Bittersweet: A Memoir. Angus Kennedy
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sweetshop (which existed then), point to your favorite jar on the shelf, and be served your quarter pound of Humbugs. You’d see them weighed on a scale and placed in a paper bag. I would keep mine in my pocket at school all day. Almost everything came in a jar, from lollipops to sugar mice. No one thought of having them available in a different format.
That was until the late 1970s, when a company called Haribo came along and, thinking ahead, realized that they could argue it was not entirely hygienic for fingers and scoops to go in and out of the sweets jars all day long. They packaged their jellies in small, individual, hermitically sealed cellophane bags. Newly available packing technologies could weigh and deposit exact amounts of jellies into tiny bags by the thousands. They’re actually called multihead weighers, and these amazing machines took the industry by storm. They could cope with high volumes of small packs at exactly the right weight and then drop the jellies into a superfast, vertical-form seal packaging (bagging) machine that fired the packs out at the speed of a machine gun. Today’s machines can do around three hundred a minute.
No one paid Haribo much attention at first. Then in the late 1970s, terms such as food contamination and product safety became more critical and began entering the early workplace manuals. The new machines unfortunately also meant less labor, as shop assistants didn’t have to measure or weigh products from jars. It was a win-win. The factories could have fewer people working for them, the retailers could do other things with their time, and there was no food contamination (which I believe there wasn’t in the first place) caused by scoops and spoons.
By the time many other producers realized what was going on, the new packaging used by Haribo and other early adopters had changed the landscape of our corner confectionery shop forever and gradually the jars disappeared. By the end of the 1970s, jars had given way almost entirely to prepacked products in bags, and companies that were not fast enough to realize this trend did not survive. The industry went through a quiet but huge revolution in packaging.
However, my room at home needed no sealed packs, as most of the stash was taken straight to school for trading. The legendary “sweet mountain,” as we called it, would be piled high in our living room, higher than our black-and-white television, which never worked very well anyway. (That was in the days when, to get our TV going, I would have to bang it hard on the top and then stand on the end of the couch while dangling the utterly useless antenna off the side of the curtain rails at such an angle that we could actually watch it.)
My new hoard of confectionery contained all the power in the world for a nine-year-old boy. I was the Candy King. Chocolate still has a magical power, even for adults. I believe in its magic; I am still alive and that’s proof.
I was the boy who could bring any type of confectionery to school, at will and to order. This gave me a lot of confidence and a great deal of popularity. Even back then I was often called the Wonka boy. Who isn’t popular when they always give away free sweets? I was a living fairy tale: a cross between Robin Hood and the Pied Piper, and living in the witch’s house from Hansel and Gretel.
Returning to school after any period of time, after a fire, illness, or simply because my mother did not take me in for a while, would always spark curiosity. My mother would pull the car up outside the rusty iron Victorian school gates, and I knew that my arrival would always be different from the other kids’. I walked into the schoolyard, which had surprisingly little to play with considering it was said to house our playground—just some old car tires to roll around the yard and high brick fences. It was a claustrophobic place, but I could always brighten it up with the copious amount of sweets stuffed into my leather satchel and my pocketfuls of Gobstoppers and penny chews. In an instant, children came running across the schoolyard, caps flying off their heads, to get in with the kid with candy. Hypnotized by the treats, they pulled on my blazer, tried to open my satchel, and demanded free sweets.
Well not so free. Some pieces were given away, but others, like the new products not yet on the market, were definitely for trading. And here I learned a very important life lesson, namely how to trade and negotiate.
I must have appeared a rare human sample, a frail, pale, and gangly version of what I once was, but nevertheless I was capable of conjuring curiosity from all corners of the school. And from the overused schoolyard to the sickly powdered egg–smelling dining halls, kids appeared like ants to view the spectacle and land some sweets from the school’s very own Wonka.
“Roll up,” I would holler. “Angus Kennedy, an original sight, a somewhat different Angus is here, everyone,” I accentuated with a raspy voice from a lung condition years ago to add to the special effects.
I felt great at these times. I was a mess, of course, but I didn’t see it. My candy lifted my spirits and everyone else’s for that matter. I made people happy, I still do today, and that’s all that will ever matter to me. I was determined to be with my classmates and get on with the tasks of swapping, eating, and demonstrating the newest sweets in the land. School was all about laughing, playing Ace Trumps card games (sports cars edition), and having fun. It was a forgone conclusion that I would fail most, if not all, of my exams. But success was always weaved into the accomplishment of happiness.
Oddly, I never really felt that ill with pleurisy or from my other random dalliances with death. I never thought I was going to die in the fire, or let some ghastly intestinal worms take me either. These were all just annoying inconveniences. Kids are the best teachers; they are masters of enjoying the present, while adults are masters of not getting over the past, or worrying about illness.
Throughout everything, above all, I looked forward to going back to swooning over the amazing girls in class, one of whom I hopelessly fell in love with. I was back at “work” feeding kids with treats while trying to catch the attention of my heart’s desire, the latest beautiful girl with whom I was completely mesmerized. But as the weeks went by, I was unaware of the inevitable.
Soon, even desperate crushes would be obliterated from my thoughts. I don’t know anyone else who has ever had a Christmas quite like the one I was about to experience. All the presents were under the tree, but I didn’t want to open them. A horrible feeling of foreboding had come over me. For the first time in my life, I was truly scared. I just knew something horrible was about to happen. I wanted time to freeze and for the tree to be there and the presents remain unopened so life could be put on hold forever.
Chapter 3
My Father’s Death
In short time, all I was to have left of my dad would be the few badly developed black-and-white photos leaning against my bedside lamp. If only I could have taken more photos. I would gaze at a picture of the two of us on holiday on a beach together for hours before sleep, imagining him until he was really with me. But there was no way the pictures could tuck me in, pull my duvet up, and kiss me good night.
I had to remember that it’s not the length of a life that counts: a short life as a good man is always better than a long life as a bad one. We never learn from a perfect life.
The death of your father, particularly when you are nine years old, fries your circuit boards and reprograms you in an instant. If I had been a computer on that Christmas Eve, I might have been thrown out the window from the fourth floor onto reinforced concrete (for good measure).
You are left with the bits of your old life scattered in places you will never find them. You know whatever you do put back together can’t ever be the same. Perhaps my dad and I had struck a deal with our maker before we came to Earth: “Okay, Angus,” God would have said. “It’s going to be a tough one, but I’ll give you a life’s supply of chocolate, mate.” Life was okay—the odd mishap and a wonky mum, tons of chocolate and candies—but to be honest on that day I would have not minded dying too.
But life is worth dying for.
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Other kids at school had been dished out far worse than I had experienced—something I always tried to convince myself of, even though I found it hard. There was