Overview

The forgotten world of Monmouthshire small-town shopkeepers based on the experiences of an Abergavenny family. John Barnie looks back at his experience of this world, his father having kept a sweet and ice cream shop in Abergavenny for over forty years.

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9781848510685

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When my father said approvingly, Those are nice shoes ... I knew the words carried a meaning beyond their sense, that they were an expression of his love. We discussed the shoes for a while, and then I turned out the light and we lay there silently, endlessly, until dawn. Barnie describes with great tenderness the last days of his fathers life towards the end of this touching biography, growing up in Abergavenny as members of the shopocracy, a generation of traditional shopkeepers with a rigid code of the petite bourgeoisie. His father, Ted, E. C. Barnie, Wholesale and Retail Confectioner, opened the sweet shop in the 1920s and ran it alongside the other community of shopkeepers - barbers, tobacconists and stationers, until he retired in 1969. It is an evocative account of the shopkeepers idiosyncratic lives, ruled by certain immutable principles, seeking respectability. And what did that mean? - Voting Conservative, upholding religion, never getting into debt ... never telling other people your business, providing your children with a better education than you had so they could get on, and, not making 'a fuss', knowing and abiding by the acceptable limits of your aspirations. Life, outside the long hours of the shop, was run by a strict adherence to certain routines: his fathers trips to the Conservative Club every night, except Sunday, at 9 oclock; tea of eggs or baked beans on toast at 6 p.m.; dinner at 1 oclock; the evening paper and regular radio programmes; the Littlewoods pools; the china set and gambling table at Christmas; the lighting of the fire at particular times in particular rooms; the encroachment of the television set until it was on permanently from the news through all the soaps, as surrogate existence, until bedtime. As he grows up, the author begins to feel strait-jacketed by the narrow focus of the shopocracy and rebels against Christianity, the Empire, Conservatism, or anything which forces him to be a something. The young Barnie begins to find his own way in the aftermath of the war, developing a strong political awareness, striking out on his own path that conflicts with the narrow values of his parents, and yet maintains an attentive affection towards them and a self-consciousness at his own rebellion: What started as a challenge on my part became more and more heated until it ended in a row, usually between my mother and me with my father keeping in the background. I should have backed off, but I returned to the attack, angry and inarticulate. Looking back, what did it matter what they believed. But at seventeen or eighteen I was like a terrier with a rag doll and couldnt stop until I had shaken out all the stuffing of what seemed to me the shopocracys musty beliefs. He speaks fondly about his father in the garden, as the place where he was truly himself a shy, gentle man tending the vegetables, and, when he was ill, planting broad beans in the flower beds so he could watch them grow. There is sensitivity too in his description of his parents hard-working lives, spending their time off in the winter in the complex procedure of canning peaches for the following summer when his father would make home-made ice cream as well as the usual sweet business and open a parlour selling Knickerbocker Glories, and, in addition, his home-made raspberry syrup. This is a touching portrayal of life of independent retailers before the ravages of supermarkets and chain stores. Both a deeply personal biography and a significant socio-economic history of the time - as the author concludes, To remember the old shopkeepers is to catch sunlight in your hands. Jane MacNamee It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council. Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru. -- Welsh Books Council

Author Information

John Barnie is one of Wales's most distinguished and respected literary figures, well known for both his creative and discursive abilities. He has published several collections of poetry, prose fiction and essays, most notably The King of Ashes which won a Welsh Book of the Year Award. Formerly editor of Planet, he lives in Comins Coch, Aberystwyth and performs with the bilingual poetry & blues group Llaeth Mwnci Madog / Madog's Moonshine.

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