One side carried sweets and tobacco. Sweets stood in jars and some tobacco was sold loose. The main counter handled the ordinary weekly order. Because customers were registered with particular shops under the rationing system, the same people came back week after week, often with a known allowance and familiar order.
Bacon, cheese and exact weights
The food counter demanded constant cutting and weighing. Bacon was sliced on a machine turned by hand. Cheese was cut from large blocks rather than selected from packets, and sugar also came in bulk. Rationing made the weights exact: a small error repeated across a week’s customers could leave the shop short of stock against its coupons and registrations.
June remembered the ordinary cheese ration as about one and a half ounces per person each week, while people working on the land received a larger allowance of three-quarters of a pound. The distinction mattered at Ifold because agricultural work remained common around the surrounding farms and fruit holdings. The shopkeeper had to know both the customer and the correct allowance before reaching for the knife and scales.
There was no refrigerator. Bacon through warm weather had to be managed under muslin covers, and every perishable item demanded attention. The absence of refrigeration was not peculiar to the shop; many of the houses outside still depended on wells, ranges and paraffin. Ifold Stores operated within the same practical limits as its customers.
Everything measured
Other goods arrived in forms now more familiar from a warehouse than a village shop. Biscuits came by the tin and golden syrup could come by the gallon. Nails were sold by weight. Paraffin was measured by the gallon or sometimes by the quart, while methylated spirits was sold by the pint. The counter therefore handled food, fuel and hardware in the same working day.
Paraffin linked the shop directly to the domestic routine of the estate. Oil lamps required fuel, wicks and replacement chimneys. Paraffin cookers supplemented solid-fuel kitchen ranges. A resident could buy groceries and at the same visit obtain the materials needed to light the house after dark. Until the arrival of electricity, these purchases were ordinary household maintenance.
The hardware line also suited a settlement where owners were still building and repairing their own homes. Sheds, garages and bungalows required nails, fittings and fuel. Early residents learned carpentry, glazing, concrete work and roofing as their plots developed, and the local shop sat within that continuing building economy.
The delivery network beyond the shop
Ifold Stores was one part of a wider rural supply system. Alice Wooldridge’s wartime recollection records much of her family’s shopping at the Loxwood Combination Stores and Hilltop Stores. A butcher, baker and grocer visited two or three times each week. A milkman came every day. A chemist from Cranleigh called periodically with ordinary medicines and took orders for anything further.
Connie Bayley also remembered milk deliveries from Mr Grout at Round Street and coal merchants serving the developing estate. The Combination Stores in Loxwood operated delivery vans, while neighbouring businesses supplied bread, meat and other goods. A family did not necessarily make a separate journey for each requirement; the village and district came to the door on a sequence of rounds.
Packaging was sparse. Alice remembered that her family had little rubbish because they ate mainly fresh food and many goods were not wrapped. Shoppers took their own bags and used them repeatedly. The absence of a dustman therefore sat beside a system in which comparatively little disposable packaging entered the household.
The bus, the wireless and a heavy accumulator
Transport shaped shopping as much as rationing. Kilner’s buses from Loxwood ran towards Horsham and were remembered for stopping where passengers found it convenient. Larger shopping trips could be made by bus, but even household technology had to travel. Before mains electricity, the wireless set depended on a rechargeable accumulator.
Alice carried the heavy accumulator to the main road, took it on the bus to Plaistow and left it at the garage for charging. She collected it on the return journey. If the return bus was missed, the weight came home on foot. Bayley later recalled that a Billingshurst electrical shop also collected accumulators for residents. The radio brought news and entertainment into the home, but its power supply still depended on a physical journey.
The same bus service brought customers past Ifold Stores. When Bayley became a bus driver after the war, she remembered waiting there for late passengers, some running down the road eating breakfast. The shop, road and bus stop became part of the same morning routine.
After rationing
Rationing continued into the years after 1945, so June Blackman’s first job belonged as much to wartime practice as to post-war recovery. The registered customer, hand-operated slicer, scales, bulk cheese and paraffin measure remained ordinary features of the counter when she began in 1946.
The settlement changed around the shop during the 1950s. Mains water and electricity reached more homes, electric lighting replaced oil lamps and refrigeration reduced the problems of keeping bacon and other food through summer. Better road surfaces and increasing private car ownership made larger shops in surrounding towns easier to reach. The counter at Ifold Stores had served a period when bacon, cheese, sugar, nails, paraffin and meths could all be measured out by hand during the same afternoon.
