Читать книгу Bittersweet: A Memoir - Angus Kennedy - Страница 8

And so, we all made it, together, for another four years after the fire. My mother was suitably satisfied that we, including the dogs, were still enjoying the added bonus of being alive. I am sure that by this time she knew of my father’s illness, which must have started when I was nine, and which only made her drinking worse.

Dinner at home was a fairly suicidal affair if you weren’t careful. It was an achievement to make it from six years old to nine in my house. In between rescuing the mail and having a candy fix, my new survival test involved fighting an enemy that was smaller than a raging inferno—the bacteria in my food, in what little eventually found its way to my plate. My mother didn’t have much time to cook, as she was busy trying to work, too.

The problem with publishing is that there is never enough advertising to go around. It’s still the same today; selling magazine advertisements is a high-pressure job. I have sold millions of pounds’ worth, and it’s still just as hard convincing someone today to buy something they don’t really want as it was then. She was always going back to the phone or her homemade minibar and giving either a go, and they were both brilliant distractions from cooking.

Meanwhile, I was always going hungry and my poor father was getting weaker by the month with his cancer. Often, cooking occurred only when my mother remembered to, and it was quite an education. Every now and then we enjoyed a truly great meal, as she really could cook once upon a time, but sadly the drink molded her into the very last person you would want to accept a dinner invite from.

I used to have to do a kind of excavation job on my dinner plate to see what was waiting for me among chunks of raw garlic, orange or lemon peel, and hundreds of cloves or countless peppercorns (she always spilled the packet). Or worse still, I would be presented with reheated food that was several days or even weeks old, in which case it was not unusual to find myself sharing a plate with the occasional maggot or other insectoid dinner guests.

My mother’s disastrous cooking techniques advanced considerably, especially in the evenings when she really could not even recognize the contents of the cooking pots she was tending to. She continued to add ingredients at random times, as she couldn’t remember how long had passed since she had started cooking, or if the gas burner was on at all.

She liked curry, so you can imagine how hot some of those dishes became when she cooked with triple doses of chili powder. To this day, my brother and I like a hot curry. I also continue to check my food for bugs (cooked or alive) that might have taken a liking to my dinner or anything else: from stones or hundreds of peppercorns to household items like lids of ingredients jars or random items of cutlery that might have accidentally fallen into the cooking pot.

Mum sometimes even forgot she was cooking at all, and would wobble straight past the burning pots to the end of the kitchen, where a convenient gin bottle was handy to help her through the day. She never forgot about that.

It was a fine occasion to have the real meal deal that was both tasty and edible. Even if it was a good dish—because she could be a fabulous cook—sadly she would often fall asleep (well, pass out) while it cooked. I would rush downstairs through the smoke to find the spaghetti burned dry and retire to my bedroom to nibble on a Tunnock’s Teacake. I saved those for special no-dinner-from-Mum-this-time occasions.

Sometimes I thought I had quite exceeded myself with an excellent idea to feed Peggy and Sheba with the dinners that were not, in my opinion, fit for us humans. But they would have none of it. The blasted dogs knew better. They’d run away from under the kitchen table when presented with a human’s plate, just in case I tried to feed them.

I had the most intolerable stomach pains most days after school. They became so severe that while waiting at the bus stop on the way home from school, I would buy a warm, freshly baked loaf of bread from the baker, who was strategically positioned right next to the bus stop. I would then eat the whole thing outside the bakery while waiting for the Route 134 London double-decker, only to realize when the bus finally arrived that I had spent my bus fare.

It was never really established what caused the pains, as I don’t recall seeing a doctor about it. I expect now, after having kids of my own, that it was threadworms. It was also a several-mile walk from London’s Camden Town to Muswell Hill, so I probably used up all my calories walking home.

Needless to say, I would turn to my private candy store and fuel up on sugary carbohydrates. The large supply of free confectionery really was my savior, essential to keeping me alive during my school years. I lived off the stuff, which I kept in cardboard boxes locked in the cupboard in my room. On many occasions, it pretty much saved my life.

I know what it’s like to be hungry, and nowadays I never leave anything on my plate and always save everything after the family meal.

The best times were definitely the nights my mother returned home with so many sweets in the car that the rear bumper scraped along the road. Things were looking especially good when she managed to trade the tiny Renault 4 for a Ford Cortina XL with velour seats, a real cassette player, a cigarette lighter, and an armrest in the back, which seemed an absolute luxury. But most importantly, it had a bigger trunk, which meant one thing—a larger hoard of candies.

Yes, an entire car jam-packed with sweets straight from the largest confectionery show in Europe. Possibly every kid’s dream? I knew that I would be able to stock up for weeks with such a hoard, and that it would keep me going right through the winter. My mother, as a journalist, would be handed plenty of free products at the trade show in Cologne, Germany, which I now visit every year myself.

In fact, I have been attending this show since the age of twelve. It’s an enormous trade fair, where you can walk through fifteen halls the size of cricket pitches and pass a thousand trade stands displaying the world’s tastiest confectionery and bakery products. At the trade exhibition, you can eat and take home as much as you can carry. I go every year, and like my mother did before me, I come home with a car filled to the brim with the best French, Swiss, Belgian, Italian, and German chocolate on the market, although today I have five willing kids to help unload when I return. I also have a rather bashed up twelve-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser Invincible that can hold a welcome two thousand pounds, so I am very well-equipped for our candy cargo. I take magazines to the show and return with a carful of every possible treat you can imagine.

The tradition carries on, from generation to generation. My kids wait 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 large glass jars on shelves behind store counters. You could pop down to your local 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.