Up West (23 page)

John Sainsbury and his wife, the daughter of a dairyman, opened a small grocery store at 173 Drury Lane, a house with three floors and an attic, in 1869. After their initial success, John Sainsbury planned to establish a small chain of stores, one each for his six sons to manage. It's all a far cry from
today's chain of supermarkets.
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I have always suspected that Mrs Sainsbury's family was Welsh: the great majority of the dairies in the West End were run by Welsh men and women, so much so that even those with English proprietors were referred to as ‘Welsh dairies'. This may have had something to do with Sainsbury's specializing in butter, cheese and dairy products for much of their history.

The Jacksons were registered for dairy rations with Sainsbury's in Drury Lane. Olga remembers ‘the cheese, and the butter that they used to pat and pack themselves, and the big high chairs that you'd sit on while they did it'. Butter pats – wooden paddle-like things with carved surfaces used to shape and brand the butter – came in all sorts of wonderful designs. One paddle might have a design of wavy lines and the other would have a picture of a cow or something: it could be a thistle, or buttercups, it varied from dairy to dairy. Butter was stored in large ceramic bowls, often decorated with a blue and white pastoral design involving cows. The grocer cut a lump out of the butter and weighed it. Next, the paddles were used to pat the lump into shape, taking great care to centre the design properly: dairies were proud of their product. Once the butter pat was made, it was wrapped in greaseproof paper and tied with string to keep the flaps closed.

Most of the food shops in the West End were small and specialized, although there were exceptions, such as Fortnum
& Mason in Piccadilly, the more modest Hammet's, and the Civil Service Stores in the Strand, which had a food hall on its ground floor. These shops were nothing like modern supermarkets: they were more like food department stores – or, in the case of the rather grand Fortnum's, a food emporium. Pepe Rush remembers Hammet's ‘as like a modern supermarket, but old-fashioned', with what were effectively separate shops in the same building.

The normal practice, however, was for the butcher, the grocer, the baker, the dairyman, the greengrocer, the cheesemonger and the fishmonger to have their own specialist premises. I have vivid memories of some of these lovely small shops around Soho: a butcher with lots of game hanging from steel hooks, both inside and outside; drool-inducing displays on glass trays in the windows of fragrant pâtisseries; and particularly, the exotic and exciting delicatessens, festooned with hams and salamis, infused with the scents of coffee, garlic, vanilla, chocolate and dried mushrooms, and humming with activity in a variety of languages – Italian, French, Yiddish, Greek.

These wonderful shops were Soho's pride and joy at a time when meat and two veg – and no seasoning apart from far too much salt and possibly, for the brave, some white pepper – was as adventurous as cuisine got for most people in Britain. There were so many delicatessens in Soho – over fifty, according to Alberto Camisa – that expatriates could find just about anything they might want from the ‘old country', no matter which one it was.

‘Where we were in Berwick Street,' Alberto explained, ‘there was a Jewish delicatessen immediately to our right, a butcher's shop next to him. In Peter Street, there were three Jewish delis and a big fish and chip shop. In Old Compton Street there were ten or twelve – a French delicatessen, three Parmigiani shops, Demonises, the Lena Stores – and everybody knew everybody's prices. If someone came in for a chorizo, we'd say, Go to Ortega – that was another one in Old Compton Street – They have it at two and sixpence a pound. And if Ortega had someone wanting Parma ham, they'd send them round to us. It was like an open-air department store.'

Soho has been associated with gourmet and foreign food in one way or another – cooking it and importing it, as well as selling it – since the French arrived in the seventeenth century, and the Italians, Chinese, Greeks, and many others have carried on this tasty tradition ever since. A description in the
London Courier
in 1955 revelled in the exotic nature of the foodstuffs available. ‘Through the windows of a Soho fishmonger one can see squids and cuttlefish, crayfish, red mullet and eels, and vast sheets of dried cod. The greengrocer sells peppers of every description, artichokes, celeriac, custard apples, avocado pears and about half a dozen different kind of beans. It could not be anywhere else.' For this writer, continental food shops signify Soho as surely as the ‘huge beer barrel' of St Anne's Church clock.

‘There is a famous oyster bar in Old Compton Street that is quiet and English,' the writer continues. ‘There is a roaring Italian café where the waiters sing. You can buy really
good croissants and omelettes in this street, and sandwiched between the restaurants are those gigantic Italian grocery stores, bulging with twenty different kinds of enormous cheeses with twenty different smells, and more over the counter. Racks of pasta, straw-coloured bottles of wine, rows and rows of sausage hanging in racks above your head: fat ones, red ones, black ones, white ones, brown ones. Eight different kinds of rice in bins, ten different kinds of sugar.'

In the fifties, the switch in grocery retailing from the market model – where everything was weighed out and separately bagged in front of you, according to your needs, but you had to wait to be served – to the supermarket model – where everything was pre-packed and priced and you had to wait, in theory, only for other customers' purchases to be totted up – had only just begun.

The supermarkets had their fans – they certainly made shopping quicker, once you got used to the new rules – but the shops that leave the most vivid memories are ones from the pre-pre-packed era. Graham Jenkins remembers Law's, in Drury Lane: ‘All the currants and that used to be in aluminium-lined drawers. They used to tell me, Go on, help yourself. I used to go in there and get a few currants and raisins out of the drawers. Their cheese and all that was on display – you'd get that smell, when you walked in the place, with all that mixture of foods, the dried fruits and that.'

On the other side of the Strand, Barbara Jones went to Darby's in Craven Street. ‘It was a general provisions shop, a grocer: they sold beer, and I also got Pepsis there. It was
one of those shops with a flap in the counter, and a trapdoor down to the cellar; a real old-fashioned place, with biscuits in tin boxes with a glass lid.'

Leo Zanelli harbours fond memories of ‘a great big sweet shop in Leicester Square. I remember it vividly because they would always have a giant block of honeycomb and they would chip a lump off for you.'

Pepe Rush, who lived just down the road from me in Old Compton Street, remembers the shops there very fondly. ‘Pâtisserie Valerie was opposite where I lived, between the newsagent and the Vintage House. The Café Bleu was not far away, and a tobacconist in Frith Street was where my dad got his cigars.' So did mine. Father smoked big, fat, Romeo and Julietta Cuban ones that smelt wonderful. ‘Pugh's dairy was round the corner, run by Pugh's daughter,' Pepe recalls, ‘and on the corner of Dean Street, first there was an Algerian café or something, and later there was Anello & Davide, where my mum bought her ballet shoes.'

As well as Pugh's Welsh Dairy in Frith Street, there was another in Peter Street, in Green Court, with a really memorable feature. ‘I always called it Mrs Cooper's,' remembers Janet Vance. ‘It had a cow outside, a cow-sized metal cow. You put your money in a slot, used the tail as a pump, and filled your jug from that.'

Sonia Boulter remembers Slater, Bisney & Cook, along Brewer Street, for other reasons: ‘It was a very high-class butcher's. My youngest brother, when he left school, went to work there for a while. Taught me all about meat, you know,
the cuts. It was a lovely shop. Lots of tiles, lots of windows, very clean-looking. The counters were always spotless.'

I am delighted to say that some of these shops still flourish today, West Enders being slower than most to sacrifice quality, choice and taste on the altar of vast profits and bland uniformity. The shopkeepers, in turn, don't want to let family reputations, gained over generations of hard work, fall apart. And the work
was
hard. ‘We used to open from half-past eight to six o'clock or half-past,' remembers Alberto Camisa. ‘At Christmas time we opened from seven until nine or ten at night; we opened Christmas morning. Thursday afternoons we were closed. My parents never went out at night, they were knackered. The shop opened at nine but they were up at half-seven, and it shut at six, but by the time you'd closed up and cleaned up, it was seven thirty.'

Hard work was a family tradition. Ennio and Isidoro had lost their first business in the war, and had had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, building up their business again from scratch at the shop in Berwick Street. They were helped by having family ties with other shopkeepers, particularly the Parmigianis. The three Parmigiani shops in Old Compton Street were run by cousins. Like the Camisas, they came from Tasorgno, ‘in Parma ham country'.

There was never any question that Alberto and his brother Francesco would follow in their father's footsteps, ‘You started working as soon as you started walking. As soon as you could see above the counter, you'd serve. You'd come home from school, finish your homework, if the shop was still
open, you went downstairs. On Saturdays, you would help out. Go and get stuff from the cellar, put it on the shelves. We had our little chores. Like most people, we had bare wooden stairs, and we had to wash the stairs once or twice a week with a scrubbing brush.

‘Kids always helped out. If their parents had restaurants, they'd help out in the kitchens, wash the dishes, help lay the table. The shop, workshop or restaurant was considered part of your house. Most people lived above it, next door to it, or not far away. It was all family-run, so you helped your dad or mum do the work. It wasn't slave labour or anything, it was just expected that you would help your parents. When the shop shut,
then
you could go out and play.

‘The shop wasn't very long, about thirty feet, and sometimes there were seven of us behind the counter and we did not have time for lunch, we were that busy. There would be two people downstairs bringing stuff up from the cellar.'

Naturally, time brings changes and many shops have disappeared: Fratelli Camisa has long gone from Berwick Street, for example, and the building was demolished in 2008. Some familiar names remain. Pâtisserie Valerie has made people drool for as long as I can remember, the Algerian coffee shop still prides itself on supplying quality coffee beans and teas to a devoted clientele, Lena Stores continues to supply pasta, dried beans and much, much more from its corner of Brewer Street, and there are several others that are still trading. Unlike Covent Garden, Berwick Street market is still there, although the barrows have fallen silent: trucks
bring the produce from Nine Elms now. The faces, and the accents, of the costermongers have changed over the years but the cries of, ‘No squeezing 'til it's yours, missus, surely your mother told you that,' or something similar can still be heard above the general racket. West End locals still have some of the best food shops in the country in which to forage for their three square meals – and nowadays there are no ration books or coupons to worry about.

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John Sainsbury died towards the end of the twenties. His last reported words were, ‘Keep the shops well lit.'

‘Ooh, bona to vada your dolly old eek,' declaimed the distinctively nasal tones of Kenneth Williams in the justly popular sixties radio programme,
Round the Horne
. Most listeners could only have guessed what Williams was saying, but of the relative few who actually understood every word, the great majority would have been living, working or playing in London's West End. Kenneth Williams and his sidekick, Hugh Paddick, always started their sketch with the catchphrase, ‘Hello, I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy,' and then launched into Polari, the secret language adopted by some, but certainly not all, of Britain's homosexuals.

In those profoundly class-ridden days when the population was summarily consigned to ‘top drawer', ‘middle drawer' or ‘bottom drawer', Polari was most popular with working-class gay men. Ordinary seamen (but not officers), dockers in the East End and show people in the West End used
Polari extensively in the forties, fifties and sixties. ‘Higher class' thespians, such as Sir John Gielgud and the bisexual Sir Laurence Olivier, probably rarely, if ever, used it, but ‘chorus boys', bit part players and stagehands did. Hotels and restaurants boasted quite a large gay population and many of those working in West End establishments were fluent Polari speakers in their off-duty hours. ‘Julian', his ‘friend Sandy' and
Round the Horne
were a much-loved part of Sunday afternoons for a large section of the UK population and it seemed to matter not at all that most listeners didn't know what on earth the pair were talking about – which is just as well, as often what they were talking about was wildly
risqué
. How Polari speakers must have loved to have been in on the secret!

Here's an example of a Polari exchange.

Man one
: ‘Oh, vada the omee ajax who just trolled in – her in her cod lally-drags. Bona eke, bene corybungas but a fashioned riah if ever I clocked one. She must be on the team.' (
Translation
: ‘Look at the man next to us who just walked in, him in his bad trousers. Nice face, good arse, but a wig if ever I saw one. He must be gay.')

Man Two
: ‘Nanti, nanti ducky, she's a charpering omee, I've seen her down the charpering carsey. Time to scarper and toot sweet.' (
Translation
: ‘No, no dear, he's a policeman, I've seen him at the police station. Time to leave and fast.')