Chas, much to my annoyance, had ordered this to be specially made. I felt we were doing very nicely and needed less improvements, not more. I had no desire to be a Mrs Sainsbury (in reality we were Mrs Marks and Mr Sparks), for I would rather have spent the money on home improvements, but the shop was Chas’s baby. He insisted, ‘We cannot stand still,’ and I worried incessantly that he worked so long and so hard. I had to admit, though, that it was a happy shop – indeed, I can only remember one difficult customer among all the many we served and she wasn’t a customer in the accepted sense in our shop. A foreign lady of Jewish extraction, she was well-dressed, capable and organised. She came to us only for bacon and cheese, and she didn’t come into the shop as a normal person would but hovered about outside, looking up and down the road as though expecting a friend to appear. It only later occurred to me she may have been watching for the rabbi. She insisted the bacon and cheese she purchased should be to the exact weight she required.
