(an e-mail to tell me that someone likes my story 'Poking Wasps with Sticks' which is up at JBWB... someone thinks it as good as any published story he has read and that it has a quality that reminds him of Ian McEwan... it's always encouraging to hear someone likes what one has done)
THE SHOP THAT SELLS EVERYTHING
Years back it was the post office. Just stamps and postal orders then and the air smelling of dry paper and dust, and Mrs Campbell’s cologne. It came in small clear bottles, that cologne, all the way from Germany, with a silver and blue label on the front and numbers for a name. Came in a small brown paper wrapped parcel three times a year. Some said it was a soldier from the war who sent it. There was always a letter tucked in with the bottle. And Mrs Campbell might have written back.
Mr Campbell was always old. That’s what it seemed. Old when he shouldn’t have been. Took over the post office from his father and there’s some that never noticed the difference. Except that slowly the post office began to change. Sold postcards first and birthday cards and some that said ‘Get Well Soon’. Then small gifts with ‘Port Brokeferry’ written on them. For the tourists. Snowglobes in summer and sticks of rock and toffees in tins with a picture of the post office on the front.
When the girl, Izzy, was born the villagers bought more and more stamps. Bought them in one’s and two’s so they could make daily trips to the post office counter. There to see the baby in her basket, sleeping, its small pink face all crumpled and new. And Mrs Campbell stamping the postal orders more gently on those days so as not to wake her.
‘Good Morning, Mrs McAllister,’ might well have been the first words that the post office baby-girl spoke. The sounds she made maybe not shaped into words quite, but the rise and fall of what she said something very like.
And the post office sold small provisions then. Gingernut biscuits and malt loaf. Tea bags and sugar. Became ‘The Post Office and General Store’ and a big window was put in at the front, and it was Izzy’s job to make the window pretty with the new things that they sold.
Always a queue, backed up to the door, and the sprung bell above the door making a small bright music every time someone came in or left. Mrs Campbell passed the time of day with her neighbours. Taking an interest in what was in their lives. She knew things after all. The postcards and parcels and letters all came through her and she could tell things from what was to deliver and what was afterwards sent.
One day, selling newspapers and magazines and children’s comics. Izzy read the comics before she put them out on the shelf. And nails they sold, scooped from brown boxes and weighed in white paper bags, and batteries in all sizes, and bamboo stick nets for catching small green crabs on the beech. And plastic cars or Matchbox or Corgi. And milk in glass bottles and orange juice too, with green tin foil caps, and eggs and cheese.
Came the day when Mr Campbell hung up his postbag and they employed Blair. Never says much, the new postman, but no complaints from the villagers. And not so new really, been doing the job for some years. Does his rounds well enough that you can mark the clock by him, pretty much. Some in the village do.
Izzy grown to woman now and she stands behind the counter when her mam is too tired to leave her bed upstairs. Smiles like her mam, Izzy does, like her dad, too, only he is gone and not often remembered. And like her mam, Izzy talks to everyone coming into the shop. And she watches Blair sort through the mail before packing it into his bag, expecting that today will be the day that he talks, and she does not want to miss that.
And the bottles of cologne have stopped coming.
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