A Handful of Broken Biscuits: the sweet shop.

This is the title of the book my father wrote when he understood that he was terminally ill. "I am past my sell-by date", he told me. "Better finish that book, then." Reading this now --he wrote it for posterity, comfort, family and friends-- it is as if he is extending a cordial handshake across the years to me.

The book is about his childhood, growing up on the edge of Burrington Combe and Langford in Somerset, in the Mendip Hills. The broken biscuits of the title are those that my grandmother, Elizabeth (Beth in the book) would order from the grocer every week and which my father, if he was lucky, would also be able to buy at the village shop. Often, the generous shop keeper would slip him an extra toffee and, if the ice cream churn was nearly empty, give him a spoon and pretend not to notice. I noticed, when I read this book again, how much he remembered of the food of his childhood and, of course, of the garden from which much of it had come. Some extracts.

This first is about having a penny in hand and going into the sweet shop. This was in about 1930 (I was a late-flowering chrysanthemum). The humbugs I include in the picture above could induce a sort of sweetie shop frenzy in me, still. They must, of course, come in a rustling little white paper bag.

Into the shop they went and the door bell tinged behind them. They could see straight through to the post office counter where Mrs Thomson was serving the next customer with penny stamps and his pension. It was slow moving, slow speaking, easy going Miss Buxton who came forward to serve them. They could take their time with her as they weighed the merits of humbugs against licorice allsorts, or Nutalls mintoes against dolly mixtures. These shelves, with thirty six big glass bottles to inspect and choose from. The bottles winked cheerfully at them in the soft, mellow afternoon sunlight, seeming to say "Choose me. Choose me." Aniseed balls, with a sweet, powdery bloom on them, were in one jar; the pink pastel colours of fruit drops were in the next. The rich brown sheen of Sharpes' Bluebird toffee pieces were next to the brown and white whirls of Maynards' delights.

Lovely they were, but they gave you toothache if they took out one of your fillings. All you would get then was iodine treatment to see you through to the next visit of the school dentist, months away. So no: better not. Small black roll chunks of licorice gleamed dully; sherbet lemons spoke of high summer and Fox's Glacier mints of the North Pole, looking to him like bits chipped from an ice flow.

And for me? Mint Shrimps, licorice comfits, rhubard and custard, fruit pastilles, the aniseedy ones in the Licorice allsort box, mint imperials and sherbet lemons. And I'll never forget the box of sugared almonds that Father Christmas delivered and I sampled in a dark still house. I think it was the smoothness, the smell and the thinness of the sugar shell of that crisp nut. And the allure of the pretty pastel sweet -- to a girl mainly interested in mud and not at all sweet and pink things. And they were so cold. From the Pole, I imagine.