Mrs Callows Wool Shop

A Memory of Ightham.

Does anyone else remember Mrs Callow's wool shop? Situated in the High Street near the top of Station Road, it was ideally situated for primary school children to buy sweets after school. In my case this was only on a Thursday (Dad's payday). The strange thing was that the sweets weren't on display. You had to ask Mrs Callow for the sweet tray, whereupon she would reach under the counter and produce a large plastic tray filled with all kinds of one penny sweets like fruit salads and black jacks, sherbert fountains and flying saucers. I still wonder to this day whether she was allowed to sell them or was she rebelliously flaunting some bylaw forbidding her from selling them?
After leaving the shop it was the ritual to collect conkers from Station Approach when they were available, taking them home to soak in vinegar or bake in the oven whilst Mum cooked dinner. I must have had many a sixer or sevener from those trees.
My father worked at Wallers, later to become Calor Engineering, at St. Mary's Platt. During the summer months, I would leave home and head up the Wrotham road, turning right into the public footpath across the fields opposite Chirnsides, and then follow the path up to the Victorian bottle dump, appearing at the fishing ponds at the back of Platt Industrial Estate, climb the stile and walk to the car park of Wallers and get in my dad's car. At six o'clock the bell would ring, signalling the end of the working day. Then Dad would drive us both home.
Everyone in Borough Green knew everyone else in those days and as a youth, if you got up to mischief you knew your parents would already know by the time you got home. How times change.