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best customer. He had known about these firms since the days when he had been an apprentice with Littlewoods.

Other shops soon started trading and gradually Wembley became a town with a good shopping centre. All the surrounding cornfields and buttercup fields gradually disappeared as house building took over and estates grew up. Nothing could stop it because people needed homes even though there was a depression. Professional and middle classes were drawn to Wembley and the surrounding area.

Services to London had been greatly improved with the arrival of the tube train. Houses were not cheap, with prices in the region of seven hundred and fifty pounds for a semi-detached and over a thousand pounds for an executive house. There were many of this type being built

Dorothy did not notice the depression for the new middle class commuters had moved into the area and because of this she was not effected. She did not ask how the rest of the people in the country lived.

Very seldom would she find or see anyone in need, they would be too proud to tell you, it was for you to find out. She was sent to Mrs. Crawford Phillips who ran a dancing class. Mrs. Crawford Phillips was a widow and started classes in both dancing and piano playing in order to keep her. That was our way of helping her, nobody-accepted charity, and not the people she knew.

Marie had a lady come in for the whole day to assist with the sewing. She would turn sheet sides to middle, took up the hems of her sister’s dresses and let down the hems on her dresses; she also did all the mending. The family gave her enough work to keep her busy for a whole day she would come about twice a year, once in the winter and once in the summer. Dorothy expected she went to other houses as well and so would keep a steady income. She didn’t remember anybody poor even in the 1920’s and 30’s.

Dorothy also remembered when she was first married, how men would come to the door with products to sell. They would say, “ If you take this news paper for six weeks you can have this book for two shillings and sixpence”. She always fell for it and she still has many of their books! She imagined these peddlers were educated graduates who couldn’t get a job and would go around trying to sell vacuum cleaners and books. She could never afford to buy an encyclopaedia but she did try to get a Hoover. But never managed it because her husband left the cleaner on the doorstep with a note telling the salesman, “We can’t afford it!” On another occasion Ted her husband was cross with her for buying a piece of aluminium to fix on the doorstep. He said she shouldn’t have bought it, but really that was the only poverty she knew – it was ‘Genteel Poverty’. She didn’t know poverty like there was in Liverpool when she went there. She never went to the East End of London where poverty was more apparent. It was like, ‘Lark Rise to Camdleford’, written in the early 20’s, a poverty where people had enough to eat and a fire to keep them warm. They had no complaint.

Her customers were mainly ladies who had a servant. These ladies would come into the shop and buy what the servant said the house needed. The lady of the house would come in her shop and order such items as soda, soap, rope and cane and items for the garden. The ladies would buy on account and they certainly took a long time to settle their bills.

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