The other day, my husband was looking at a pair of very worn and very favourite shoes. The soles were worn and so were the heels. They were a leather pair he had had for a long time, and he did not want to throw them away, but the dilemma was...where does one go these days to get shoes re-soled and heeled? Along with many other crafts and trades, the shoemaker or shoe-mender has gone the way of the Dodo. We started chatting about all the other things that have disappeared in everyday life and remembering some of the craftsmen and artisans who used to be found in almost every small town.
Growing up in England, I clearly remember my Mother taking me shopping for groceries and going into individual shops for each item on the list. The green-grocer (where you could buy cooked beetroot), the butcher, with sawdust on the floor and where the butcher wore the familiar "pork-pie" hat and white apron, the bakery with its wonderful smells and amazing variety of loaves and pastries, the grocery shop, with its bumpy floor and interesting smells of cooked hams and dry goods and where the clerk weighed the goods on an old-fashioned scale with weights and added the bill up on a piece of paper and a pencil taken from behind his ear. Then there was my favourite place, the Sweet Shoppe! This place was a dreamworld for children - a huge oak counter, behind which were shelves and shelves lined with bottles of multi-coloured sweets and candies of every conceivable variety and flavour. I have seen shops like this one in Canada - there is a wonderful one in Huntsville, Ontario, where I used to have my cottage and they sold English Sweets, like Peppermint Humbugs, Pontefract Cakes (licorice), Lemon Drops, Mars Bars, Cadbury Chocolate Bars, and many others. I had to pass the Sweet Shoppe on my way home from school in England, and I always saved my pennies just so that I could stop in and buy one special thing to pop in my mouth to keep me going on the rest of the walk home.
In most small towns in the UK there would always be a shoemaker, a tailor (who did small and large sewing jobs to order) a friendly ironmonger who stocked all manner of tools, nails, buckets, work knives, rope, and other things a home owner might need for odd jobs inside or out. I loved these shops with their smell of tarred rope and the heavy wood floors and barrels of nails and "grommets".
Of course, today, we have replaced all these individuals with the ubiquitous Supermarket and Home Depot, and "one-stop shopping". I appreciate the need for these in our fast-paced world, where most households have two working parents and shopping is done on the way home from work, and I would be the first to embrace "one stop shopping" if I were in their shoes, however it is sad to see some of the trades and crafts disappear with the advent of the new Box Centres, where no one knows your name, your family or your occupation, and where you cannot watch things being made or repaired. I was always so fascinated when I visited the shoemaker with my Mother or Father and watched as the shoes were fitted onto the last and the nails were driven into the soles or heels. The smell of leather permeated the shop and the shoemaker's apron was dark and shiny leather from many years of use, his fingernails darkened by the tannins in the leather he worked on every day, and his beady eyes behind round glasses always twinkling at me as I peered over his counter at the rows of shoes waiting to be claimed. Remembering shoes and childhood, there was the excitement every school year when my parents took both my sister and I out to the nearest large town (Worthing) to buy new shoes. My Father believed in leather soled shoes which laced up - and I longed so for slip-ons - but he was adamant. First, the shoe salesman or lady would stand us on an X-Ray machine, where we could look down from above at the X-rays of our feet below and see if the shoes we had on were a good fit. The sight of those skeletal feet was always etched in my mind as a child. Next, the salesperson would take out a big ruler-like contraption, with a sliding part on it and we would put each foot in turn onto the ruler and they would measure our size. Then, we would walk around and around the shop testing the shoes to see if they were comfortable. Nobody asked us if we liked them - BUT - they lasted a whole year, and that was my Father's methodology. Good memories!
