Past and Present

Very appropriate, the name of this old rather battered shop.
PAST 'n' PRESENT.
There I was, today, standing in the present and looking at the past.

This was the Communist’s chemist shop in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s in Halton, East Leeds and he sold it in 1964 and bought a shop in Acomb, York, where he worked for twenty-two years before he retired.

I don’t think being a pharmacist was the Communist’s dream job, but to his Jewish immigrant parents it was pretty damned good and a way out of poverty and to a steady income – which, indeed, it provided.

Pharmacists frequently seem to live to a ripe old age and many of them are still working well into their seventies. The Communist, however, retired at sixty-two and has so far had twenty-one years of retirement, which is pretty good going.

I think he was very good at his job – certainly, his staff still send him Christmas and birthday cards after twenty-one years. He always worried about dispensing the wrong drug – frequently the pharmacist had to sort out the doctor’s mistakes – and although it never happened he still has nightmares about it.

I remember going to this shop when I was a very small child – the strange scents, the comparative darkness of its interior - but had never been back since. I wasn’t sure exactly where it was. Today, however, I took the Communist and my mother shopping for clothes at nearby Matalan (yes, fine, we got the clothes that they wanted and I hope I won’t suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder for too many weeks to come).

So as we left Matalan I asked the Communist to show me where his shop was, and we drove past it, and I stopped to take this photograph - dodging a rather large bus, which is why the photo’s a bit sideways.

Near the shop was a railway line with a steeply sloping field next to it and Mum and I sometimes went there after visiting the Communist in his shop. The field was left to grow wild and it was there, one August in the early 1960s, that I first saw harebells and was enchanted by their delicate purple flowers. I’ve thought of that field whenever I’ve seen harebells since.

Interesting how the present can take you so strongly back to the past.