Location: Wolverhampton
Era: 1940 onwards
“When I was in the sixth form I used to work on a Saturday at a bakery, a cake shop, called Hughley’s. I worked at the one on the edge of the market and remember selling slices of Madeira cake, and slices of Madeira cake with cherries in it. We’d start at about 8am and the Saturday girls’ jobs were inevitably things like cleaning the floor and making up the boxes for people to take the cakes away in. The cake I used to love, and we’d hope a few would be left over at the end, were pineapple tarts. Pastry at the bottom, some pineapple flavoured filling and then yellow icing across the top. It was a fun thing to do. 15 and 6 I got for the day. Because it was at the market, the stall holders would always come in and you’d dread the fishmongers coming in as they carried the smell of fish with them!”
Vivien Small