The Village Shops

A Memory of Streetly.

Lovely to see the old pictures of the village, they almost made me cry. Does anyone remember some of the old shops and their owners? Ted Shelley in the newsagents where I went with my pocket money to buy my weekly comic, also a very spooky antique shop run by the equally antique couple who used to scare me silly as a young girl. It was an old curiosity shop with a musty smell, quite dark inside as well. How about Horsleys the grocers, the last of the old family grocers in the days when supermarkets were in their infancy, I would go in with the red book with the weekly shopping order and a man in a brown overall coat would go round collecting the provisions and marking them off with a pencil that he occasionally licked before lodging it behind his ear. The Post Office, devoid of modern technology, with a post mistress who had regulation glasses on the end of her nose and hand writing of artistic beauty, rubber stamps, a moist stamp pad and a rubber thimble with which to count the money. I actully loved that village with its shops and all the characters, I would ride my bike down there from nearby Middleton Road then pop round the corner into Burnett Road to visit my aunt, uncle and cousins for a jam sandwich. Those really were the days. All that and only a stones throw from one of the most magnificent parks in the country. If memories were money I would be among the richest in the world. Dear Streetly, thank you for those memories.

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