Favourite sweet? "Anything that lasted a long time."

“On Fridays, Mum used to buy the sweets, and then she’d come home, and she’d have four saucers and she’d share them out,” Grandma explains. She was born in 1941, a year after rationing was introduced, and was the second youngest of four children. “Mum and Dad had chocolate. But we had boiled sweets and things. I suppose you could probably get about…eight or nine.”

Eight rhubarb and custards
(a bit stuck together because I put them in a draw
in September and then forgot about them).

This scarcity of sweets got me thinking about its opposite – abundance – and the role that plays in children’s literature in particular. The quintessential example of this is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) by Roald Dahl.

It is the quantity of sweets, as much as the sensory descriptions of them, that overwhelms the book: “There’s enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well!” (79), “rows and rows of small white square-shaped sweets (125), “THE ROCK-CANDY MINE – 10,000 FEET DEEP” (140), “FIZZY LEMONADE SWIMMING POOLS” (141). It kinda puts Grandma’s saucer of lemon drops to shame.

In “THE INVENTING ROOM,” the children don’t just observe large quantities of confectionary but are completely enveloped in the sensory experience of its production:

"Charlie Bucket stared around the gigantic room in which he now found himself. The place was like a witch’s kitchen! All about him black metal pots were boiling and bubbling on huge stoves, and kettles were hissing and pans were sizzling, and strange iron machines were clanking and sputtering, and there were pipes running all over the ceiling and walls, and the whole place was filled with smoke and steam and delicious rich smells." (104)

Except, of course, that the most crucial of all senses is forbidden; Mr Wonka tells the children, “no tasting!” (103). Dahl’s prose is transparent in its tantalisation of the reader (who I’m sure can empathise with this particular form of torture - restricted access to sweets), and brings to my mind the wriggling children of the Stanford marshmallow experiment which was first conducted four years prior to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s publication.  

Some of Willy Wonka's harebrained schemes.

“What was your favourite sweet?” I ask Grandma

“I don’t know, really. I think anything that lasted a long time.” We both laugh at this.

“I used to be like that,” I say. “Even though I liked chewy sweets, I liked the boiled sweets…”

“Because they lasted,” we say in unison.

Dahl thought of this predicament too:

"‘Everlasting Gobstoppers!’ cried Mr Wonka proudly. ‘They’re completely new! I am inventing them for children who are given very little pocket money. You can put an Everlasting Gobstopper in your mouth and you can suck it and suck it and suck it and suck it and it will never get any smaller!’" (106)

Time drags when you’re a child, especially if it’s the time leading up to something you really, really want (e.g. Friday after school when you get sweets – a ritual observed by both Grandma and I – although I acknowledge that my Fridays were more bountiful).

The abundance of sweets and the concept of everlasting sweets speak to the same anxiety about prolonging this infrequent moment of gustatory ecstasy. I always think that taste – along with smell – is peculiar in its fleetingness. I mean, you can look at something – a painting, the view from your nearest window, the mug to your right – for hours. Likewise, you’re always touching something even if it’s only the ground beneath your feet. I can’t make a bar of chocolate last more than five minutes, maximum, and then the fun is over.

But if you have so many sweets that you could eat them for hours and hours and never run out – or one gobstopper than stops your gob definitely – then you’d be free from worries about the future. You wouldn’t have to exercise self-control or compromise on taste or texture for longevity. Your experience of the present would be intensified by the absence of anxiety about how long the present will last.

“I know that my sister was very good at spacing it out for herself during the week, whereas mine went in a couple of days,” Grandma says, and we both laugh. “So did Ollie’s, and Robin, our younger brother, he used to hang on to them.”

My approach to sweets, when I was a child, most aligned with Robin’s, but I’m not convinced ours is the best strategy. Every year, I’d make my Easter egg last until my birthday (29^th May), at least, but I think nibbling crumbs of chocolate every now and then was less pleasurable than gobbling it all in a couple of days would’ve been because I wasn’t present in that experience which can only be experienced, to the full, in the present.

Bibliography

Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Puffin Books, 2013.

"Rationing in World War Two." BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/topics/rationing_in_ww2. Accessed 5th March 2018.

“Stanford marshmallow experiment.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment#cite_note-Mischel1972-1. Accessed 3^rd March 2018.