Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Jun 1, 2006
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days that all these memories come flooding back to me.
Sunday Afternoons
They say that you cannot stop progress and I agree with that. It's just a pity, however, that we tend to lose certain things along the way.
I was watching television recently and saw an advert where they used the sound of a till ringing as it opened - a sound that I have not heard for some years now. When you come to think about it there are many sounds that we do not hear these days as compared to a few years ago. Every shop had a till that rang out a sound when it was opened. I can even remember the first till my parents had; it was a long wooden one with a brass handle on the pull-out drawer. It made a lovely 'ding' sound as it was opened. This was later replaced with a then modern mechanical one that rang a bell when it opened and it opened with some power as well. In fact, I can recall the first time I used it as I was knocked off the lemonade crate that I had to stand on in order to reach it. I had to stand on this just so the customers could see me as I was only around eight or nine years old at the time and both my sister and I had to help in the shop as our parents also had a small café to run.
The lemonade crates were made of wood at that time; in fact that is how I judged my rate of strength as I grew up. You see when I first started helping out in the shop I could only drag them to the shelf where we stacked the bottles. As I grew older and stronger I managed to carry them, even when all the bottles were full.
It was quite common for us to work behind the counter of the shop during our school dinner break along with all the other times we were not at school. This mechanical till had the large buttons that had to be pressed down very hard in order to ring up the total required. In fact, my small fingers often used to slip off the button and get caught in the space between them which, as I recall, was very painful. I think that is why I remember that till so vividly. Luckily for me, however, it was soon replaced with the very latest electric model which was much easier to use as the buttons were on a keyboard, much like a modern day computer one. The till, itself, still had a nice ring to it when it opened and a spool of paper that sprung out a receipt on every sale. This spool, however, was very difficult to replace, but had to be in position all the time so as my father could do his weekly books. My father was the only one who could fit this roll into the till at the time, which meant we had to keep handwritten accounts until he had the time to replace it. It was just hearing that sound again on that advert that brought all this back to my mind.
Another sound we no longer hear on a quiet Sunday afternoon is the sound of those old push lawn mowers. I remember the smell of freshly cut grass would waft in the air as we listened to the sound of those mowers being pushed along and back again; it seemed to be in harmony with the music of that radio program, Two Way Family Favourites. They made a different sound on the return run from the push, almost as if they were being wound up like the large wall clocks my granny used to have hanging on her walls. Come to think of it, that is another sound I remember when I was small and we used to travel down south every winter to visit my parents' families and one of my grannies had a few of those clocks on her living room walls ticking away all night when I was trying to sleep on the settee which was my bed when we visited there. My uncle used to wind them up once a week and I was always fascinated by this as I used to wonder how did he know when to stop?
I remember hounding my dad to buy one of those push mowers as it was hard work cutting our grass with the sickle, which he had taught me to use when he thought I was old enough. In the end he did buy one, on my promise that I would cut the grass every weekend but, by the time he did buy it, I was at the age when I wanted to be doing something else on a quiet Sunday afternoon. You see, I had reached the age where girls began to be more important than they had been in the past! It was around this time that my father started his ice cream van round and he left my mother, along with our one and only full time employee and us, to run the shop and café. Then again that is a totally different story and far from the subject of this one - so it will be left untold.
