Mighty Malcolm Mustard

Trades. Apprenticeships. Pride in your work. Its important. Helps to
give you a sense of who you are. What you're about. Lets you come face
to face with your capabilities and your shortcomings. Nothing worse
than hiding away from yourself I say.

Now I'm not a swell headed man but I've always been led to believe that
if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing well. And I would like to
think that throughout my life I have stuck to that principle.

As a child I made sure that I mastered the skills of spelling and
reckoning and during the weekends I kept myself busy and had a regular
little business going with my mother. I'd go up to Marsdens on Union
Road to collect flour and butter and sugar and then make up some pastry
and mother would bake these cakes and I'd deliver them round the
houses. 'Here's Tommy on the Bun Run' they'd shout, and I'm not
swanking but I became a very popular child at that time.

My father, well, he sold tea services on the Sneinton Market. He had
the patter on him there's no question about that. If he had been in the
right trade, doing the big advertisements for the papers he could have
made himself a fortune. Always drew a crowd he did and if nobody
brought what he was selling he'd just smash it on the ground in front
of them. The kids loved that.

So as you can see I was bought up into the world of buying and selling.
I suppose you could say it was in my blood. And then in 1936, at the
age of 17, I made my proper entry into the world of commerce by
becoming a Grocers assistant at the Cinderhill Co-op. Now that was an
eye opener I can tell you. We did everything. Jams and pickles and
sauces. All sorts of soaps and wash powders. Everything you could
possibly want to help you lead a full and happy life.

Anyway after a number of weeks being shown the ropes on the packing I
had the good fortune to get on to the provisions counter, which turned
a few heads because I think there were some there that thought they
should get the nod in that direction ahead of me, but there's always
folk who think that things are due them without putting the effort in
before hand as I'm sure you'll agree. And I had been very attentive
with the packing details so I had earned my right to be there amongst
the more temperamental products.

Now the king of the counter was a portly man called William who smelt
very much like liquorice and who was an absolute master with the bacon
and the cheeses. If you ever wanted to know how to dress a Gorgonzola
or keep your Stilton in fine fettle then William was the man to pay
attention to.

And William told me that for every single little thing there is a right
way to do it and a thousand and one wrong ways to do it and that if you
follow the right path and use your head and eye's and ears to discover
the correct way when carrying out your actions then you will be in
control of your world and you will gain the respect of those around
you. And he made me promise him that I would master the trade and so I
started attending the evening classes which the Nottingham Co-op used
to hold at the Albert Hall Institute.

William must have said something to some of the others too because I
wasn't the only one to go along from the store. There was also Jack
Bartlett, a member of the Butchering Committee, who played the
accordion for Thorn Eddie's band, and drank far too much for his own
good; and Frank Dibson, a little weasley fellow who was well known
within the Co-operative society on behalf of the fact that as a child
he had won the spoon cleaning competition at the Nuthall Gala for a
record five years in a row. He wasn't a popular man amongst his
colleagues but for some reason he always had a different girl on the
back of his tandem whenever he was seen on his way to Matlock
Baths.

There were three subjects that we looked at. Grocery Management,
Salesmanship, and Window Display. Now I'll tell you this, in those days
we weren't in a position to get the television set to do all the work
when it came to persuading the customer to come through your door. It
was up to us and we used to have to try and draw the eye to what we had
on offer. A shop window had to be done properly. You had to make people
stop and look. You had to draw people's attention to what it is you had
to sell. A good display man was a valuable asset to a shop. It's no
good just standing a lot of tins of fruit in the window and making a
quick stack; you have to make it look attractive and saleable.

Well up to this point I thought that it was all going well enough. My
boning technique on the ham was very good and I had a way with my words
that the head Co-op people who were taking the lessons thought fitted
in well with what they were trying to achieve. But I couldn't get the
hang of the blasted window display however hard I tried.

They had this big false window built with no glass in it which they
would wheel in and they used to give you various goods which you would
have to make your display with. Well to start with you had to design
your background with crepe paper and the like and then you would have
to build up your stocks which you wanted to sell to the public, whether
it be your wash powders or some sort of jam or a speciality product
like some new spread or another.

Now Little Weasley Frank had a talent for this and it used to irritate
me. I don't know whether or not his ability in this field and the
endless stream of women on his tandem were in any way connected, but it
seemed to me at the time that that must be the case and Jack agreed
with me.

He was having problems all the way round though was Jack since his
girlfriend had packed him in for a big chap who worked at the Raleigh.
She had moaned on at Jack for being a coward when he refused to climb
to the back of the steamboats at the Goose Fair and when he came a
cropper on the Cakewalk she said she'd had enough and stormed off and
that was that. Jack took it very bad and started drinking even more
than usual and if you looked in his coat pocket you'd see a half bottle
of Whyte and Mackays or Booths Gin and it was interfering with his
judgement on how to arrange the products properly.

I had no excuse though. I'd clicked with a pretty young thing that I'd
met on the Monkey Run. One of my mates knew her sister and after a few
walks around the Forest we became a couple. She was impressed by my
knowledge of the grocery world and my buns and we were very happy
together. She worked at Judges Confectioners on Mansfield Road taking
trays of tea and cakes to the local solicitors and helping to prepare
poached eggs on toast and food of that category.

Anyway, as I said, I was having real problems. I'd start with my crepe
paper and that would look alright to me but as soon as it came to the
bit where I had to decide how to place the foodstuffs I would have all
sorts of trouble. No! No! The head Co-op teacher would shout. Look
you've got your ham all wrong. And your pickles are a disgrace.

I'd apologise and try again and they'd show me what to do - because
there was a system to all of this you see - but it wasn't working. And
meanwhile Little Weasley Frank was standing there with his display all
finished with this smile on his face that reminded me of how your hands
were like after you've been dealing with the bacon and I could feel
myself getting angry and I'd have to bite my tongue and stop myself
from going over and knocking his perfect display all over the floor.
I'm not proud of how I felt and I know that it's daft to get all worked
up over a whole load of Pink Salmon and Table Jellies but that's how it
was.

I don't know how Cynthia put up with it to be honest. I'd be sat over
at her house with her family listening to Radio Zagreb or Radio Riga -
because Cynthia's mother was a great fan of those Russian folk songs
and Cynthia would whisper to me 'what's up Tommy' and I' tell her that
I'd got my ham wrong again and she'd pat me on the shoulder and get out
a bag of stale cakes and we'd sit there and eat them while her mother
did these little dances around the room.

And then one night when I went over to see Cynthia she was in a
dreadful state and when I asked her why she explained that one of her
customers had found a mouse tail in one of the cakes and that she was
sure that she'd never be able to look at another cake without feeling
funny in the stomach and had been given the rest of the day off to get
back to sorts and that it would be better if I left her alone.

And that night when I went to sleep I had a dream like in one of those
childrens books or some fantasy picture at the cinema where Cynthia was
running through the aisles of the Co-op with a big net on a pole trying
to catch these Congress Tarts and Cream Horns that were running around
all over the place with long tails and faces like Little Weasley Frank
and making the kind of noises that you might associate with rodents.
Well I had never had any kinds of dreams like that before, usually I
was running down the wing with the ball looking to see if Tommy Lawton
was in the box, or totally bemusing Bradman with my well concealed
googly, or something of that nature.

Anyway when I went to visit Cynthia the next day I told her all about
it and she started laughing and shaking all over and she said that I
was the funniest and strangest man she had ever known. And then she
told her mother and father and before I knew what was happening we were
all laughing like jackals and I was joining in with some silly
dance.

So, let's get this straight, the next evening I went in to the Albert
Hall again and out came that blasted window and I was told that this
was the last chance I had of getting the exam. And that put the worries
up me because if you passed you were invited to one of the productive
factories - and there was a lot of them mind - to see how the stuff was
made from start to finish which helped no end with your education and
your overall understanding of the trade. And the box of goods were
passed over and the head Co-op man said 'Gentlemen tonight I would like
to see what you can all do with Mustard and Toilet Soap' and started
his watch.

Now I don't know if that funny dream really helped or not but it was as
though somebody had uncorked a hole in my brain and a bucketful of
ideas were waiting to come out. Something inside of me kept saying that
I was funny and strange and that if Cynthia and her parents liked that
then there was no reason that the head Co-op people wouldn't.

So I stuck all of these jars of mustard together and made this life
sized figure with legs and arms and a bit of a face, which was the
difficult bit, and then I wrote a big sign saying 'Mighty Mustard
Malcolm - He'll Put Pep In Your Step'. And then I made a great big nose
with all of the bars of soap and above it I put a sign that said
'Mmmmmm. Smells lovely'.

I'll tell you the head Co-op men couldn't believe what they were seeing
as I worked away with the glue and tried to get Mighty Mustard Malcolm
looking right, but I got top marks that night and they said that what I
had attempted was something that was not in the rule book but that they
would overlook it for this one time because my display was very
effective and the following day they instructed their managers to put
it into practice immediately, not just in Nottingham but across the
whole wide country. And I do believe that they sold more toilet soap
and mustard in the next few weeks than they ever had before. And the
slogan 'I'll Put Pep In Your Step' was later used by Potato Pete for
the Ministry of Food although they never found a use for 'Mmmmmm smells
lovely'.

I was a bit of a hero after that at the Cinderhill Co-op and when
William retired I got to take over as king of the counter and when I
came back from the war I was made manager of my own branch and I made
sure that we always had a good display even when the other shops
decided not to bother with it anymore.

I personally never did another window display in my life though - I
always left it to somebody else. The peculiar imaginings that I had
when faced with the challenge of promoting a new range of cordials or
breakfast cereals were things that I decided to keep to myself and I've
never really been one of those people who believes in experimenting or
doing something different just for the sake of it. After all there's
always a right way and a wrong way and I guess that I just got lucky
that one time. Play it by the book and you can't go far wrong.

That's my advice.