It’s funny:
as a child I envied Karin, a classmate with whom I often walked back from
school home, because she always had money to buy sweets at the kiosk. Karin’s parents
had a drugstore, but no time.
Karin
bought soda-sweets, and little eatable sponge rubber dolls that held hand
endlessly like those garlands you cut out from tissue paper; she bought Salinos;
Ahoy!-effervescent powder-sachets
with a blue sailor on the waxen paper, that grew so strangely limp when you
licked the last few small crumbs out of the edge with your tongue. Pipes from
liquorice with a pink or lime green foamy filling on top, that stuck in form of
a cone in the pipe bowl and had to be unhinged in one piece by a skilfully bite
of the molars; rolled-up liquorice- ribbons that you held with your teeth and
reeled off to your waist, and then gobbled up with lightning speed. And sticky
toffees, which sometimes pulled out a filling from the tooth (Karin had a lot
of fillings, it was a time when the dentist gave you sweets as a recompense for
the suffered torture).
My parents
disapproved of Karin, who was the first in our class to wear nylon stockings,
and they disapproved of sweets before dinner – as a quite well-behaved child I
abided them, mostly.
In the drugstore
Meissner stood huge cans, filled to their neck with salmine pastilles (tiny
rhombes of very salty liquorice) – a cockaigne, into which Mr. Meissner dipped
a tea spoon and laddled the boot into a pointed little paper bag – Mr. Meissner
was a friend of children and sold a teaspoon of salmine pastilles for two
pennys. You sticked them in form of a star with saliva onto the back of your hand,
and licked them off till they became wafer-thin. Then there were sweets that
one could never suck to their end: nibble-thaler had to be bitten through till
the cracknel splintered among the teeth; gobstoppers hid under their hard
vanilla or powder pink shell a tiny sugar kernel and must be bitten through, and cristal raspberry sweets did not only
colour your tongue excitingly red but also cut your mouth with glassy needles.
Round went the horrible rumour that genuine liquorice sticks were made out of real
ox blood. Highly interesting were the very personal mixtures that one created
oneself: „chocolate&salmine pastilles& tiniest sugarywhite peppermint
pastilles“: aaah! Even better: “chocolate, sour raspberry sweets and salmine
pastilles“ – that was heaven!
Today I
have the money to buy all these treasures – I could put rows of huge glasses
filled with sweets onto the shelves in my rooms. Nobody would admonish me, I
could downright bathe in them!
And do I do
it?? No!
But yesterday
I did a breach of my own rules. Did, what I never would do with the men in my
life, because I want to keep them treasured in my memory as I have them in my
memory – will say I never am tempted to look after 10 years what has become of
an Old Love – because: am I being
stupid?
With sweets
evidently I am: there they stood saucy tantalizing in look-through sachets on
the counter of ‘Manufactum’: “Sweets of Yore”.
In my
nostalgic brown paper bag with the slogan “They
still exist, the good old things!” piled up cannon balls (devilishly
salty!), golden nuts, crunchy thalers, rhubarb-vanilla clumps, raspberry sweets
and sorbet pillows.
The result
was predictable. In a German film of the Sixties, “Zur Sache, Schätzchen”, (“Let’s
dispense with the preliminaries, cutie!”) depicting the slack life of
students in Schwabing, a young Werner Enke always nagged his running gag: “The old spunk has gone!” (He was about
twenty).
Let it be
understood: the sweets have lost it.
I: not by a
long chalk!
