Goodbye dear friend

First off Happy Thanksgiving to you all - all I want is a slice of pumpkin pie, so please do not forget me.

Goodbye dear friend - well that is how I feel today. When my son visited our town he was amazed to see that we still have a Woolies (Woolworths). I remember there was one in New Rochelle when I lived there, but my son told me they had gone from the States and how lucky we were to still have one.

Well today they have gone into liquidation and it is so sad. Woolies is part of my life and growing up, just as much as those American movies I loved. Living in a deprived area, Woolies was the jewel in the crown. Sitting on the corner of our main street, how us young girls loved to go there on a Saturday afternoon. It was all part of our routine. I remember the huge square, glass topped display cabinets, what a wealth of super goods they had. Outdoor girl cosmetics, tiny, plastic enclosed lipsticks, face power, the tiny phials of Californian Poppy perfume. How we loved the smell.

As well as shiny metal buckets, and pristine looking mops and brushes, there were other secrets - nylon stockingss, lying in neat piles, some black, most with a shaped heel and a seam, how we longed to be old enough to wear them and to struggle getting our seams straight.

Some of the girls that worked there we knew from school. They were ever so smart, we thought, in their red brown uniforms with the beige collar. One girl who had been, to me, a heroine at school, (I thought her more beautiful than Betty Grable) was a supervisor, she walked around the store in flat ballerina shoes, a metal belt holding bunches of keys rattling down from her waist. Oh, yes it was bliss.

Woolies in Fleetwood is much brighter and more like a supermarket, but it still sells its pristine buckets and brushes, toys and well designed children's clothes. Where will I go for video tapes now? As you are preparing to leave, the best of all - buckets of sweets - pick and mix - ah, what will I do for my Christmas candy now?

Don't tell me times change - there should always be a Woolies, if only to remind me of happy days.

Margaret.