Half-Day, by Loveday Trezise

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

On Wednesdays the shop at Treleaven closed at one o’clock, but Mr Pengelly never truly closed it. He drew the blind halfway, so that the word GROCER still showed above it, and left the bolt off the door in case a farmer’s wife came down the hill short of yeast. He was a small man with a waxed moustache, which he trimmed every morning with his late father’s scissors, and he wore a white apron so stiff with starch that it creaked when he bent to the sacks. He kept the accounts in a red ledger and wrote every debt in pencil, never in ink, because, he said, a pencil could be rubbed out when times improved. Behind the counter hung a barometer that he tapped each time he passed it, though he had never once been known to believe what it told him. On half-day afternoons he walked to the cliff path with a paper bag of broken biscuits for the gulls, and came back with his trouser turn-ups full of sand. His sister, who kept house for him, said he would die behind that counter, and he took it as a compliment.

List five things you learn about Mr Pengelly in this extract.