Bagging the tea and other memories

Part of the Eurospar site on Main Street was once a shop owned by two women whom I knew as my aunts Peg and Nora. They weren't direct aunts, but my grandfather's sisters. This was the business which my great-grandfather came to Kilcullen to help out with and which established him here. Not just as a shopkeeper, but as carpenter the carpenter which was his trade, and and as a builder. And coffin maker too, which led to the family's long involvement in funeral undertaking.

I still have vivid childhood memories of that shop, and the residence attached to it. There were several ground floor sections: a grocery shop, a bar, a back store and a parlour and kitchen where Peg and Nora lived, as well as two bedrooms upstairs. Access to the whole complex was by one open entrance way, with a door on the left into the parlour and one straight on into the grocery shop.

The shop had a scrubbed wooden floor, a varnished hardwood counter, and wooden shelves behind where stock was stacked. In these days of supermarkets and convenience stores it probably seems strange that people would queue up to be served by somebody behind a counter, rather than helping themselves and then queuing to pay. But that's how it was then.

Beyond the shop was the bar, separated by a partition and a door with frosted glass and a brass handle. Its own counter was an extension of the shop's, with access to both through a lift up section beside the partition.

Peg and Nora would do their stints behind the counter, but the real important person was their employee Pat Quinn. He was barman, storeman, shop assistant. Polisher of the brass pole which supported the ceiling, and operator and cleaner of the slicer used to cut the sides of bacon into rashers, and the cooked hams into thin slices.

The slicer was an awesome thing, all stainless steel and red enamel. An amazing piece of engineering, using the weight of a flywheel to spin the cutting disc. Itself a frightening sight, especially when watching Pat Quinn's fingers getting dangerously close to it as he pushed the side of bacon in and out. The slices slipped out the other side onto another shiny stainless steel area. They'd were then picked up and placed on greaseproof paper on a scales, to be checked for price.

Apart from the speed at which Pat Quinn could do this, the other amazing thing was how accurate the weight asked for ('a half-pound of rashers, please, Mr Quinn') would be produced. Partly experience. But there was also the brass adjuster, with numbers which dictated the thickness of the rasher, and later I realised that Pat would know how many rashers of any preferred thickness made up a the requested weight.

As kids related to the shop, we liked to swing around the brass pole. Much to the chagrin of Pat Quinn who had earlier polished it to an exquisite shine. If he was in bad humour, he'd make us polish off our handprints. Most times, though, we got away with it.

There were interesting chores. Like filling the pound bags of tea, sugar, sultanas, raisins, and candied peel at Christmas. These came to the shop in bulk and had to be bagged using wooden-handled metal scoops. The bags were of a heavy paper, in a variety of muted colours, blue, brown, grey and dark green. The colour denoted the contents. Doing some of this work always brought a treat of chocolate or boiled sweets at the end of the afternoon.

The tea came in large plywood boxes, tea chests sealed with foil that was sharp-edged but much prized for playing with afterwards. The lids of the boxes were dangerous, with dozens of small sharp nails sticking out of them. They had to be carefully put out of harm's way while we were around. The sugar came in a sack, and the sultanas, raisins and candied peel were, to the best of my memory, in boxes smaller than the tea-chests.

There was a system for bagging. The appropriate colour bag opened out so it sat comfortable in the hand (they came folded flat). Scoop in the tea, or whatever was being packaged that day, then the open bag was placed on a simple balance scale with a brass weight on the other side. Any extra needed poured in until the scale tipped. We got really expert at not needing to add anything.

There was no Sellotape or other glue system to seal the bag. Just a neat fold, and a characteristic of the bag's material was that it stayed closed if properly done.

We enjoyed particularly bagging the sultanas and raisins, because we could pop the odd handfull into our mouths. As an aside, this made our mother's ritual with Syrup of Figs unnecessary that night.

The bags were then stacked on the shelves at the back of the shop, ready for the customers. It all looked very neat, and the paper bags allowed the various aromas to leak around the shop, mixing to give that very special smell which the old shops still have in the memories of those of us lucky enough to have been there.

Other smells came from the fresh vegetables. I remember with most affection the baskets of peas in pods. Even today pod peas are extraordinarily inviting, a smell of particular sweetness. When my mother would bring a basket of them home, there was no problem getting us to help 'shell' the peas from the pods. The real problem was making sure that we didn't eat all the raw peas as we did so. The only way she could make sure that enough were left to be cooked was to allow us chew the empty pods afterwards. I'll still do that today when the opportunity arises, and though you can't actually eat them because they're too stringy, they still have that sweetness. If you've been raised on frozen peas, you really have missed out.

Another smell was the fresh bread that came each morning and evening from O'Connell's bakery down the town. There's really nothing like it today, and especially engaging was the batch loaf which was the most popular in my family's house. I'm probably not the only boy in town who was sent to get the bread, wrapped loosely in thin 'bread paper'. By the time I got home I had eaten inroads into both 'white' sides of the loaf. Still warm from the oven.

The aroma of stale Guinness was also a part of the whole environment in the shop, because that was the only draught drink in the bar at the back. I've written elsewhere about my memories of this, especially the copper basin under the hand-pump that took the beer from the barrel, where the overspills went, and the copper jug used to scoop this up and top off the pints for the customers.

There was a glass six-shooter in the bar, part of an advertisement for some drink and mounted on a mirror. It fascinated me as a child, and later it ended up as one of the artifacts in the family pub, The Hideout. When my late brother sold the pub several years ago, he asked me if there was anything I'd like to have. I chose the gun, which is now somewhere in my attic and not nearly as interesting as it appeared to me as a child.

Other memories from the shop are the rack of biscuit tins, later with glass lids so you could see inside. But in those earlier times we depended on the labels. It took some special deftness to remove the lids without finger damage.

My memories of the the residential side include the kitchen, lofted high to a rooflight that gave it an unusual brightness all through the day. There was a range, but I don't remember the make. And a kitchen table of old solid wood, with an oilcloth covering. There were tiled walls too, and always a welcome for the child relations who needed somewhere to stop off on the way home to chores or, worse, homework.

I can still see too the parlour, quite comfortable in a fussy kind of way. The mirror over the mantlepiece was a circular thing that almost belonged in a funfair hall of mirrors. It gave a wide-angle view of the room and didn't show anybody in a natural way.

In truth, I really only have vague recollections of Peg and Nora, though Nora also sticks in my mind because she was the first person that I recall seeing dead, laid out in her small bedroom upstairs. I don't remember it being a shock, or even sad, but I suspect that as children we deal with such basics of life much better than we do later as adults.

My aunts died. I grew up. And eventually Uncle Tom turned the shop and bar into Kilcullen's first 'supermarket'.

My own personal end to the memory is when that supermarket went on fire one summer evening. I was then a young man, and with several other people I ran into the burning building to save what I could, and quite a lot of stock ended up stacked on the footpath outside.

It has to be said that it didn't remain stacked there long. But what the heck, Uncle Tom's insurance company paid for the windfalls on many tables that week and Lord knows he'd paid enough premiums over the years to fund it.

My own abiding memory of that night is the damage done to my jumper, and to my hair, by what I later discovered was melting lead from the gutter between the shop and the former living quarters of the premises.

And of providing suitable refreshment for the members of the Fire Brigade who had managed to save the structure of the building that night. Much of the liquor stock survived, and in the then roofless kitchen where I had so many times as a youngster delayed my going home after school, we raised several glasses apiece to the efforts.