Ian Ewart (Photograph courtesy Shelley Wall) |
On a blog a few days ago on Ewarts Newsagents I mentioned the sweet jars which were set up along one counter of the shop
behind glass. For small children this of course was at a perfect marketing
height-eye level. For many of us we were in there very regularly for our treats.
In the mid 1960s as I got toward the age of nine or ten, if my father was
working and we had been given school dinner money we sometimes just held on to
the money and bought our lunches at Oxgangs Broadway. For me, lunch would
consist of three Paris buns for nine old pennies with a bottle of Koolapop-a
cola drink, which also cost nine pence-a grand total of one and six i.e. one
shilling and six pennies. However, on returning the Koolapop bottle I would get
threepence back which would go on a little mixture of sweets.
I’d usually go
for sports mixtures-little fruit gums which were very hard and which took a lot
of sucking and chewing. They took the form of sports kit-little boots or
racquets. Green or red were the best flavour-orange was fine, but black was
unpalatable to all but a few; on placing the order I would ask the shop
assistant for no black ones. Sometimes they would oblige, on other occasions they would say Ye'll take what you get son! After all they could hardly
do this for all customers and be left with a jar of black sports mixtures!
Because the sweets were bought towards the end of the lunch period and also to improve the quality of the school afternoon we
would run the risk of eating surreptitiously in class. This was high risk-if
you were caught, which was often the case, you had to spit the offending morsel
out in to a basket, but more worryingly you might have to hand over the offending
sweet bag to the teacher.
Other sweets which were popular with us all from the
Ewarts sweet jars particularly for chewing in class were Fruit Salad and Blackjacks. Because lunchtimes were busy and some
kids could be very slow in making up their mind and the shop assistants
patience low, the lunchtime theme tune for Ewarts could have been Come on, make up your mind! I was never like that. I knew exactly what I wanted. However,
there was such a bewildering range of sweets to choose from, perhaps it was understandable. In Sunday's blog in a quick Cooke's Tour I'll tackle the impossibly large topic of the bewildering range of sweets that were available.
1 comment:
How I remember that saying you"ll take what you get it was one of my mothers favourites
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