Healing Holistix

Another one from my U3A meeting.

Pre-Supermarket.
Before supermarkets! Wow! That seems such a long time ago that I have to think very hard. I’ll work retrospectively from the last I can think of. My arrival in Central Hawkes Bay from Auckland after my European years involved a farm near Patangata and the first trip to town in Waipawa to get groceries to set up the kitchen of the nice little house that the farm had just built and that we were to live in. We asked the manager where we should go for supplies and he told us that virtually the only option was Williams & Kettle so we set off to town with this unknown source in our mind. As we entered Williams & Kettle a smiley faced young man came up to us and asked what he could do for us. We held up our list of required goodies , with another smile he took it from us and began collecting the items. He packed them into several cardboard boxes as he went out the back, climbed ladders and opened and shut cupboards. Finally about 6 boxes were assembled and he said ,”Where’s your car?” I grabbed a couple of boxes and followed him out of the front door to our car outside. As we loaded them into the boot he asked where we were living and I told him Paihia Farm. His response was “Oh you working for Frank?” As we went back inside to get the remaining boxes I asked if it would be okay to pay by cheque. He looked blankly at me and said,
“You want to pay?”
“Of course, “ I said “But we haven’t got much cash”.
“But don’t you want to charge it?” he looked puzzled. We paid for it as we left, but we felt eyes on us as our helper regaled his colleagues about the people who didn’t want to charge it.
Even when, further into the past, I was working in London, and sharing a flat with a mate, we bought our bread from a bakery, our vegetables from a greengrocer, other food from a grocer, and meat from a butcher, even though I did once ask, in my innocence, for bacon in Golders Green from a Kosher butcher, and got some strange looks. Anything not edible was from an ironmonger , such as knife , fork and spoons but cooking utensils were very basic and sometimes our pocket knives came into play in conjunction with our only utensil which was a frypan .
Stepping back another 5 or 6 years it was outback Australia living out of an old Landrover and eating whatever was currently available. Depending on the time of year we ate sweet corn, pineapples, mutton and even kangaroo. When we got to Tasmania we ate apples, potatoes and due to our extreme lack of cash for a week we ate “gookies”. Gookies were oatmeal, milo and sugar mixed to a thick paste with water and cooked in an old soap strainer we had found, through the door in a small pot belly stove at Liaweeni youth hostel campsite to produce a kind of cake. The landscape was all tussock and we asked the drunken warden what we should use for firewood and he pointed at the cabin next door, so we systematically chopped it up with the axe supplied and fed it into the little stove. That same YHA hostel warden was the guy who checked on the lake levels for the hydro-electric company that ran the dam as his ‘day job’ and drank himself into a stupor the rest of the time. He very kindly offered us a slice off a cooked wild pig which resided in his table and although we were not picky eaters we declined and left it to the flies which were crawling all over it. His company house was full of empty beer bottles as was his company Landrover. Fortunately we had ample stocks of tea, a billy and a couple of mugs, so it was ‘black billy tea, boys, black billy tea.
Of course, when I was at school I took no interest whatsoever in groceries and my mother was a very good cook so food just used to turn up regularly on my plate. While waiting for a place at a boarding school which I was to attend , I was entertained at a Secondary Modern school in Essex which served the children lunch, where I learned to eat faster after missing out on dessert for a few days. The boarding school, in Colchester, was a very different story, food was brought to us at the table and ‘seconds’ were very likely if needed in this very posh establishment owned by the headmaster, a nephew of author H.G .Wells and a one time chess player for England.
Beyond schooldays I only have my mother and father’s recollections of war time rationing, (I was Britain’s answer to Hitler- I was born a couple of months after the war began) I was an adventurous child, I had been known to reach out of my pram and eat loose, rationed , cigarettes from the shop counter and bite pieces out of loaves of bread. Our local shopkeeper soon learned to not leave items within reach of the voracious child in the high wheeled pram!
With the advent of the supermarket, the whole shopping experience changed and became more impersonal, the customer did most of the work running about selecting for themselves before presenting at the checkout and staggering out with numerous plastic bags of almost everything that the household needed. I fully expect to be able to buy a car at the supermarket soon or maybe an aircraft.

Now, besides packing your own groceries, the supermarket wants you to ring them out yourself.

That was really interesting Michael.