I grew up in a junk shop, got my education after school from piles of dog-eared comics in the corner of my mother's shop, learned the psychology of selling on my mother's knee. She'd figure out what something was worth then add a bit on, to be knocked off later so the customer felt like they were getting a bargain. If my mother had no real idea what something was worth she'd charge either 35c or $3.50, or if it were really unusual or particularly ugly, $35. Often too, my mother would abruptly withdraw items from sale, much to the frustration of customers. Sometimes she'd figure that if someone was so interested in something, it must be worth more than she had on it, and it would go home to be packed away in the garage indefinitely. Or sometimes she'd refuse to sell purely because she took a dislike to the customer.
At fairs and garage sales I was my mother's apprentice, some would say accomplice. "Go ask that man how much it is, he'll give it cheaper to a cute little girl," she'd say. Without fail we would be at the head of the queue at every church fair - the art of getting to the front via careful elbow positioning and waves to invisible friends further ahead was a useful skill which later held me in good stead at concerts and band gigs. We would head to different ends of the white elephant stall once in. Divide and conquer was the rule, as well as grab first, decide later.
Getting first into garage sales was important too, but the story that my mother once ran over a man who kept getting to garage sales before us is exaggerated. She merely nudged him gently with her car as he tried to dash past and he tripped over entirely of his own accord, and not without a certain dramatic flourish.
After the viciousness of garage sales, I preferred auctions - they just seemed more straightforward. My mother loved them too as the scope of items for sale was so wide. On one occasion she bought over 40 mannequins and a lifesize fibreglass donkey, and at another auction about 20 telephone boxes. Auctioneers loved my mother, if she wanted anything, she just kept on bidding to the bitter end. "Swings and roundabouts'" she'd say, if she paid over the odds. The odds were usually in her favour anyway as she picked up things that no one else wanted such as the cartons of replica coinsets she got from a fire sale auction in the 1970s. I think she must have bought the entire world production of them - thirty years later she was still steadily selling them to the children and grandchildren of the original purchasers. When my mother died we found more mouldering cartons of them in the back of the garage; my sisters tried to sneak them into the rubbish skip but I furiously dug them out and continued to sell them.
When I decided to open a shop of my own, my mother and I went to a Smiths auction where we bought two old wooden display counters from Ballantynes. I put them in my shop in High Street (Red Fish Blue Fish next to the iconic Galaxy Records). One counter was from the haberdashery department and had a brass rule along the top. In the other counter we discovered a drawerful of very expensive chocolates which we ate and replaced with spud guns and fake moustaches. When I closed the High Street store, the counters sat in my garage until my mother died and left me her shop. At the Village Junk Shop my counters got a new lease of life displaying souvenir spoons and rusty tobacco tins, broken watches and postcards from holidays past.
Later I moved them over to Lyttelton for God Save the Queen!, a Village Junk Shop/Red Fish Blue Fish hybrid. The haberdashery counter held all the treasures of past lives including Victorian photos (aka instant ancestors), thimble collections, and rose patterned tea cups, while the other had whoopee cushions, stretchy aliens and clockwork mice.
That all came crashing to an end last Saturday. The haberdashery counter along with the remaining stock (including the last few boxes of coinsets) was smashed to pieces. The other counter was rescued in the nick of time (ask no questions as to how) and now sits in my hallway patiently awaiting its next customer.
goodbye God Save the Queen! and all that went before...
