The scene is a mixture of home, a baker on a corner site with large plate windows facing in both directions and a workplace. Someone, my or at least a father, is going on about there being no bread in the house for his breakfast, partly because he is very mean with the housekeeping and despite bread being very cheap.
Exasperated I go down to the baker. Nobody there and very little bread, but there is half a small white loaf on the shelf behind the right hand counter. Which I fetch out but then wonder about paying.
I decide to leave the money with one of the young lady clerks at work, a lady clerk who is not actually there, her whole office being very thinly populated. Perhaps she is on a fag break. So I leave the 7.5p in coin and try to write her a note in pencil, a note which I have great trouble making legible. During the course of which I decide that 7.5p is not enough and change it to 10p, very slightly less in cash terms than the 1/8 (one shilling and eight old pence) which I now think to be the price of one large white loaf, entire, when I was very young and bought bread at bakers, perhaps that at the Thornton Heath Pond end of Norbury High Street (the parade at the left hand side of the middle of London Road in the illustration (click on it to enlarge it; works very nicely in Windows 8)), an excellent baker of plain white split tins but not a corner site and long gone, as you might have discovered for yourself had you caught a south bound 109 bus from the Embankment in town, had the route not been truncated during the day to its southern portion, according to TFL. Eventually get the note down as I wake up.
The legibility bit may derive from sprog 2 not being able to read I note that I had left him, but I don't see where the rest of it is from.
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