Bittersweet: A Memoir. Angus Kennedy
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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 bags of sweets in astonishment, and I would tell her, “Mum, you are amazing.” She didn’t hear me say that often, and I saw the tears in the corners of her eyes. If only I could have said it more: Mum, you are amazing. I wish I had. It was those rare moments I said she was special that were very special for both of us. After she died, this became what I remember and hold close.
We are never really that proud of our parents, but there are pockets in time when we see how hard it really is for them to get it right and keep going on and on day after day, fighting the impossible systems put before them. I was proud that she managed to stay alive. It was that simple; she fought every day to stay alive and be with us.
We had many foreign products from Egypt, Syria, Greece, the United States, India, Grenada, and all sorts of other wacky places I’d never heard of or had seen only in pictures in scuffed geography textbooks. It was the best way to learn geography. But all those sweets, when I look back, were very different from today’s.
A lot of the candy companies that existed then have been acquired or are now out of business. The world of confectionery has changed a good deal, but of course it has, as has the rest of the world. This was a few years before we bought our first Apple Macintosh Plus computer with which to publish. Fry’s and Rowntree’s were independent companies that were, like Cadbury, founded on Victorian Quakerism. There were a number of large food companies that were founded by people with such strong faith. That was in the days before death duties and new employment laws existed, and the owners of businesses amassed huge private wealth and built their fabulous English mansions.
Fry’s was bought by Cadbury and then Cadbury by Mondelēz (Kraft Heinz), but I still remember when Fry’s was independent. Believe it or not, they were the first company to invent the molded chocolate bar in 1847. Yes, Fry’s invented our chocolate bar, and few people know it. It also invented Fry’s Turkish Delight, a chocolate-enrobed, rose hip–flavored gelatin countline bar, still made by Cadbury—and it was another product I had available on regular call in my school blazer’s inside pocket.
Meanwhile, Rowntree’s, which is from York in the United Kingdom, invented some of the world’s best-known brands in the 1930s—including none other than Kit Kat (1935). Hershey acquired the rights to produce Kit Kat in 1978, and today it is one of the world’s biggest selling confectionery brands. Reports say they now sell around 250,000 every day! Yes, all from a small factory in York.
Rowntree’s also invented Aero, Smarties, and Quality Street in the 1930s. I always found that a small yellow box of their colorful Fruit Pastilles would make a bad movie a good one; they were first produced by Rowntree’s well over one hundred years ago, in 1881.
When gobble-up time began, they merged with another British company that is all but forgotten, Mackintosh. Then Rowntree’s bought a whole load of other companies, including Tom’s Foods, Sunmark confectionery, and more, and then (deep breath), along comes Nestlé in 1988, who gobbled them all up in one delicious gulp. Bang, gone, amen, lest we forget.
I always had some Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles in my blazer. You could go into a corner shop and see their name on large glass jars on the shelves among other products such as Terry’s All Gold chocolates, Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts, Mackintosh’s Egg and Milk Toffees, Anglo Bubbly bubble gums, Paynes Poppets, Maynards Wine Gums, and Barker & Dobson Television Selection. Really—they had a tin of sweets with a picture of a family all watching TV together as the big occasion. The tins alone are worth around $265 on eBay now, so if you find one, hang onto it. Anyway, these are names I have engrained in my mind to this day, and soon many will perhaps be remembered only with a trip back in time to my dusty attic.
It wasn’t long ago that what I would estimate was most of our sugar confectionery was presented in