大象传媒

This is a story told me by my paternal grandmother, Annie Brooks (1887-1971), and later verified as to the central point about the activities of the market trader by my mother, twenty years ago, when I noted down this and some other wartime stories that my parents and grandparents told me.
My grandmother had two old friends. One was Sue Coles (Mrs Smith, but Grandma never called her that: Coles was her maiden name), and another was Ginny (Ginny Savage? I am racking my brains for the surname and I am not sure). I think they got to know each other when, as young women, they all worked at the Lotus shoe factory at the top of Newland in Northampton. Mrs Smith lived in a small house in one of the streets off Newland or the western end of Ladies Lane (possibly Inkerman Terrace), remaining there until her death in the 1960s.
Once they were married and had families, these three old friends would shop and discuss shopping over afternoon cups of tea. That must have been going on for years by the time the war started. They had got into the habit of all looking out for each other - for bargains, for example - during the difficult 1930s. The war would have intensified that sense of mutual support.
My grandmother made clothes for herself and her family, as did the others for theirs. I recall my grandmother saying her own stitches were neater than Sue Coles鈥檚, but that may just have been an example of old friends鈥� rivalry or plain bigheadedness. During the war, dress material was rationed, and I come to the heart of the story. Sue Coles, living just off Newland, was very close to Northampton Market Square and was a kind of informant for the others, telling them that such-and-such a stall had a supply of so-and-so and they must get there quickly. None of them had telephones. She would just walk to my grandmother鈥檚 house in Grove Road, and to Ginny鈥檚 wherever that was, and tell them.
Accordingly it was Sue Coles who told my grandmother about the stall selling dress material off ration. (As they would say, 鈥榳ithout points鈥�, i.e. without taking points from your ration book.) No one asked where the stallholder and his wife obtained their material, but there was even a small amount of choice, though customers were only allowed to buy small quantities at a time. Enough for one garment, I suppose.
This went on for some months. Everybody expected the stallholder to be arrested, but their concern was limited to not being there when it happened.
The word got round. More people went to the stall. Another was my maternal grandmother, which is why, years later, my mother was able to confirm most of the story. She had got to know about it from someone entirely different. Still the authorities took no action.
Psychologists often surmise that people who commit crimes have the desire to be caught. They commit the crime again and again until they are. I have some difficulty in condemning someone who was obviously providing a service, but there is no doubt that they were selling dress material illegally according to the regulations then in force. After many months of success, they must have become over-confident. Instead of word of mouth, they started to cry their wares just as the greengrocers would tend to do (鈥淏est local spuds, tuppence a pound to you, me ducks鈥�). The stallholder鈥檚 wife, in particular, would call out to passers-by that she had off-ration dress material on her stall.
My grandmother, who told the tale more than once, always finished with the dramatic claim that the police arrested them the next market day, but my mother said they kept it up for a month before they suddenly disappeared. I think I prefer my mother鈥檚 version of that part of the tale. Were they arrested, as my grandmother and her friends presumed? Were they even locked up? Or did they simply discover that they were no longer permitted to trade on the market? My grandmother, and later my mother, said there was no news of it in the local paper. Did the authorities prefer to turn a blind eye to that sort of activity until they were forced to intervene when it became too conspicuous? (My father always claimed that they did.)
My grandmother made herself a blue-and-white check apron in the late 1960s out of what she claimed was material left over from a wartime purchase that she had kept in a drawer. She never said it came from the stall on the Market Square, but it would be nice to think it did. A torn-off part of it still exists, much washed but still serviceable and hardly faded, in the form of a rag I keep in my car and occasionally use to wipe the inside of the windscreen.

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