TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

​Due credit to Dhaneshar Maharaj who is author of the following blog
TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE
LANDMARK IN SAN FERNANDO.
ALLOY SHOP
The photo depicts a site on SUTTON STREET, with FREELING STREET to the east (left) and IRVING STREET to the west (right). The building seen in the “THEN” photo was what we called “ALLOY SHOP”, a business operated by a Chinese proprietor from the 1940s to the early 1970s. Grocery items were sold on the left side while the right side had a parlour where you could buy something to eat and drink and there was even a small wooden table to sit at by the window and look outside at the occasional vehicle passing or admire the greenery in Irving Park, looking northwards. My favourite meal bought at Alloy’s shop was a six cents loaf filled with butter and cheese (oily and a bit rancid at times) and a Nestlé chocolate milk in a glass returnable bottle, to wash down the bread and cheese. When funds were a little scarce, I would settle for a plain bun or coconut drops and a banana SOLO. Food items were kept in a glass case on top of which sat a cat or two and these would have to be chased away from the glass case when Alloy’s wife was making a sandwich or selling drops, buns, biscuit cake or bellyful cake. The cats were probably kept in order to keep away the mice which roamed the shop and parlour in the night and nested amidst the many spaces and holes in the old, warped wooden floor of the shop.
This was the closest shop to where we lived and I remember being sent very often when my mother was cooking, to buy a pack of curry (a penny a pack) or a pound of salt (cent a pound) and probably buying a cent Paradise Plum (three for a cent) or a ‘sours’ with part of the change. It would take me just about thirty seconds to run uphill from my house to Alloy shop to get these items. Children never walked in those days when going on errands. We would run at top speed since we had no shoes or slippers to wear at home and would try to minimize the time the soles of our feet came into contact with the hot asphalt as we went barefooted about our errands. We would fall occasionally when running and grate away parts of the skin on our arms and legs, but we were healthy kids and these bruises and scrapes soon healed without the aid of medication, not even leaving scars on our skins.
When Alloy died, his family ran the business for a while but then it was sold to an East Indian man who had a blue Opel motor car and who operated a garage in the back. This new owner kept the place enclosed day and night so no one was able to see inside the premises, except when he was reversing his car out of the garage on to Irving Street and would open the galvanize gate to do so. Once I saw a woman sitting in a hammock, while the gates were open, and I would hear the occasional crying of little children coming from the enclosed premises as I passed by. Little or no renovation was done to this building for the many years in which this garage man lived here.
The right side of the photo shows how the spot looks now. The photo was taken early on the morning of January 19, 2014. After the old wooden building was demolished, the spot stood vacant for some time. There was a short mango tree on the compound and grasses and weeds occupied the ground area. I am not sure, but I heard that the owner of Affan’s Bakery bought this spot along with the spot opposite on which the old TICFA building where WASA’s office was once located, and which has since been demolished. The mango tree has been cut down and the area fenced around some time last year and the ground paved over with oil sand. A doubles vendor now operates here out of a new truck, the tray of which has been modified to provide a mini kitchen for cooking bara, aloo pies, saheena and pholourie on the spot. (Just a passing observation. I have seen many doubles vendors with several vehicles, all of them fairly new and not of the cheap run of the mill type. Which tends to signify that a well-run doubles business can move one fairly high up the economic ladder). This doubles vendor sells from Tuesday to Sunday, taking a rest on Mondays. The business was run by a father-daughter combination, the father doing the bagging and money collection while the daughter was part of a team of cooks preparing the items for sale. I have not seen the father in recent times and the daughter has now taken over the father’s former role of bagging and cashing, though today, when I took this photo, there was a strange gentleman cashing and bagging stuff for customers.
I first discovered this doubles team on a vacant car park lot opposite the SSL main building lower down on Sutton Street, i.e., at Gomez Street corner. They operated here for a long while until CHRIS BHAGWAT, the owner of SSL did some improvement on the empty lot and began to use it as a car park for his business and to store lots of iron and pipe stuff. Chris himself would patronize this vendor on a regular basis, especially on Sundays and despite his regular diet of oil, flour and other starchy stuff has remained quite lean, not an ounce of fat showing on his slender frame.
This doubles business changed location to the pavement of the old, abandoned TICFA building (part of which is seen in the “THEN” photo) next to Affan’s Bakery, just opposite to where they are located today. I taught the owner of Affan’s Bakery (he is the son-in-law of the original founder and owner of Affan’s Bakery, so he is not an Affan, but is married to Affan’s daughter) while I was a young teacher at Naparima College, and I taught his son when I was a much older teacher at Presentation College. I would meet this bakery owner (forgot his name now) on Sunday mornings patronizing this doubles vendor who operated right next to his bakery. I discovered on one such Sunday, that he would buy a Sunday breakfast of doubles for his entire staff of Bakery workers and himself, probably giving this vendor the biggest sale for the day. During the spate of kidnappings plaguing the country about ten years ago, the bakery owner feared for his family’s safety and took his children out of school and along with his wife, sent them to live in Vancouver, Canada, where they now reside. After the old TICFA building was demolished last year the doubles vendor moved over the road to the former Alloy Shop site and has remained there to the present time.
Items worth noting in this picture are the wrapper and money collector having to stand on a bench to be at a high enough level to function properly, a green plastic chair for lazy customers to sit on and eat in the shade cast by the truck, two coolers for supplying drinks to patrons eating on the spot, a garbage bin for the exceptional customer who knows how to use it or just feels like not littering on certain occasions, a water container some distance away to the east for washing hands, a fat customer wearing a number 8 jersey to indicate that he regularly consumes 8 doubles at a time and a number of pigeons which walk around to feed on any tidbits or morsels coming their way, sometimes from sloppy eaters who allow channa to fall out of their doubles or even let a whole doubles slip out of their greasy hands.
And as I end let me remind you that the primary purpose of education is not to teach you to earn your doubles, saheena, pholourie and kurma, but to make every mouthful sweeter. (Source: Angelo Bissessarsingh's virtual museum of Trinidad and Tobago, Jan 10, 2024)

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