Mr. Sheppard

Mr Sheppard was our milkman. I'm quite surprised that his name came back to me almost instantly after fifty plus years, yet I can't remember the name of someone I met the day before yesterday. Psychologist no doubt will have a good explanation, but this post is about what I do remember, not what I can't. 

For the first ten or so years of my life, milk, vegetables, meat and bread were delivered to the back door. Steyning, where I grew up, was (and still is) a village of about five thousand.  The dairy wasn't on the high street but on Charlton Street (as in Bobby), the narrow road that ran parallel to it. We seldom went there that I recall and I have no recollection of ever being inside. 

Three times a week Mr. Sheppard would arrive in his green and yellow electric powered milk cart, whirring and clanking as it made its rounds. He'd pull up outside the gate sit for a minute doing his paperwork on a clipboard. Then he'd go to the back of the cart, select the bottles he needed for our order that day, put them in his wire milk-bottle basket and make his way to the back door.  

He rang the bell only once a week to settle up. My mother would pay him, in cash, which he'd put into an old leather pouch slung over his shoulder and across his chest. Otherwise, we'd leave the empties in a 2x2 white plastic-coated-wire milk bottle holder outside the back door (the "tradesman's entrance") which he'd collect to take back to the dairy, replacing them with the full ones my mother had ordered. 

Milk bottles in the 1960s were tall and tapered. In the mid 70s they were replaced by the shorter squatter variety in the picture.  At the time the change seemed traumatic, a much loved institution giving way to ugly modernity. Only now do I begin to understand the organizational enormity of switching from one size of bottle to another.      

The milk bottle holder may have been a new-fangled invention because my earliest memories are of the bottles standing free, but with a small red plastic disk (with a small chip in one side) on the top of one of the empty bottles; that was the indicator which my mother would set to let Mr Sheppard know how many bottles we wanted that day. The new wire bottle holder came with a panel on the front and a red plastic pointer to show that day's milk order. I know it was wire because as the plastic coating on the handle aged and chipped, the wire underneath began to rust.  

The bottles were glass, reusable, and sealed with aluminium foil. The color indicated what kind of milk was in the bottle. To open the bottle you simply pushed your thumb down in the center of the foil cap and lifted if off. I think, but I'm not sure, that my mother had some kind of plastic cap she would put onto opened bottles before they went back into the fridge. 

Our usual order was two gold tops and two silver tops. Gold top had more cream (technically, it was milk from Jersey cows) and the big treat was getting to be the first to pour the milk on one's morning's cereal WITHOUT shaking the bottle first so you got all the cream which had floated to the top of the bottle.  

When I was about ten or so, we started getting green-top milk. Green was my favorite color and I'd seen green foil tops on Mr, Shepard's cart, so that's the kind of milk I wanted. Green top was unpasteurized and tasted even creamier than gold top. My parents promised that if, in a blind taste-test, I could tell green-top from gold-top, they would order a bottle of green-top for me; I could and they did, at least for a while. 

As family of three with one dog, a border collie called Patch, we probably drank, collectively, a pint an a half to two pints a day; from breakfast cereal, to a glass of milk with lunch, milk in tea and often a glass dinner for me at dinner. My grandmother, who die when I was about 5, drank stout - Nana's "black milk" as my mother called it.

Mr. Sheppard retired when I was about eight or nine, which would make him about a hundred an ten, so I doubt he's still with us. But he remains an indelible part of my childhood.