House-shop noun
A house that doubles as a shop; the shop is usually in the front hall. House-shops are usually found in working class housing estates.
“Not the day love,” she used to say, one of our wee neighbours when we called on the 1st October singing “Halloween is coming on and the goose is getting fat.”
“What about the mara?” we three cheeky witches used to answer back, killing ourselves laughing, running away from her door.
The cheek of us in our black bin bags; DIY coal streaks round our eyes and talc on our faces, trick or treating the minute October landed. But we kept going, house after house, song after song, rejection after rejection, foundered, pounding the streets, hope against hope that maybe one of our neighbours would feel sorry for us and give us a few bob. Then, bingo, our saviour neighbour, a youngish fella lived with his mummy would stand and make us sing the whole song the whole way through and then say “sing another one”. Without a beat we would launch straight into the chorus of Irene Cara’s “FAME! I wanna live forever, I wanna learn how to fly” whilst flinging ourselves through the air up and down his front path. He’d no choice but to hoke in his pockets and give us a few shekels. The sheer joy of that moment.
Off we flew, a hundred miles an hour, the binbags flapping madly in the wind, up the street to Patsy O’Carroll’s house-shop where his wife would make and sell candy apples in October. The candy was so thick we got about an hour’s worth of licking from those apples before bouncing over to Ma Green’s Shop to buy a single… one single Embassy Regal cigarette between the three of us, two draws each and then we passed it back round sucking away until it burnt the skin off our lips!
This was the deal every night in October until Halloween night itself…everybody’s house had a party, and by party, I mean the washing up basin was filled with water and in went the apples with the rusty 2ps in them that left behind burnt orange indents, and there we all were dunking our faces in the basin full of half the street’s slabbers! Then up to our front bedroom to watch the top half of the Casement Park fireworks display.
I go trick or treating with my kids, but it’s not the same. We collect enough sweets to open our own house-shop and they barely eat one. When I look back now, I realise we had nothing and we had everything. Happy Halloween!
