer and complete their transaction with all the sophisticated aplomb a schoolgirl could muster. 

One day, around lunchtime, when my uncle was absent, I was alone, and the small shop was quite busy. A tall man suddenly burst in, and across the heads of the small waiting queue, he spoke with firm urgency “three and nine, miss, three and nine please”. In spite of his brash approach, my response was instant and so sophisticated, bearing no trace of my inner blush. I grabbed a bag, loaded it from the drawer, and handed it across the counter to his impatient outstretched hand. Looking puzzled, he peered into the bag. The look he then bestowed upon me is etched in my brain, as he tossed it back to me, and stated, with absolutely no compassion: “Milk bill, dear girl. I ain’t got time for this. The milk bill is three shillings and nine pence. If. You. Please.”

I returned to school so much wiser, though there were plenty of questions yet to be answered. But with my Saturday earnings, I had bought myself a clutch handbag and my first stiletto heels …