Travellers

It would never do to rush people out of the door. A chemist's, after all, was a place you came when you were contemplating some of the greater mysteries of life, like your health or the welfare of someone in the family. It was not a visit that was taken lightly.

Kit had often heard her mother asking why she couldnt work in the shop. It would be sensible, she had pleaded. People would like to deal with a woman when they were buying sanitary nakpins, or aids for breast feeding, and then there was the cosmetics side of things.

Travellers from the various cosmetic companies were paying more and ore visits to country pharmacies to sell theit wonders. There wasnt a week when someone from Ponds, Coty, Dawn, or Max Factor didnt call.

Martin McMahon had very little interest in such things.

"Give me what you think." he'd say, and take an order of expensive bath soaps and assorted lipsticks.

They were badly displayed, often fading in the window and never sold. Kit's mother had said that the woman of Lough Glass were like women everywhere: they would like to look their best.

These cosmetics companies would give short training courses to tell the chemists assistants how best to display the products, how the women customers should use them for best advantage. But Kit's father was adamant. They didnt want to be pushing paints and powders on people who couldnt afford them, selling magic potions promising eternal youth..

"I wouldn't do that." Helen McMahon had argued often.

"I'd only learn how to make the best of them and give them advice."

"They don't want advice." her husband said. "They don't want temptation either. Don't they look fine the way they are.. And anyway, would I want people to think that I had to have my wife out working for me, that I can't earn a living for her and my children?" Father would always laugh when he said this and make a funny face.

He loved a joke and he could do card tricks and make coins disappear.