Spiders

My wife has a morbid fear of spiders. I've just come back from the village, she sent me to get some bananas. "Check for spiders, before you buy them!"

So some spider stories.

In one of my stores, the greenfruit supervisor and the rest of his staff, always "initiated" a new member of staff, usually a girl. She'd ask them to take the protective sheet off the next box of bananas before bringing it out. The cardboard boxes are re-usable and have an aperture in the lid, the supplier puts a sheet of insulating material over the bananas.
What the poor girl didn't know, was she put "Charlie," in there. He was a soft toy black spider they kept, a good nine inches across with his legs, with huge orange eyes.
You'd here the shriek halfway down the sales floor.

A teenage friend worked in the East End in the fifties in "dockland." He was in the print business and their workshop was in the basement of building next door to a fruit importer's warehouse. He said huge spiders used to come through the wall from next door. He said they were so big, you could hear their feet when they were coming!

In a TV documentary on the Blitz, many years ago, two little old ladies were being interviewed, the reporter asked them why they never went down to the shelter.

"Bombs are a possibility, spiders are definite!"