SELF SUFFICIENT?

On Friday mornings during the years immediately after the Second World War, when we were waiting for the school bus to take us to Spalding, it became the custom to stand outside the nearby waggon works and watch men putting iron 'tyres' on to the wheels of newly-made farm carts. There was a circular indentation in the concrete forecourt into which they placed a new wooden wheel, and then the heated and sometimes red-hot iron rim was hammered into place. Once done, water was poured into the hole, causing it to sizzle and steam and the rim to cool and contract and grip. 
It was a thrilling sight - sometimes there were six brand new farm carts lined up outside, their freshly painted pale salmon-coloured liveries lined with black, drying in the sun - but in the late 1940s it was routine. What is more, there were two other waggon works in the town doing the same, or similar, work.
Looking back from a distance of sixty years it is plain our small town - Long Sutton, in south Lincolnshire - was self-sufficient in many things, except coal, and like many communities could pretty much look after itself. For example, in the market place, or close by, were two grocery stores (where everything was sliced or weighed on the spot and placed in blue paper bags ready for delivery by boys on bikes), two printing and newsagent shops, an ironmonger, two or more butchers, two barbers, a wool shop, two clothing shops, several greengrocers, three bakers, two sweet shops, a couple of blacksmiths, and a coal yard next to the railway station.
But it was Swapcote Corner which really fascinated me. This was a curved and somewhat ramshackle series of frontages which faced the main road and then tailed round into Swapcote Lane. There were four premises here, all long gone, at least two of them built of timber and corrugated zinc.
First and closest to the town was Mr Tasker, the cobbler, who not only repaired shoes and boots but actually made them, too. You could see him through the window hammering at his last when you walked by on the way into town, or when going home. Second was Jenkinson's garage, where some of my friends made extra pocket money by taking the family wireless accumulator to be re-charged. It was a source of income denied me as our wireless was plugged directly into the mains electricity, or rather, and as was the method then, into the main light plug.
Third was Mr Parrott, saddler and leatherworker. When the town's agricultural show was in the offing his workshop would be 'decorated' with lines of brand new saddles and sets of harness. And fourth was Mr Franks, who in the mornings was a postman, delivering mail far and wide on his bicycle, and in the afternoons, a tinsmith. He also sold paraffin for cookers. I used to watch him in his little shop tap-tap-tapping the shiny sheets of metal into saucepans and trays and kettles. He also repaired items which were clearly meant to last, because we still have and still occasionally use a baking tray which originally belonged to my parents and which he probably made sometimes in the 1940s.
The postman/tinsmith was in fact one of a well-known trio of Franks' business people in the town, another being a jeweller and the third a printer, which earned the three of them the nicknames of Tinny, Clocky and Inky.
Of course, I don't suppose the town really was self-sufficient, but at the time it certainly felt as though everything we actually needed was close to hand.