One of the defining memories of my childhood was falling through the ceiling of my parents' house. We had friends visiting Timaru from Dunedin, I was maybe about 8 years old, and had been OD'ing on the CS Lewis Narnia books, and was reasonably convinced that a clamber around the attic of our old house would locate the passageway to a parallel universe.
Of course, my partly formed 8-year-old brain had not fully thought this one through, or I would have, at the very least, considered walking on the beams. So, when my chubby legs started marching my chubby body along the ceiling panels, something kinda had to give.
And give it did. Oh, my word did it give. However-many years of plaster, dust and pink batts came clattering down, all over the rooms below. Chaos and carnage. I remember hanging on to a beam and shrieking for help, while my parents rushed, panicked, to see what the ruckus was about. And then almost collapsed in hysterical laughter.?
I have no recollection of the repairs. What I do remember is that we were eating humbugs at the time...
When I was a boy (all those many, many years ago), one of the greatest treats and a source of unbridled gastronomic pleasure was getting a bag of sweets from the corner dairy.
Back in those days, 50 cents bought you a mixed bag of lollies the size of your head (especially if you knew a girl who worked in her parents' dairy). Sometimes you would open the white paper bags and sneak a peek (to try to avoid too many orange or green jet planes), but mostly it was luck of the draw. The favourites were always chewy, wrapped Milk Shakes, milk bottles, perhaps a brittle, thinly choc-coated toffee milk bar, jet planes of the red or purple persuasion, Jersey caramels, soft jubes, and the glorious, iconic pineapple lump. There for bulk were Eskimos (big, but bland, and possessing a curiously chalky texture), some pretty ropey marshmallows, and liquorice allsorts, which always seemed a bit grown up and dull.
Some sweets were clearly for kids, while others were obviously more adult in their appeal - boiled sweets, for example, which I regarded as tantamount to some form of cruel and unusual punishment as a child, and about which I am ambivalent now. Barley sugars always reminded of the dreaded 40-hour famine (which I did once, without any real enthusiasm or awareness of what it was actually about) - sweaty sleeping bags and farting schoolkids.
I have recently been reading Toast, the memoir of English food writer and cook Nigel Slater, in which he describes all manner of delicious English sweets such as pear drops, sherbet fountains, rhubarb and custard drops, and Blackpool rock, and the way they can still transport you back to simpler times. Taste (along with smell) is one of the most evocative senses, and certainly sweets seem to have an almost portal-like quality in recalling childhood memories. And I have found that visiting the UK Goodies shop in Petone (where I happen to live, purely by coincidence), I am able to revisit childhood memories that actually belong not to me, but to Nigel Slater...
A special honorary mention, also, to the pick'n'mix at?The?Dutch Shop?in Jackson Street, Petone, which specialises in the peculiar salty, chewy candies beloved of that nationality, but also has amazing wine gums and caramels.
These days, you can buy "fancy" sweets, even sweets that contain no artificial colourings, such as those made by the Natural Confectionery Company.?There is the delectable soft liquorice made by RJ's, the traditional black and also now in red raspberry. With chocolate, white or brown, inside or out - yikes. And then there are all those classic chocolate goodies from Whittakers?(although chocolate is really another topic altogether...)
What actually reminded me of this was the Aspee Fruit Supply, on Wellington's Cuba Street, which now has a pretty amazing selection of pick'n'mix sweets - all the old faves, along with new selections such as peach-, feijoa- (which taste faintly like a rugby changing room smells) and grape-flavoured gumdrops. Just occasionally (not too often!) I like to stop in and make up my own "50c mixture" - even if nowadays it is likely to cost more like four or five dollars.
And still, to this day, I pretty well spurn aniseed, smokers, anything musk flavoured, anything cherry, orange or lime flavoured, and, obviously, humbugs - the taste of falling through your parents' ceiling.
But everybody has their favourites. What were your favourite sweets as a child, and what memories do they evoke? And what are your favourites now - do you still eat sweets now and again? Or have you outgrown, or just stopped eating them?
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