I worked in old Grimmett’s shop for nearly six years. Grimmett was a fine, upstanding, white-whiskered old chap, like a rather stouter version of Uncle Ezekiel, and like Uncle Ezekiel a good Liberal. But he was less of a firebrand and more respected in the town. He’d trimmed his sails during the Boer War, he was a bitter enemy of trade unions and once sacked an assistant for possessing a photograph of Keir Hardie, and he was “chapel”—in fact he was a big noise, literally, in the Baptist Chapel, known locally as the Tin Tab—whereas my family were “church” and Uncle Ezekiel was an infidel at that. Old Grimmett was a town councillor and an official of the local Liberal Party. With his white whiskers, his canting talk about liberty of conscience and the Grand Old Man, his thumping bank balance and the extempore prayers you could sometimes hear him letting loose when you passed the Tin Tab, he was a little like a legendary nonconformist grocer in the story—you’ve heard it, I expect:

“James!”

“Yessir!”

“Have you sanded the sugar?”

“Yessir!”

“Have you watered the treacle?”

“Yessir!”

“Then come up to prayers.”

God knows how often I heard that story whispered in the shop. We did actually start the day with a prayer before we put up the shutters. Not that old Grimmett sanded the sugar. He knew that that doesn’t pay. But he was a sharp man in business, he did all the high-class grocery trade of Lower Binfield and the country round, and he had three assistants in the shop besides the errand-boy, the van-man and his own daughter (he was a widower) who acted as cashier. I was the errand-boy for my first six months. Then one of the assistants left to “set up” in Reading and I moved into the shop and wore my first white apron. I learned to tie a parcel, pack a bag of currants, grind coffee, work the bacon-slicer, carve ham, put an edge on a knife, sweep the floor, dust eggs without breaking them, pass off an inferior article as a good one, clean a window, judge a pound of cheese by eye, open a packing-case, whack a slab of butter into shape and—what was a good deal the hardest—remember where the stock was kept. I haven’t such detailed memories of grocering as I have of fishing, but I remember a good deal. To this day I know the trick of snapping a bit of string in my fingers. If you put me in front of a bacon-slicer I could work it better than I can a typewriter. I could spin you some pretty fair technicalities about grades of China tea and what margarine is made of and the average weight of eggs and the price of paper bags per thousand.