Dancing in the moonlight by Sarah Plant

Finally, the weather breaks. 

‘Mummy!'  Tom wails from the conservatory.

‘What?' I snap back, ironing savagely.

‘Can we go outside?'

‘Don't be ridiculous!  All summer I've wanted you to play outside and you pick the day it rains!  Why don't you watch a DVD until I get this lot finished.'

Tom turns away from finger-smeared patio doors. 

‘It's not rained for ages!  We should go outside and do a thank-you rain dance.'

Late August 1976 and it hadn't rained for weeks.  My family had been running a shop for two years - The Oldest Sweetshop in England.  In an attempt to earn a living against the growing number of supermarkets, we opened early and closed late.  We were beginning to learn our trade, and had stopped making elementary mistakes: eating the stock that wasn't selling or crying out ‘there's a mouse!' when one scuttled across the shop floor behind the customers' backs.  These incidents would not be repeated - we laughed at our previous naivety. 

This year we had different challenges: the chocolate had melted and it was impossible to get hold of ice-cream. 

My grandmother, mother and I were the sisterhood who ran the business.  My father was a policeman, which kept him too busy to work behind the counter.  My thirteen year old brother was no help.  He would spend the next five years ‘out'.  I had gone from his best friend to ‘that pain' since he had started secondary school.  The four year age gap had become a chasm.

Out of school, I was a working woman.  I armed myself with my personal toffee hammer, ready for making up quarters of invalid toffee.  I served Grammar School teenagers single cigarettes and a book of matches for five pence.  I advised my grandmother on the intricacies of the decimal system.  We would have muttered conversations behind the counter.

‘How much are those Weekend chocolates, Sarah?  Bloody hell!  That's 10 shillings in proper money.  Bloody ridiculous.'

My mental arithmetic was as sharp as a sherbert lemon - times tables honed through counting out six jelly teddies for a penny and adding up the Christmas Club monies.  Our till was a wooden drawer under the counter.  Next to it my mother kept a small, blue plastic egg cup, just for the sixpences.  We still accepted old sixpences, but once over the counter they were sent on their final journey down the High Street to the Bank.  We would be their last transaction.

I was fiercely proud of the shop and believed myself to be an important - essential - member of the community.  Liptons and Fine Fayre wouldn't remember that Mr B bought 20 Craven A every Friday or that Father J, the local Priest, smoked Lambert & Butler because his family had owned the firm.  I loved every well-swept, sweet-covered inch of the place.

I would stand on the pavement outside and read the black, Gothic lettering on the white-washed front wall: ‘The Oldest Sweetshop in England - 1721'.  We had that printed on boxes of souvenir sweets.  I often stood by the front door, in anticipation of customers.  I would open and close it for them, to hear the little metal bell jangle.  I felt it added a personal touch.  My Gran made me cut-down overalls, identical to hers. 

‘Now how are we supposed to tell you apart!'  Mr B said. 

‘I'm smaller.'  I told him, seriously.  ‘And I have to go to school.'

When I was tired of being on the door I would slip back behind the counter.  I had plenty of other jobs.  I collected pop bottle empties (penny back on each one) and kept them dust-free, ready for the van.  I would refill the two display counters and organise the boxes of penny sweets, which covered the top of the ice-cream freezer: firemen's hoses, liquorice laces, sweet tobacco, flying saucers and pink shrimps. All had to be displayed to best advantage.  I knew what would entice a child with 10 new pence to spend.

Next, I would move on to the jars, checking levels were high enough and wiping them down to make the glass shine.  My favourite job was restocking cigars and cigarettes.  I loved the smell of the familiar tobacco-scented packets - each make with its own particular odour.  My brother and I had tried a cigarette each that summer, but I was disappointed - they didn't live up the smell.  I had decided to stick to the sweet variety instead, with their little pink candy tips.   I felt they gave me an air of mystery, drooping languidly from my lips, as I stood on my box behind the counter.

In that long, hot summer we used a heavy weight to keep the door propped open and pulled the window blinds down.  Apart from ice-pops - and we sold eight boxes of those a day by August - the ice-cream fridge was empty, the Lyons Maid rep in despair.  Mivvis and Orange Maids were only available on the confectionary black market and my Dad wouldn't have any of that.  Chocolate wilted.  Toffee softened.  The Yorkshire Mixture grew sticky within its jar, baked into a solid mass of glucose.  In those pre-mineral water days, our empty pop bottles were useful to take to the standpipes. 

The corners of the windows filled with vast, torpid ladybirds. 

‘Look at the buggers!'  My Gran would cry.  ‘Look at the bloody size of them!  I could saddle them and ride them!' 

They gathered together in every corner of house and shop - a 70s ladybird love-in.

If it was too hot or too quiet in the shop - often the pensioners wouldn't come out until dusk, waiting for the cooler air, like hedgehogs with shopping trolleys - I'd push aside the rainbow coloured plastic fly curtain and go through the narrow passage into the house.  We had no garden, but I did have a climbing frame in the back yard and a large, square paddling pool.  The climbing frame was too hot to touch and the hose-pipe ban had put an end to the paddling pool.  Besides, I would have had to shovel the ladybirds out first.  My sunflowers gasped in their pots, faces rearing up to the sun.  My Dad had erected a shade to cover the guinea-pig hutch and they lay, panting, as far towards the back as they could.

Often I would retreat to the cellar with a book, surrounded by bulbous spiders and crates of pop.  The old stone walls were cool to the touch and I sat on the flagged steps, feeling the cold slabs against my bare legs. 

‘Sarah - we've got a rush on!'  Always the same words.

I would climb wearily, stickily, back upstairs.  Gran usually meant a coach trip had arrived.  Identical white-haired women in M&S dresses with funny accents - usually Lancastrians or Geordies.  I didn't know where their husbands were, but they obviously weren't allowed to travel.  Wednesdays was market day and the buses would disgorge thirty, forty at a time.  They would wander critically past the castle, then surge purposely across the market place towards the High Street.  They loved to stand arm in arm in front of our shop to have their photographs taken against our sign.  Gran encouraged this, would offer to snap them and then, in her shop voice, the one she kept for best, try to sell them the boxed sweets with the shop picture on.  They had the biggest mark-up.  I tried to stop her converting back to old money in front of the customers.

We stayed open until after nine, to beat off the supermarkets.  As it was the summer holidays, I was allowed, encouraged to help most nights.  One night, late, in August, my parents were out at a Police dinner.  I'd watched my Mum get her face on, then dress in a long, swirly patterned frock matched with a black choker.  Gran made all our dresses, without the need for patterns, with material from Jack on the market.  My brother was camping with the Scouts.   Gran and I were in charge.  After she'd fleeced me at gin rummy, I'd gone up to bed. 

My room was in the old, upstairs lounge.  The people who owned the shop before us had lived up here, rather than in the two downstairs rooms.  It had a dais down one side, where I kept my old rocking horse and dolls house.  My bed was pushed up against the peeling, wood-framed window.  Its tiny panes of glass let me keep an eye on the comings and goings of the pub and the bus station opposite.  My brother had to go through my room to reach his.  Originally, it had been the kitchen.  My parents had decided to keep all the units and the sink.  The only addition was his bed and a complicated Matchbox car track. 

I couldn't sleep.  It was hot with the windows closed, even hotter with the window open.  I'd drawn the curtains but could see the ladybirds massing on my windowsill.  Laid on top of the sheets, in the absence of sheep, I counted their spots.  I could hear Gran in the spare room down the landing, which she shared with boxes of Callard & Bowser nougat.  I knew her routine.  She must be up to the Ponds Vanishing Cream as she was singing: ‘List to me while I tell you, of the Spaniard that blighted my life, tra-la!'  She broke off, mid tra-la and I heard her hurrying along the landing. 

 ‘Sarah!  Get up!  Come on!'

Bemused, I got up and put my slippers on.  She was already gone, thumping her way downstairs.

‘Gran, where are you?'

‘Kitchen!'  She shouted.

The galley kitchen ran the length of the house.  As I went in, she was fumbling with the bolt on the back stable door.

‘Gran, what are you doing?   It's nearly eleven.'

‘Wait and see.'

I followed her into the yard, to see fat rain drops hit the plastic padding pool, sending the ladybirds skittering for cover.  As each drop hit, motes of dust bounced up into the air.  The guinea-pigs were at the front of the hutch, squeaking in relief and the sunflowers were spread wide in grateful anticipation.

‘It's raining!'  She shouted, grabbing hold of my hands, ‘It's finally raining!' and, in the yard, in our nighties and slippers, we danced the night away

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