In The Sweet By And By (Top Ten Sweets)

Member Name: raehippychick

Product:	Top Ten Sweets
Date:	26/09/07 (417 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Happy memories of some sweets of my childhood

Disadvantages: toothache, tummyache, weight gain

1. Sherbet Dip Dabs
Ah, the mess of a sherbet dip dab… A small pink lollipop to dip into a pack of sweet, sugary lemon sherbet. One little packet could last me almost a day if I was careful and could resist the temptation to crunch the lolly to bits

2. Traffic light lollipops
I loved the fun of traffic light lollipops; they started out with a red unidentified fruit flavoured lolly. As you sucked and melted the outer layer away you got to, my favourite bit, a lovely creamy, almost custard flavoured tasting yellow part and then, the not so fun bit; a green centre. When I got to inner core I would often swap it with my friend for one of her sweets. Yes, disgusting I know, but hey, back in the 70’s we didn’t have an obsession with germs, as long as we washed out hands before meals we’d survive. To be honest I find the current fixation on keeping everything germ free tedious and pathetic, as kids living in the country we were grubby a lot of the time and yet rarely had colds or bugs or infections. Sorry, rant over, back to the lollies… anyway, after we had shared our traffic light the sticks were lovely to chew as, being made of tightly rolled paper, one stick could last for ages as we ran around pretending to be Kojak

3. Space Dust
This amazing sweet confection arrived when I was in my teens and was a novel sweet to us. A brightly coloured sachet of what looked like innocent sherbet. But drop a little onto your tongue and you were tickled with a crackling spitting explosion of taste that sounded a lot louder to your own ears than those around you. We sued to dare each other to put a whole sachet in at once… quite an experience the first time! After a while we began to get brave and would spend all our pocket money on Space Dust and pour whole packets into our abused mouths at once, I think the maximum ever was three packets… not something I tried, although I was highly impressed

4. Strawberry bon bons
Innocent looking dusty pale pink sweets that could crack a filling in a careless instant, these were strange sweeties, but quite addictive. I loved to suck off the sugary dusty coating and then gently suck the toffee centre for hours while I read my favourite Enid Blyton books. But woe betide should I forget myself and give a quick bite, I’d end up at best with my teeth stuck together and once a quick trip to the dentist to replace a filling

5. Peanut brittle
As a huge peanut fan, I am still a lover of peanut brittle. A long sticky plank of peanuts stuck together with a crisp toffee, a bar of this was another favourite accompaniment to my reading addiction. I had t o carefully unwrap this almost to the bottom of the bar as once engrossed in a book I could easily lose concentration on my nibbling and often ended up gnawing on the wrapper

6. Pineapple chunks
These happy chunky yellow sweets always remind me of summer. During the endless holidays as a child we often had ‘days out’ around Norfolk and were allowed to choose a quarter of whatever sweets took our fancy should we come across a sweetie shop. Ah, the hours of deliberation as out parents stood patiently outside waiting for my sister and I to come to a decision. I was always torn between pineapple chunks and those hard candy peanut sweets shaped like peanut shells and filled with peanut butter, but after getting one stuck in my throat one day (a very scary experience that almost put me off all boiled sweets for life) pineapple chunks became a firm favourite. There is nothing like a small paper bag filled with those pretty yellow cubes dusted with powdery sugar and a smell of artificial pineapple wafting up at me to take me back to a glorious summer afternoon in the sweet shop in Holt, North Norfolk

7. Sherbet pips
These were strange little things. We had hours of endless fun with these tiny little pink and white blobs of fizzy flavour, as they were the perfect size for dolls tea parties. A bag of the would start off I pristine condition with each pearl either clean pink or beautiful white and by the end of an afternoon of hard partying they would all be a dingy grey, but we still wolfed the lot down before going indoors for our tea

8. Anglo Bubbly
Now, this is where this op becomes truly disgusting. I hang my head in shame, but you must realise that growing up in a village so small that there were only three main families, one bus a day and nothing to do but climb trees, something had to give. When I was around thirteen, we didn’t grow up as fast as kids today, and although boys were starting to become mildly interesting to us, we were more concerned with having fun and outdoing them than enticing them with our feminine wiles. Our village had a ford with a bridge where we all congregated in the holidays and at weekends; the bridge had large rivets holdings the planks on it. One long hot day a couple of the local lads decided to have a spitting competition using the rivets as targets. So far so revolting? Well, we girls wanted to beat them, so to this end we scurried to the village shop and stocked up on Anglo bubbly. We chewed all the way back to the ford and the bright pink bubblegum didn’t let us down; for some reason it produced the most marvellous quantities of spit of the perfect consistency for any spitting competition. Suffice it to say, that after a competitive afternoon the girls finally won! I don’t think we ever did let the boys in on our secret weapon!

9. Butterscotch
Oma, my grandmother on my father’s side, used to arrive for her annual visit from London with a box of Dutch butter biscuits and a packet of butterscotch for my sister and I. The biscuits were always consumed on the first day during afternoon tea by the open fire, but the butterscotch was careful rationed. This was no ordinary butterscotch, it came in a longish flat packet and each piece was a small bar that could be sucked and replaced in its cellophane to make it last a little longer, or it could be crunched to make a delicious squeaky mess that stuck in the gaps of our teeth and then be sucked out gradually over a an hour or so. Thinking back, a lot of our choices of sweets were based on how long they would last, and out energies were devoted to eking these treats out as long as we could as a week between pocket money days was along time. It never occurred to us to ask our parents to buy us sweets in the ordinary run of things; sweets were paid for out of our own pocket money

10. Barley Sugar
As a child I suffered quite badly with carsickness, probably not helped by my habit of reading in the backseat on every journey, but this inconvenience had its own rewards. In the glove box of our car was a tempting round tin filled with barley sugar nestling in a nest of softest icing sugar. I did have to be honestly car sick to get a piece of this, and I had to have stopped reading for some time, but it was worth forgoing my book for a short while to get my mouth round a lovely sweet lump of gold. Barley sugar has a strange taste, sweet but not overly sugary, but it really did the trick in helping a bout of nausea in the car. Although I think any boiled sweet would have done, barley sugars were what my parents bought. Looking back this may be because if they had a tin of assorted fruit flavoured boiled sweets my sister and I would have fought over who got which flavour so with barley sugar there were no arguments!

The majority of the sweets we devoured as youngsters were of indeterminate taste, all full of artificial flavours, sweeteners and preservatives. All tooth rottingly unhealthy, but because we had to live with the budget of our pocket money we didn’t eat vast quantities of them and because we weren’t ferried everywhere by car we got plenty of exercise, out in the fresh air with our friends. As the saying goes: all things in moderation; we grew up healthy and with surprisingly few fillings

Most of the sweets of my childhood can be found online at: http://www.aquarterof.co.uk/ although sadly the traffic light lollies are no longer as good as they used to be, I have yet to find any that are fully red on the outside to give the fascinating layering effect of uncovering a different colour as you suck; nowadays they seem to be sort of stripe, which to me negates a lot of the point of calling the traffic lights

Summary: A sweet trip down memory lane (with an icky bit)