Batley Market

In the early seventies back in the UK, my mother rented a stall on the weekly Batley, West Yorkshire, market. The marketplace was set up on the sloping cobbles between the town hall and the Carnegie library, sprouting like mushrooms on the morning of market day Friday and dismantled like magic on the Saturday evening. The market, of wooden stalls roofed with canvas and lit by strings of incandescent bulbs running from stall to stall, was a like a charmed wonderland to me – particularly in winter, when it does not become light until 9 am and darkness falls again by 4:30 in the afternoon. The cobbles were treacherous in the rain and in the occasional snowfalls, so the crowds moved slowly down the rows of stalls, dressed in long, heavy coats, the women with headscarves tied under the chin and the men with flat hats. 

Batley Town Hall, with marketplace in front. (The buildings were cleaned in the seventies - 

they were coal black when I was growing up.)

The stalls concentrated on the items that the supermarkets, with their national or international focus, did not. The butcher's stall sold sheep's heads, liver and lights, tripe and elder. They cried their traditional calls for their pork pies and steak and kidney pies. The stall I frequented most sold American comic books. Here, you did not have to buy them outright. You bought a few issues, took them home and returned them for half price. As the comics got worn or damaged, they were marked down and you could buy more – but would, of course, receive less when you returned them. From the usually twilight or dark marketplace overlooked by the black stone municipal buildings you could go home and read about Metropolis – always light, usually rich – and Gotham City – always dark but safely watched over by the brooding Batman. Spiderman and his travails with Aunt May and his boss were a glimpse of another planet, one where women did not wear headscarves and you did not see your breath in front of you as you leafed through comic books.

My mother, on her stall, sold supplies for home-winemaking and home beer brewing. Drink was a regular means of escape from Batley's difficulties. As a child I had my own, in the brightly illustrated comic books.