Household goods
A fully automatic top loading washing machine arrived at home one day. Bendix by name. Our house had cellars, so a staging was erected under the kitchen floor to cope with the spinning barrel in the machine. It stopped the washer travelling along the kitchen floor when spinning out the wet clothes. Mother used a Prestige Pressure Cooker for vegetables etc, it had weights horizontally fixed on the lid. They had a habit of flying off at pressure and hitting the kitchen door.
Shopping
Mother would shop for food at John Williams a chain of Provision Merchants centred around Mid Wales and the borders. Mother would sit on a chair and the manager would dance attendance; samples of cheese, sweet biscuits, bacon etc, were offered for approval. I would be given a chocolate biscuit to eat. The bacon was sliced on a large red slicer with a shinny round blade, turned by hand; sugar was ladled into blue bags; butter sliced into greaseproof paper, and wrapped on the long Mahogany counter, all along one side of the counter, on the floor were 7lb biscuit tins with glass lids enabling the customer to see the variety available.
Mother would tender the money which was placed in a round mental container; above her head; it was sat on a wire; the cord was pulled and the money fled across the ceiling to a cashier somewhere in the distance. Change would arrive back in seconds.
Food coupons exchanged hands; they were ripped out of a buff coloured book. Part of the wartime rationing which perpetuated until the mid 50s
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