Longer ago than I care to think about
I worked for a few weeks during University holidays with the Trevis Brothers of Blackstone, Queensland. Colin and Theo, their other assistant was Mr. Evans, who took orders in kitchens from housewives on Mondays and Thursdays, and delivered on Tuesdays and Fridays.

They ran two shops, one on Thomas Street ( the shop is trill there at Google Earth 27.37.24S, 152.47.57E), up the road from the Welsh Chapel, and down the hill from the cracks in the ground where smoke arose from the burning coal seam. The other was in Blackstone proper, a suburb almost entirely inhabited by coal miners.

I expect you have seen "Open All Hours". Mr. Barker had the tone correct. They belonged to a grocery chain, 4 Square I think it was called and every week the chain would have specials. The A4 posters on cheap duplication paper would arrive in the mail and they would be posted up on the inside of the windows. Now you would probably use tape from a roll. Not Theo and Col. They bought sheets of postage stamps and the blank, gummed edges were carefully torn off and used to hold up the posters.

I was there to make myself generally useful, and to take orders and deliver while Mr. Evans had a little holiday with his family. The store room on the right was filled with bulk groceries, potatoes, chicken feed, carrots, onions. Another room at the back held drums of kerosene and methylated spirits. When nothing much else was doing, I filled beer bottles with these useful fluids or bagged potatoes and onions into 4 and 7 pound lots. A potato can go from sound on Monday to a stinking mass on Wednesday, at least in Queensland's summer heat. One day as I was peacefully weighing spuds, I heard a rustle in the store room and glimpsed something moving down the far end.

A rat! Col had the answer, an ancient single shot .22 rifle. The rat didn't last long.

I saw the interior of a lot of kitchens. After a few times round you knew what the orders were going to be. One always included three packs of "State Express 555" cigarettes. Folk living just around the corner from me had a big family, and every weekly order was three big crates of groceries, I staggered carrying them into the house.

There was Mrs. Marsh. House proud, she was. Mr. Marsh was a miner, and though he showered in the bath house after leaving the pit, she insisted he had another before he entered the house. So there was a little shower cubicle just beside the back door. We also took orders from her married daughter. Both of them had pastel coloured plastic doilies inside their refrigerators and each item had to sit on them just so.

Then there were to two ladies, mother and daughter who lived in a big old Queenslander overlooking the Bundamba Racecourse. I used to get there about 2pm and they'd always had a couple of sherries with their lunch and could be rather chatty.

The saddest were an old couple living not too far from the Ipswich police station in a tiny cottage that must have been built in the 1870s. They always ordered a few cans of dog food. Foul stuff that our dog would not eat. It was a long time before I realised why.

Nearly all the customers were miners. Back in the late 1940s, there had been a national miner's strike that had gone on for weeks. The Trevis Brothers had carried accounts and didn't ask for payment until miners went back to work. It was many years later, but the miners did not forget.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Fri 11 May 2012, 15:04, 1 reply)

Dog Food.
I never really understood the myth that poor folk ate tins of dog food. Wouldn't a can of beans or a pound of spuds be the same price, but a shitload more palatable?
( Ken Oath, Fri 11 May 2012, 15:37, closed)