The Link To The Child In All Of Us

Do you remember the trips to your local sweetshop when you were young? The eager anticipation as you approached the door, pocket money clenched in your hand, wondering which retro sweets you were going to buy this week?

Sweetshops were different in those days.

If yours was anything like 'The Chocolate Box' at the end of our road, it would have been something like this.

The first thing you saw as you approached the sweetshop was the board outside - a board which highlighted the headlines from the daily paper. Sometimes the headlines were printed... and other times they were hand written. But they were always dramatic (invariably, in the 1970's, telling us about the latest strike!)

The window at the front of the shop was filled with postcards advertising all sorts of things for sale. I think, from memory, it used to cost about 10p per 2 weeks to put an advert in the front window of the sweetshop. I know I did it a few times when I was in my teens, trying to make a bit of money by selling toys I no longer needed or wanted... or offering to wash people's cars or mow their lawns in return for a supplement to my pocket money.

Inside the sweetshop, or CTN as it was more correctly known I think (CTN standing for Confectioners, Tobacconists and Newsagents) one of the walls was filled floor to ceiling with newspapers and magazines.

In the corner there was one of my favourite attractions, a revolving stand full of jokes and tricks. You know the sort of thing... sneezing powder (which we found could be replaced, much more cheaply, by pepper), itching powder retro (the fluffy bits out of rosehips worked just as well as this), nails through the finger, fake ice cubes with flies in... and fake chewing gum (which didn't look much like real chewing gum) and where the unfortunate taker of the stick of gum received a whack on the finger from a sort of sprung loaded, mouse-trap like contraption... nice!

At the far end of the shop was a selection of birthday (and other greetings) cards and also the start of the most interesting and fun bit of all... the sweets! In this section it was a set of shelves containing boiled sweets. Some of these were very interesting to me... things like Sherbet Lemons and their cousins, Sherbet Strawberries, frequently found their way into my little white paper bag of delights. Others though, such as aniseed balls and mint imperials, were quickly passed over as being either horrible (aniseed was and is not one of my favourite tastes) or a bit dull (I could never get excited about a mint imperial... especially when there were so many really interesting and tasty sweets to choose from in the rest of the shop.

The jars of retro sweets continued round to the wall behind the sweetshop keepers counter - a myriad of sweets of different colours and sizes - from the large Gobstoppers and Couch Candy twists, through the 'normal sized' favourites - rhubarb & custards and strawberries & cream, the mini sweets such as the pips in a wide variety of flavours and hues (sherbet pips, apple pips, spearmint tips) and down to the powders in the form of sherbets, crystals and kali.