Do you remember when a penny was real money?

A penny was a large copper coin back when I was a child.. 

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It weighed richly in my hand when my dad chose to give my sisters and me a penny each to spend at the corner shop. With permission granted to leave our garden we would fly on wings of fairies to pick up our sticks at the gate and run, dodging the lines on the pavement of course, otherwise " bad luck until you die!"

Freedom lent fleetness of foot to the three of us. 

Lily the eldest by several years had a slight advantage and she would lift her stick first and drag it deliciously NOISILY along horrible old Mrs Spratt's long, corrugated iron fence partitioning her vegetable garden from the public eye and their thieving fingers! Then as the second oldest I would add to the clattering hullabaloo with my stick running over the corrugated surface and when the youngest Amy  also added to the gargling  noise the net curtain would twitch violently and we would flee the X ray vision  and poisonous glare of the old "witch'. Gasping with horror and the relief of not being caught we would leap the  fire hydrant in victory and come to a pile up of bodies at the beginning of the red brick wall of The Corner Shop.

The door was on the corner of the building angled to look out across the main Church Street. It was wide and inviting with a sign reading

"Mr Timm's Corner sweet shop" above it. Carved in the fancy concrete above that was a mysterious 1935, in curly letters.

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It was an Alladin's cave of glorious treats. There were gleaming tall bottles of sweets, striped candy sticks, black round balls that stained the tongue and lips dark as pitch.   Coconut orange squares, Wilson toffees, long strands of licorice wound round a sweet treasure in the middle and the most treasured prize of all, a lucky packet. Those cost a tickey and were a longed for prize.

Of course there were loaves of bread and pink slabs of polony plus newspapers for sale but as children we only had eyes for the sweet treats.....Four for a penny!

The choosing was agonising....a black ball could be sucked for minutes on end, but the creamy goodness of a Wilson toffee (only two for a penny 'cos they were much bigger) was so tempting and then there was the lure of Chappies bubble gum with wise bits of information on the striped wrapper. I learned aged 5 that Pluto was the smallest planet and as an adult was sad when it was demoted to a mere star!

The main attraction was actually Mr Timm himself. He was a large, grandfatherly man with silver hair and black beetling eyebrows plus a twinkle in his eye. He had a great sense of humour and a way with the children in his street that attracted my sisters and me like iron filings to a magnet.

When we had recovered our breaths we planned our attack with military precision.

The leader, sometimes me to my intense happiness, would crouch down below the level of the long window at the side of the shop. Our skirts would be tucked into our 'bloomers' so as not to trip us up. Bums below the eyeline of Mr Timm, should he be looking out that way, we would creep up to the angled door. The leader got to peep cautiously around the door jamb.

 Oh glory be if he was reading The Natal Witness on the counter, unaware of the enemy lurking at his door. On my signal we would screech round the corner whooping and firing our pointed finger pistols at him "crack, zing crack bang crack zing bang!"

Obligingly, if we truly caught him unaware, he would writhe up in pretended agony and fall dramatically across his newspaper, feigning death until we ran up to the counter to pat him wherever we could reach, to reassure him it was "only us."  OH the laughter that would rumble from his belly delighting us further as we giggled hysterically. Occasionally he had spied us as someone's bottom showed up above the window sill and he would be waiting for us! He would fire HIS finger gun and the rule of the game was that we would sprawl all over the wooden floor.  

Slowly the gasps would subside and then the laborious business of choosing our treats would begin. He never rushed us. He sold loaves sometimes cut in half with a strip of tissue paper to protect the bread from dirty workers' hands and newspapers while we weighed up the endless possibilities of our purchases.

Then, with sometimes an extra gumball in our bulging cheeks, we would stop at the doorway and turn as a smiling threesome and wave goodbye and thank you.

We would disappear out of his life like wraiths until the day a momentous decision was made that took us out of his life forever. 

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Look for the sequel tomorrow!