196. Nuts at Granny's

Discovering the sort of independence we couldn't get at home.

In which Rebecca remembers early shopping trips with her brother to buy their own noisy snacks.

---

Dear Reader,

Granny and Grandfather lived near the sea in a 1930s semi-detached house peppered – no, pebbledashed¹ – with original vernacular features. The front door was painted a gaudy yellow, and the draughty leaded-light windows had jewel-like stained glass features in green and red.

Number 19 shared a party wall with next door, and its garden was bordered by flint walls. There was a low wall at the front, and the ones standing on the right-hand boundary and the back were taller even than Daddy.

The pair of houses was located on the inside of a long bend of one of the main streets in the village. Beyond the front wall was a wide pavement, and by turning right onto it and walking only a few steps we’d get to a parade of tiny shops. Although Granny would always cook for us at home, we loved that our visits coincided with the lunchhour ‘frying time’ posted on the door of the chippy which would season the already salty air yet further with the seaside scents of hot batter and vinegar. There was a tired old convenience store which sold the dusty packets of Angel Delight which Granny would sometimes buy for us kids to turn into a strawberry, chocolate or butterscotch Sunday-lunch dessert using her ancient mechanical handwhisk.

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash

---

🥜 The treat of going shopping on our own

After lunch, once the grown-ups were all chatting over a cup of tea and my brother and I had begun to fidget, Granny would tell us to open the cupboard beneath the clock. On a low shelf, perfectly within reach, two little purses would be waiting. My brother’s was a shiny red oblong with a chrome clasp, and mine was tatty leather in school-uniform maroon, but it wasn’t the purses themselves that excited us, but what they contained.

Taking care to keep the piles separate, we’d carefully tip our money onto the little side table in order to count the coins. We knew how much we’d need to cover what we were going to buy, and having stacked up the three sizes of coppers which Granny had been collecting out of her own change since our last visit, we’d work out what denominations we’d hand over in the shop. The highest-value coins were the 2-pence pieces, twice the size and way heavier than the pennies, but it was the half-pence pieces I loved the best. They were tiny, and in place of the fleur-de-lys design on the obverse of every 2p and the portcullis and chains depicted on the penny, each light-as-a-feather ½p sported a beautiful crown.

‘Have you got enough?’ Granny would ask seriously, knowing full well even before our emphatic nods that we had.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

‘Off you go, then!’

It was so exciting to be walking to a shop without adult supervision. The surroundings of our own house offered no such opportunity; it was isolated, located on a busy main road with a 60mph speed limit and no pavement, and it was out of the question for us to even attempt to walk to the shop at the bottom of our hill.

At Granny’s we would open the front door and scamper out to the pavement, turning right and passing the postbox on the inside of the corner and past nearly all of the shops.

The one at the end of the parade was a greengrocer. It always felt dark inside, and smelled unspecifically agricultural with an accompanying air of damp paper bags. Little stacks of these would be hanging from their corner loops of thin string, and I loved to pull one so that it would tear at the corner and be mine to fill.

We were there for one thing: peanuts.

There were always two sacks of them on the floor on the left-hand side of the shop, just inside the door. One was full of kernels, their matte red-brown skins showing up darkly against the beige paper sack, and the other bulged with peanuts still in their shells. The knobbly neighbours to the much sleeker kernels were an unattractive grubby brown, and such strange shapes.

‘Why can’t we get the other ones?’ I’d ask the lady in the shop. I asked her every time, hoping to avoid the dusty and tedious task of removing the shells myself.

‘Those ones are for the birds, remember?’ would come the same reply she always gave. ‘They’ve been treated with chemicals that are bad for people’s tummies.’

I never minded for long, of course. We filled our bags with peanuts to what we thought was about the right level to represent half a pound, and took them to the scales to be weighed. Adjustments were made – perhaps a peanut or two taken out of one bag and popped into another, or a handful removed altogether in exchange for our sighs and baleful glances.

Having handed over our coppers in the shop, back at Granny’s my brother and I would settle down with our bags of nuts, popping – or sometimes twisting – them open to fish out the kernels to crunch. I don’t remember the adults ever complaining about the noise we would make during this exacting process, and this surprises me enormously. Anyone who nibbles noisy snacks or rustles any kind of paper or packaging within twenty yards of me these days drives me absolutely nuts. 🙄

Ah, what patience those grown-ups had. And what generosity in their gifts of both coppers and independence of the kind that was only available at Granny’s.

Those treasures are worth far more than peanuts.

Love,

Rebecca x

📚 Reading and writing ✒️

📚 I haven’t been doing very much reading at all on Substack this week, but I’ve not been idle! ⬇️

✒️ I’ve been spending my spare time since my last post going back to school on a weekly CityLit writing course over Zoom taught by

Terry Freedman

. So far it’s been a voyage of wonderful discovery resulting in – to my own astonishment – two pieces of Rebecca-written fiction!

I’m enjoying exploring the reading material for this course as well as the writing exercises. I thought I’d be very nervous sharing my thoughts and my work both verbally in the classroom and in writing afterwards, but I need not have worried: it’s a very safe space, and I’ve been learning a great deal both from the tutor and from my fellow students.

📚 As regular readers of ‘Dear Reader, I’m Lost' will know, I already have an ongoing writing relationship with Terry in the form of regular, light-hearted correspondence on Wednesdays. We took a break last week, but I’m looking forward to catching up. It’s his turn to reply to me.

---

If you’ve enjoyed this post, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you.

And thank you for reading! If you enjoy ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’, please share and subscribe for free.

1. A pebbledashed finish on a house in British English is what would be called roughcast in some other places in the world.
Find out more from this Wikipedia entry.