Billy Gallagher

 It was understood in a small country town that local shops gave credit without documentation.  It was also assumed that the householder would pay, eventually when he took the notion.  Never would it be alluded to other than an occasional (posted) statement.  It was inconceivable that a shopkeeper would ask for money, no matter how stretched the account.  Customers were scarce and had to be retained at all costs.

Shopping in Strabane in 1940s/50s was always in a proprietor driven shop.  Catholics went to Catholic shops and Protestants went to their own.  Sinnamons was a Protestant draper on the main street and when they wanted a new member of staff would put a notice in the window “Assistant wanted, Catholics need not apply”.  There was little danger they would anyway.

McBrearty’s was the grocery store run by Paddy (a decent big man, his funeral had the biggest “offerings” ever heard of in the town (£106).  To achieve over £100 was almost unheard of.  Annie, his wife was more business like and had to be avoided where possible.  You went to the shop counter with your list which he or she took and compiled calling it out as they went “One bag o sugar, one pound o tea, one pound o bacon (had to cut it on the bacon slicer from a huge roll tied with string).  The sugar and tea weighted out and put in blue paper bags as was flour.  Butter cut from a slab and shaped by two wooden paddles.  It was all “charged up” and put in “the book” which was kept in the shop.  There would be a message boy to deliver on his bicycle with a huge iron frame on the front.  A message boy’s job was the worst paid – 5 shillings a week and no prospect of promotion ever.

Bobby Fulton delivered the milk in bottles and took away the empties (washed and laid out for him overnight) early every morning, including Sundays.  He had a horse and cart until he got a lorry in the late 1940s.  He also had buttermilk but nothing else.  Cream was not available then but the top of the bottle had 2-3 inches of cream that floated to the top.

The fish man came around with his cart on Fridays and had a “yodel” to announce his coming.  His yodel was “fresh herring”.  He would have had kippers, cod and whiting also but I never heard of prawns, scallops or mussels.  Fish was obligatory on Fridays (“fast days” as they were called, not days of abstinence).  Everyone hated fish for this reason and generations of us have never grown out of this.  During lent “fast days” proliferated.

Russels bread van, commandeered by Archie Fletcher called to the house every day.  He had an electric van that could do 10 miles an hour, except down the hills on Nancy’s Lane where it once reached 25 mph.  We were all in it most days as Archie liked company and was liberal with his buns.

Pauline Breslin sold newspapers and her shop smelt of piss.  She had a small shop and a piss pot behind a curtain at the back.  She also sold the Beano and Dandy and somewhere in the late 40s “The Eagle” emerged.  This was mostly “Dan Dare” and space travel.  The illustrations from those comics bore a remarkable resemblance to the space ships and space shuttles which appeared 50 years later.  I often wonder if they created space travel as a reality.

Beside Strabane was the border into Lifford in Donegal.  This was a boom town during the war and up to about 1950.  My father had a particular relationship with Jackie Hart who ran a shop from the front of his house.  My father was never short of cigarettes even during the war, he smoked 60 a day.  The brand of cigarette was anything:  Bendigo, Merino, Woodbine, Park Drive, Players, Sweet Afton, Craven A, Passing Clouds, Gold Flake.  No cigarettes had filters but Craven A had an end that looked like a filter but was only decoration.  It was the cigarette for delicate ladies and men with suede shoes.

Jackie Hart who ran his shop with his big fat wife could neither read nor write.  When he would compile your order, weighing out your ¼ pound of bulls’ eyes etc, he would retreat to the kitchen to get his wife to come and calculate the money and give the change.  When Mrs Hart died Jackie closed down the shop, gave his black Scotty dog (Judy) to my father to mind for him and was never seen again.

Lifford from being a boom town in the 1940s became a ghost town in the 1950s.  The population was only a few hundred and the ambience and maintenance like all Donegal towns then, deplorable.  It didn’t evolve from this until the 1990s when the break with sterling and huge price differentials re-emerged between North and South.