This week, a trip down memory lane, sweeties and a delightful vision of hell…
As a child, I was entranced by toffee apple wrappers. A toffee apple itself was a rare treat, bought for me perhaps on occasional visits to a fairground or church bazaar. Much as I enjoyed the toffee, and the apple, it was the semitransparent red cellophane wrapping that I adored. Rather than discarding it into the fairground or church wastepaper bin, I would scrunch it up and stuff it in my pocket and take it home with me.
Then, at home, I smoothed out the wrapper and pasted it to my bedroom window. The coating of toffee was sticky enough that it needed no further adhesive. The result was like stained glass! If the sun was shining, a red shadow would appear on my bedroom wall. This seemed magical to me, at the time. I discovered, too, that if I peered out through the toffee apple wrapper on the windowpane, the outside world took on a reddish hue, as if consumed by fire. It was a vision of hell, and one I found delightful.
Unfortunately, my mother, a proud Belgian housewife, took a dim view of having her window besmirched by a sticky toffee apple wrapper, and peeled it off. Then I had to wait and wait until next time I was bought a toffee apple, which might be weeks or months. But wait I did, and again, for a brief idyll, I saw a roseate inferno from my window.
There came the time when it was discovered I was a myopic little tot, and I began to wear spectacles. When next I was bought a toffee apple, I had the bright idea of sticking the wrapper to my lenses, instead of pasting it to the bedroom window. When I returned home from the fairground or the church bazaar, I took the scrunched wrapper from my pocket, smoothed it out, and cut it into two equal halves with my mother’s pinking shears, snaffled from her sewing box. This was a fantastic improvement! Though somewhat blurry, the world was red and hellish wherever I looked!
Alas, either my mother or my father, or both, noting the sticky toffee apple wrapping stuck on my glasses, ticked me off for being a nitwit, and insisted I remove it and clean the lenses with hot soapy water. All I could do was wait until the next fairground, the next church bazaar, the next toffee apple. I longed to grow up, so I could buy my own toffee apples, and choose to see the world enflamed by semitransparent red cellophane all the time.
Q – Is there a word of truth in all this?
I am not sure. I have been consulting a specialist in Recovered Memory Syndrome, who moonlights as a hawker of toffee apples, or possibly a hawker of toffee apples who moonlights as a Recovered Memory Syndrome therapist. We have yet to plumb the depths of my mental baggage, but we’re getting there.
Q – Is there a word of truth in all this? Without doubt, yes. I remember clapping that wrapper across my eyes, looking my chronically anaemic, permanently ashen, sister in the physog and casually observing: “What an improvement!” She bought me my first pair of football boots and encouraged me to spend as much time as possible in the fields way beyond the house.
I was more a yellow lucozade bottle wrapper kind of boy. Gave me a rather jaundiced view of the world.
A well worn Davy Crockett hat, pulled down over the eyes, gave life a view beyond the fringe.
I prefer my cocktail of truth in rose-coloured glasses (a heaven in hell’s despite).
I gained a Bird’s Eye view of the world by fashioning a pair of rudimentary glasses from frozen peas and fishfingers
The classic miss-spent youth Worm, or was that last summer?
Like Toby, it was the yellow Lucozade wrapper and additionally the purple one from the Quality Street hazelnut caramel. In combination they were positively hallucinogenic.
I miss Lucozade. I can get Chocolate Homewheat, Hobnobs, even Bassetts Jelly babies. But I can’t get Lucozade anywhere here. The first thing I did when Mrs B and I went to Ireland a couple of summers back was to go to the snack purveyor at Shannon airport and buy 2 bottles of Lucozade.
They don’t come with the cellophane though sadly.
As elder sibling to the esteemed Mr. Key, I cannot confirm the presence of toffee apple wrappers in his childhood. I can confirm the spectacles and his delight in the fires of hell.