I started work at the Co-op on the corner of Lower Cliff and Bells Road after school Monday to Friday and all day Saturday until I left school and became full time with a wage of 30/- (£1.50) per week. Of this my mother had £1 and the other 10/- was for clothes etc. and pocket money. There was a small bonus of tips.
Before I go any further I ought to describe what a grocers shop was like before the era of supermarkets. The layout and methods of work had changed very little since the 19th century, and customers were still served individually by an assistant over the counter or they could leave an order to be delivered by the errand boy. At our shop we also collected country orders every Tuesday and delivered them by van on Wednesday.  

A much changed Co-op

The shop had a large window at the front with displays of packets and tins of the products we sold. The entrance door was beside this window. The interior of the shop was rectangular, with a counter running along one side, shelves behind it packed with goods, cereals and other light boxes on the top. These we got down using a cane with a hook on the end to pull them off and catch them as they fell. There were drawers under the counter which held dried fruits and various commodities we had pre-packed in the shop. At the far end of the counter, at a right angles was the provision counter with a marble slab top, a bacon machine at one end and weighing scale at the other. The area in the middle filled with large pieces of cheese to be cut to requirement on the cheese slicer and neat piles of cut bacon and ham for customers to select from. Small off-cuts, carefully hidden within! If anyone wanted their bacon sliced thinner or thicker the bacon machine would come into action. Butter and other fats which had been pre-packed in the shop earlier, were behind the provision counter which was the domain of the provision assistant. Food was still rationed, we called across, "rations for two" or however many ration books the person had, the customer selected the cut of bacon they wanted and the rest of the provision ration would be added and brought round to the counter.The other side of the shop had shelves for mostly tinned goods and bottles. In the centre was a glass case containing square tins of loose biscuits which we weighed up as required. The eggs were on that side too. There was a chair at either end of the counter for the use of customers.  Through the back was a large walk in cold room where the sides of bacon, hams, and boxes of butter and fats, in fact anything perishable was kept. There were more shelves for reserve stocks and a tiny office with a desk and a small window into the shop, where Mr. Alger did the books. Outside in a tiny yard with a large gate onto the road was the "warehouse", ha, ha! In reality a brick lean-to with a sink and gas ring for making tea at break times. Also used for storing the empty boxes to be used for orders, sacks of potatoes and the vinegar barrel. (made up from a concentrate). Adjoining this was a small toilet. 
My first job in the mornings was to sweep the forecourt and in the summer pull out the sun blind with a long pole with a hook on the end. In the evening I had to sprinkle the floor with water before sweeping it so not to create dust. 
A regular task was to peel the muslin skin off the large cylindrical cheeses that weighed about ½ cwt., (25kg.) so they could go onto the provision counter to be cut into slices of varying sizes for the customers. Sometimes the skin would just peel straight off. Another time it would be a battle between me and it, a fight every inch of the way, scraping off the skin piece by piece. Then, it was my worst job.
I used to play practical jokes and one day I opened a jar of shoe cream and asked Sydney, a rather rotund grocer with a hooked nose to sniff it and tell me what it smelt like. When he put his nose to it I went to dab it on the end but things went a little wrong, and he ended up with it all over his nose. He was furious and when Mr. Alger the manager came into the shop, told him "either he goes or I do", but things calmed down again and, well I was there until I was called up for National Service.  
My main job when I first started was delivering the orders. They were made up on the counter when the shop wasn’t busy and put into the reclaimed cardboard boxes in a row on the floor and I took them in the order I wanted for delivery by a trade bike with a very large carrier in the front which held two or three household orders or one large boarding house order. My usual delivery direction was southwards, which meant I started off up hill and with no gears it was a hard upward grind. Unloading a guest house order could also be a problem. Most times there was a passer by to render assistance, if not it was rather hit and miss. On one occasion I dismounted, forgetting to keep my weight on the saddle and before I was able to stop it the bike upended, standing on its carrier with eggs rolling onto the pavement. I hurriedly re-packed the offending box, apologised for the egg shortage, promising to replace them later.  My most perilous journey was collecting trays of cakes from the Co-op bakery on Beach Road, with sometimes four or five trays sitting across the carrier. The very sharp turning from Beach Road round into Cliff Hill which is uphill was to say the least, tricky. Maneuverability was limited and even a silent prayer didn’t always work. More than once that corner would be my downfall, and a lucky day for some others. When customers saw the cakes in the display case looking slightly injured and at half price, they would say with a smile, "Dennis fallen off again"? Mr. Alger would grimmace. 
On Wednesday afternoons I used to go out with Algy the van driver to deliver the country orders that one of the assistants had collected on his weekly round the previous day.  Grocers, butchers and greengrocers all had errand boys, some full time like myself; the smaller shops had mainly part time after school and Saturdays. Colletts, a grocers across the road which had originally been the Co-op shop before it moved to the larger premises had a full timer, Eddie MacDonald known as "Lardy".  Bellamy’s the butcher had a full timer whose name I cannot recall. Brian Riches was part time at David Greig, a multiple which had branches all over the country. Kenny Blockwell delivered part time for Proctors, a grocer and greengrocer on the corner of Cliff Hill and Lower Cliff Road which recently has been converted into a house. Mike Bullock was part-time errand boy at Mitchell’s the greengrocer further up Bells Road. At the south end of Bells Road Mr. Blyth’s daughter did his grocery deliveries by cycle, while he delivered the milk, at one time in a noisy three-wheeled delivery vehicle. There were others that my memory has lost in the mists of time, but add to these the paper delivery boys and there were an awful lot of deliveries going on!
The Magdalen Estate was being built and we had customers moving into the new houses. The whole place was one enormous building site, with some houses completed, some being built and part roads. Amongst all this I had to find the new roads and where the houses were, but bit by bit the estate was built, and bit by bit I found my way around. I believe St. Hughes Green was one of the earlier roads I had to find.
The worst delivery I ever had was to a new customer on Cliff Hill. As soon as the door was opened the aroma of stale urine met me. I was asked to take the box in and put it on the table. The room was bare except for a table and some chairs, with two small children sitting at the table and a pale thin baby sitting in a bare pram. As soon as I put the box on the table I was off. It was my first experience of how some people still lived in the twentieth century, and when I returned to the shop, I told Mr. Alger I wouldn’t go there again, and the reason. I was never asked to go again.
When I had been at the Co-op just under a year I was asked if I would like to work in the shop. There was no training, I gained experience by asking questions and observing the others as I went along.  I liked the experience of greeting customers, many I already knew by name, and collecting what they asked for to put on the counter in front of them. Then I would remind them of other things they might need but had forgotten as I had seen the others do. Very clumsy salesmanship!  Totalling bills was no problem, I was quick and with all the practice became very quick by being able to see figures in groups, not needing to add individual figures.  There is a thing in retailing called shrinkage, which is lost profit due to pilferage, mistakes, perishables going off etc., also another small item I will come to shortly. This is every managers nightmare. To make sure the annual stocktake shows a balance the odd penny was added to various items. I seldom knew what items these were just the price to charge. I now confess I was the last item on the shrinkage list. Being a wartime child I had always known butter as a precious commodity, in fact in the early 50’s it was still rationed. For my morning lunch when we were weighing up butter to pack in ½ lb (just over 200grms.) slabs, it was cool and firm from the cold room.   Four cream crackers made into two sandwiches, with nearly a centimetre of thick butter in each, was absolute heaven. Sometimes I was sent to Matthes the bakers for freshly made milk rolls, mine received the same treatment as the cream crackers. There is no roll available today to rival either Matthes or Bullards on Nile Road. The odd biscuit might also find it’s way into my stomach during the course of the day - perks of the job!  Monday was a very slow day for customers in the shop but there was always something to be done, customers or no customers because many items didn’t come ready packed as today and had to be weighed and packed in the shop. This is where technique came in.  Sugar was weighed and packed into 1lb.and 2lb thick blue paper bags. The technique was in folding the top in and shaping it to tuck into the full bag to make it leak proof. The same was done with dried fruit. For glace cherries you took a rectangle of grease proof paper, twisted it round into a cone and put a twist in the bottom to seal it; the cherries were then put in and the top folded in similar to the sugar bag. Butter and fats were done on the provision counter. They came in a 28lb. (about 12.5 kilos.) block packed in a cardboard box. This was taken from the cold room and sliced through in layers with cheese wire and cut down through the centre in the same way. Slabs of approximately ½lb or 1lb., were cut off, put on a square of grease proof on the scale to which we added or subtracted butter to get it to the correct weight, then folded the paper in the same way as you would fold a parcel. Lard was relatively easy to cut, but it wasn’t very often available.  The wartime replacement for lard was cooking fat. There was no easy way of dealing with that commodity. It was hard and splintered instead of cutting clean. We tried a hot knife and everything else that came to mind, but it just wouldn’t co-operate.Bacon came in the form of sides, which is the complete half of a pig, minus head and lower part of the legs. The first job in the summer was to wipe the "fly blows" out of the knuckle joints. Oh dear what would they say today?  Sides started off covered in a muslin skin, but by the time they arrived at the shop it was in tatters and we never thought anything of it. We lived and didn’t topple over to challenges by the odd "bug"! Perhaps a lesson to be learned here, or is it too late and the damage already done by our superior hygiene?  It was the provision hands job to remove all the bones. except in the hocks, (which were sold, bone in) with as little wastage as possible. (remember shrinkage). Quite a skilled job. Cutting out the rib bones is relatively easy, the skill comes in removing the ham (pigs rear quarters) and shoulder bones, wasting as little meat as possible, and knowing where to divide the side when separating the various cuts. The first time I did this, I gave myself a nasty gash at the bottom of the thumb. When I showed it to Mr. Alger, before going to the hospital, his comment was, "What were you playing about at this time?"  This hurt more than the cut! I did become reasonably proficient before the R.A.F. eagerly demanded my services - no not to cut meat.
Customers were remarkably loyal. Married daughters normally went to the same shop as their mothers, shops where they took credit or where they could get the brands they liked or well treated and enjoyed going. In the case of the Co-op the all important dividend (a half yearly payment based on purchases) was an important incentive.
When one of the other assistants left I took over his Tuesday round collecting the country orders, which I enjoyed. It was an early experience of what was to become my career. Bike instead of car though!  In Summer I quickly ate my sandwiches, took no break and finished the round by the middle of the afternoon which allowed me time to go for a refreshing swim from the beach before returning to the shop.