good dish—because she could be a fabulous cook—sadly she would often fall asleep (well, pass out) while it cooked. I would rush downstairs through the smoke to find the spaghetti burned dry and retire to my bedroom to nibble on a Tunnock’s Teacake. I saved those for special no-dinner-from-Mum-this-time occasions.
Sometimes I thought I had quite exceeded myself with an excellent idea to feed Peggy and Sheba with the dinners that were not, in my opinion, fit for us humans. But they would have none of it. The blasted dogs knew better. They’d run away from under the kitchen table when presented with a human’s plate, just in case I tried to feed them.
I had the most intolerable stomach pains most days after school. They became so severe that while waiting at the bus stop on the way home from school, I would buy a warm, freshly baked loaf of bread from the baker, who was strategically positioned right next to the bus stop. I would then eat the whole thing outside the bakery while waiting for the Route 134 London double-decker, only to realize when the bus finally arrived that I had spent my bus fare.
It was never really established what caused the pains, as I don’t recall seeing a doctor about it. I expect now, after having kids of my own, that it was threadworms. It was also a several-mile walk from London’s Camden Town to Muswell Hill, so I probably used up all my calories walking home.
Needless to say, I would turn to my private candy store and fuel up on sugary carbohydrates. The large supply of free confectionery really was my savior, essential to keeping me alive during my school years. I lived off the stuff, which I kept in cardboard boxes locked in the cupboard in my room. On many occasions, it pretty much saved my life.
I know what it’s like to be hungry, and nowadays I never leave anything on my plate and always save everything after the family meal.
The best times were definitely the nights my mother returned home with so many sweets in the car that the rear bumper scraped along the road. Things were looking especially good when she managed to trade the tiny Renault 4 for a Ford Cortina XL with velour seats, a real cassette player, a cigarette lighter, and an armrest in the back, which seemed an absolute luxury. But most importantly, it had a bigger trunk, which meant one thing—a larger hoard of candies.
Yes, an entire car jam-packed with sweets straight from the largest confectionery show in Europe. Possibly every kid’s dream? I knew that I would be able to stock up for weeks with such a hoard, and that it would keep me going right through the winter. My mother, as a journalist, would be handed plenty of free products at the trade show in Cologne, Germany, which I now visit every year myself.
In fact, I have been attending this show since the age of twelve. It’s an enormous trade fair, where you can walk through fifteen halls the size of cricket pitches and pass a thousand trade stands displaying the world’s tastiest confectionery and bakery products. At the trade exhibition, you can eat and take home as much as you can carry. I go every year, and like my mother did before me, I come home with a car filled to the brim with the best French, Swiss, Belgian, Italian, and German chocolate on the market, although today I have five willing kids to help unload when I return. I also have a rather bashed up twelve-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser Invincible that can hold a welcome two thousand pounds, so I am very well-equipped for our candy cargo. I take magazines to the show and return with a carful of every possible treat you can imagine.
The tradition carries on, from generation to generation. My kids wait for me to return from Germany with a load of goodies, and I know exactly how they feel. They say, “Dad, where’re the sweets?” not, “Hi, Dad, did you have a good time? How was the show?” But I know how exciting it is at that age. My children make a homemade supermarket with the products I bring back from the show and we all pretend to buy and sell them, which makes a great game, especially when one of them (my five-year-old) is bottom in Math. When he has to work out how much money will buy a packet of his favorite Haribo marshmallows, he soon realizes math can be exquisitely useful.
I return with so much product that I could build a mini-mountain out of all the goodies. Last year, my son took some of it to his school the day after my return for his chemistry teacher’s birthday, while my younger son took a packet of expensive Italian wafers to share with his ten-year-old friends. So, in a way, I am creating popular Wonkas at their schools. My daughters, on the other hand, just got on with the important job of actually eating the stuff, going so far as to consume white chocolate with macadamia nuts for breakfast.
We trade with chocolate, too. For example, this weekend a friend who practices Reiki healing came over to work on my wife and me. After the session was over, I handed her a massive bag of Italian chocolates that I was given the week before, fresh from the factory in the Dolomites mountains, in exchange for her work in clearing my chakras. Seemed like a good deal to me. She was delighted, though her five-year-old son managed to dig into the bag before she did.
I give people chocolate all the time. They are often too polite to ask for it, and sometimes it does seem a little silly giving just a small bag of candies to say thanks for something. But they are really happy and nearly always overreact, as if I have given them a bottle of vintage French champagne. But maybe they genuinely are thrilled, not least because I am thinking of them and thanking people with sweets and not words, which I must admit makes a difference. If all else fails, try chocolate!
As a child, I knew the arrival of the car in the middle of the night was my supply ship coming in. It would provide the lion’s share of my annual hoard, survival items and things to trade with at school. I would circle the car, like a squirrel rushing through a walnut tree, and grab packets of chips, endless boxes of jellies and chews, and all manner of goodies without even looking at the labels, rush upstairs to my room, throw a decent batch of them into my bedroom cupboard, slam the door, and lock it tight.
In the meantime, my mother would get out of the car in need of an immediate drink, so yours truly attended to the job at hand. My task was to empty the rest of the Ford Cortina and carry the bags of sweets up a flight of stairs and into the living room. Like every room of our house, the living room was never cleaned, so I pushed everything to the side to make way for the incoming cargo. I emptied bag after bag and made a huge pile of goodies on the floor, everything and anything: Black Jacks, Spangles, penny chews, French nougat, Opal Fruits, pear drops, halva, Love Hearts, Jelly Belly beans, Walker’s toffee (which came with a metal hammer to break it with), and loads of other goodies. There were even the most exquisite embossed tins of Walkers and Campbells shortbreads, which really came in handy for storing Lego and Meccano pieces. I would also receive products that were yet to be launched around the world and be the first kid in not just the UK, but sometimes the whole planet to try them.
The house would once again be most conveniently fueled up with candy, biscuits, chocolates, chews, and some really weird products with lettering in Arabic or another language that I couldn’t work out. But I didn’t care one hoot; this was my booty. You name it, Mum had it in the car. Manufacturers gave her just about as much as she could carry. She never ate any of it. Both my brother and my sister were living and studying away from home by now, so almost every last piece was for the budding Wonka to sample.
I was so proud of my mum, and her making it home without crashing was a favorable bonus all round. She often drove alone in the middle of the night across Europe, and I knew that I was the one she was coming home to. I knew she would not have carried on if it wasn’t for my waiting for her. My brother, sister, and I were her reason for staying alive, which was hard work for her when she knew she was dying a painfully slow and inevitable death.
But when she came home late at night, it was just so amazing to see her do something for us like that. I knew she collected all these sweets from the trade show for her son Angus and my brother in boarding school and sister at university. That’s why she really got them.
She would stand there in the living room, watching me and smiling as I ripped open all the bulging carrier
