Looking Back: My mother's shopping bag had a layer of dirt in the bottom of it!

Most children today only visit supermarkets or shopping malls. Their mother would have taken them from being small children, often driving there in her own car and combining it with lunch. No longer the rare treat that it was when we were young, when mothers certainly didn’t have their own car! In fact, few families did! As for laundrettes. it wasn’t something my own children were familiar with being born in the 70s, when automatic washing machines started to become affordable. Although by 1971, only 64% of households had managed to acquire one.

Children today are also fully conversant with shopping online or home grocery deliveries.

The first Ladybird books published in the 1900s became the most popular and informative children’s books. Number one in in the millions of titles that they produced was the one commemorating the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana in 1981.

In 1965 there was one called ‘Shopping with mother’ The cover showed mother, bunch of flowers in her arms, walking away from a greengrocer’s shop with two excited children.

I remember the local shops when I was a child when there was certainly no supermarkets.

The shop keeper knew you by name. Asked about your family, commiserated if you’d been ill and didn’t hurry you. The queue of people behind you didn’t mind as they were busy talking to other people. No one rushed in those days. Women, mostly, didn’t work, and there seemed to be all the time in the world for socialising even though there were no labour savings devices when they did get home. Shopping could often take all day.

Nothing was wrapped in plastic, and certainly no carrier bags. My mother’s shopping bag had a layer of soil at the bottom where the potatoes had been tipped after being weighed . Then apples, oranges and vegetables added before she moved on to the next shop. Butter, lard and cheese would be sliced, placed onto greaseproof paper and into little brown bags.

Of course, Internet shopping is so much easier, but not nearly as much fun as the shopping we remembered, and which has now become something found in history books!