Grandma, Outwits the Smokes Inspector, 1920s Style.

Grandma, Outwits the Smokes Inspector, 1920s Style. 07/08/2010

Today I began more advance planning and preparation to make extensive notes for the novel I want to write in November. Tonight I am striving to work out how I can fit this in with the bread and butter writing I do each day.

I have decided the time frame for the novel, this is a big step considering the huge time frame of ideas in my mind, Simplifying to a 10 year time frame and a child as my main character, out of a potential 100 year several generations of stories I want to tell, gives me a realistic starting point.

I have so many great stories that were told, to me by my mum as well as those stories I accumulate through my Australian travels that I could use in novels. Too wide a time frame for just one, so learning to simplify and focus on a period of time, is a step forward in my novel planning.

My mum’s mother, (I never met her, so this is what I always called her), ran a mixed business, a combination milk bar and smoke shop and apparently, there were laws that the milk bar section could stay open any hours but the smokes were not allowed, to be sold, after 10pm at night. They would send inspectors around late at night trying to catch milk bars selling smokes after hours and they would fine them.

My mum was born in 1910 this was during the mid 1920’s. Late at night cigarette sales was apparently the main business for milk bars in the mid 1920's. Late one night a stranger called at my grandmother’s shop and asked to be served smokes.

He was asked, to wait awhile; grandma said she was busy with the children. She popped back and forth from the back room to the shop, chatting to this man each time she reappeared in the shop, kept him there, talking for a good 20 minutes.

Then she went and got his smokes, and served him. He pulled out his badge and showed he was a after hours smoke sales, inspector. Grand mum, pointed to the clock on the wall. It was 2 minutes after midnight and there were no laws about how early in the day smokes could be sold.

Lifelike Drawing in Colored Pencil with Lee Hammond