Ian McMillan: Queuing to stand in the footsteps of history

If my brain hadn't been idling, I would have wondered why my feet were at that particular angle, pointing a little outwards like those of a South Yorkshire Charlie Chaplin or a display clock in a clock shop.

Then the person buying the stamps moved away and I went to the counter and I realised why I was standing like I was.

Just in front of each of the windows behind which the staff are serving in Darfield Post Office, there are two marks in the floor where, over many years, people have stood buying stamps, getting their pensions, purchasing television licences, returning lumpy packages that have inadvertently come to the wrong house and, often, simply passing the time in a first-class kind of way.

My feet fitted perfectly into the shapes worn in the lino by all these people since the days when a television licence was only a couple of bob and you would still have enough change in your pocket for a book of first-class stamps and an airmail letter to Ulan Bator.

They're like footprints in mud or fresh snow, or marks in wet cement, and I think those shapes in the Post Office floor are important historically – they're like Stonehenge, or the Cutty Sark, or St Paul's Cathedral, because they tell a story and they link us to the past.

Okay, they're not Stonehenge, but then again, Stonehenge isn't the bit of lino in front of the counter at Darfield Post Office, so there.

Actually, I don't know how long those prints in the lino have been there, and I didn't like to ask, but I wonder if they were there, perhaps fainter, when I went to the Post Office with my mam as a baby when she took the letters that she posted to my dad far away at sea, or in Plymouth where he finished up his Navy career.

Perhaps they were there when I started collecting stamps, and I can certainly recall buying my World Cup stamps from there in 1966, and I can still feel that excitement of the England Winners overprinting they did after we won, a stamp that I've still got somewhere on a first-day cover.

It was Darfield Post Office that I went to with my dad to collect the 25 we won on the Premium Bonds sometime in the late Sixties; as I remember, the winnings came in a postal order and we had to stand on the lino while Mr Alderson cashed the order. My dad waved the postal order theatrically above his head and shouted "We're rich!" and for a moment or two I thought we were.

Then I definitely knew we were when he gave me a 10-bob note. Then I definitely knew I wasn't when my mam made me bring it back to the Post Office to put in my Post Office savings account. Then I definitely knew I was when I got two-and-a-half pence interest.

It was to Darfield Post Office that I took my first poems, when I posted them to obscure literary magazines with names like Pink Peace and Second Aeon. I was nervous of my precious poems being lost or damaged or even bent in the post, so I put them in a thick envelope and between each slipped one of those pieces of cardboard you used to get in shirts.

I stuck on layer after layer of sticky tape because I didn't trust the envelope glue, and I sent them registered post so that they wouldn't get lost. And then flippin' Pink Peace rejected them! Daft name for a magazine, anyway!

It was from Darfield Post Office I collected my mam and dad's pensions, always using some of the money, on my mother's instructions, to buy a couple of books of stamps because she knew I liked posting letters.

I took my kids there on a Saturday morning as part of our ritual trip that included the paper shop and the library, and I took my grandson, Thomas there when he was small as part of our ritual trip that included

the paper shop, the library, and the museum.

In fact, I reckon that Darfield Museum is where that bit of lino from the Post Office should end up. I could cut it out, frame it, and stick it up in the museum's caf so that as people sip their tea and munch their teacakes, they can reminisce about the times they spent in the Post Office, and the central part it has in their lives.

BBC Radio 4 is doing a series at the moment called A History of the World in 100 Objects; well, I've got number 101 for them. Next time you're in Darfield Post Office, just glance down at a slice of history.