Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams (12 page)

‘Never mind about 1066 William the Conqueror, 1087 William the Second. Such things are not going to affect one’s life … but 1933 the Mars Bar and 1936 Maltesers and 1937 the Kit Kat – these dates are milestones in history and should be seared into the memory of every child in the country.’

So said none other than Roald Dahl, and he should know and in fact gets the last word on just about every single sweet-related issue out there.

So take that, you smarty-pants ‘one square of 90% cocoa dark chocolate with chilli taken with a glass of Chateau Petrus 1978’ brigade, and naff right off. Here are the facts: the more rarefied and bitter you take your chocolate, the less you TRULY like and appreciate the stuff. The chocolate you grew up with, mass-produced, high in fat and sugar, low in cocoa, is one of the many, many things that made Britain great. Along with, of course, Roald Dahl.

If you truly are a chocolate snob, then the great mass-market bars cater for you too, with the most exquisite, perfectly balanced fusion of chocolate-based mint flavouring: the Fry’s Chocolate Cream (plain, in the navy blue wrapper). If this peak of delicate, sweet and ever so slightly sharp, mouth-melting infusion of happiness, class and flavour does not assuage your snobbish tastebuds, then you’re doing it wrong. May I therefore commend to you an alternative volume entitled
Being Pointlessly Snotty and Showing Off: A User’s Manual
.

It took the adrenalin wearing off for Rosie to realise just how wet she was. That, and stepping out into an afternoon as clear and blue as the morning she’d left Lipton. What on earth had the weather done? Had it been an entirely topical downpour? As she dripped up the road towards Lilian’s house it seemed unfair that so many faces turned towards her to stare. Didn’t they know they lived in a mad climate?

Lilian was pottering about in the house looking worried when she arrived, but desperately trying not to show it too much.

‘What happened to you?’ she said. ‘I thought you’d turned around and gone home. Which you can do whenever you like.’

Lilian wondered if she’d been too hard on the girl before. Although she did look absolutely atrocious.

Rosie didn’t mention how close she’d come, alone on the hilltop, to pledging to go home.

‘There was a storm! I got drenched!’

‘Well, this is Derbyshire, darling, not the Balearics. Run yourself a bath and get a proper coat.’

Rosie put the kettle on and ran her fingers through her hair. Without wanting to drop anyone in it about treating a dog in a doctor’s surgery, she mentioned in passing that she’d met the local doctor.

‘Hye Evans? That fat old fool,’ said Lilian. ‘That man couldn’t diagnose a nail sticking out of your leg if you turned up with a nail sticking out of your leg, saying, “Doctor, I just accidentally hammered a nail into my leg.” And trust me, I should know.’

‘Uhm, no, the other one.’

Lilian’s eyebrows went up. ‘Were you quite so damp at the time?’

‘What do you mean?’ said Rosie.

Lilian glanced briefly at the glamorous portraits of herself as a younger woman but didn’t say anything. Rosie sniffed and marched upstairs to run the bath, trying not to glance in the bathroom mirror. Her hair had widened to twice its normal size, like a loaf of bread proofing by a stove.

‘I have a boyfriend, you know.’

‘Boyfriends, schmoyfriends,’ said Lilian. ‘I don’t see him here.’

‘I’m going to make you lunch,’ said Rosie. ‘And you are going to eat it. And then you’re going to get out of that chair, it’s not doing you any good.’

‘OK,’ she said, coming down warm and dry forty-five minutes later. She had only one jumper. That, she probably needed to rectify. Lilian was still sitting in her armchair listening to Radio 4 and staring into the fire. Rosie was tempted to join her, but she was here for a reason.

She heated up the thick vegetable soup she’d grabbed from the Spar, ignoring the looks and whispers of the other shoppers at her dripping state.

‘Eat this. And the bread.’

‘This is
oozing
with butter,’ said Lilian, looking disgusted.

‘It is,’ said Rosie. ‘And if you don’t want me to make you eat two slices, I’d get on with it. Unless you want me to dissolve it in milk.’

Lilian made a face, but started in on the soup. As she did so, she felt a little spurt of worry; how long had it been since she’d had hot food? Hetty popped in and warmed something up now and again but even she complained about her not having one of those new oven things that heated up things so fast. Lilian didn’t trust the idea of them, and anyway, she’d always got along fine without.

‘We need to get you a microwave,’ said Rosie. ‘You know. If you want to keep living here.’

‘Ugly things,’ murmured Lilian. ‘So many modern things are so ugly.’

Rosie tried not to take this as a personal slight, but didn’t quite know how to respond.

‘Have you lived in Lipton all your life?’ she asked.

‘Well, I’ve travelled,’ said Lilian crossly. It was none of this girl’s business. ‘I’ve been to York … Scarborough of course … Scotland once.’

‘London?’

‘I have no idea why the entire world seems so fixated on London,’ said Lilian. ‘I thought it was absolutely crammed full of unspeakable people, incredibly noisy and totally filthy.’

Rosie grinned. ‘It is,’ she said. ‘All of those things. That’s what makes it so amazing.’

‘Well, if you like hooligans, I suppose.’

‘Didn’t you ever want to travel any further?’ said Rosie. ‘New York? Paris?’

‘Not particularly,’ sniffed Lilian. ‘I knew what I liked. And I had the shop. And I might go, still.’

A silence descended, and the atmosphere grew stiff. Neither of them could quite say it. That there was no ‘still’. That what Rosie was here to do was not going to result in any trips to Paris. Lilian sniffed and turned away, refusing to touch her lunch.

Afterwards, Rosie insisted on examining her aunt’s hip. Lilian would have liked to refuse, but realised she was in no position to do so.

Sure enough, the wound was a little nasty and sticky round the edges, but nothing Rosie couldn’t sort out. Lilian, for her part, was a bit more impressed than she let on at Rosie’s cool hands and efficient manner as she changed the dressing. After
that, Rosie figured there was no point in pussyfooting around any longer.

‘Let’s have a look at the business then.’

Lilian looked guilty. ‘Well, since I hurt my hip …’

‘It’s fine,’ said Rosie. ‘Honestly. I’ve seen it.’

There was a silence.

‘But didn’t you ever want to sell up before? Retire? Go see Paris?’

Lilian’s expression turned mutinous.

‘You retire,’ she said.

Rosie bit her lip, hard.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Can I have the keys?’

With some difficulty Lilian picked up the large set of ancient brass keys from the mantelpiece.

‘Come on then,’ said Rosie. ‘Let’s go and have a look.’

The key twisted reluctantly in the old lock on the red-painted wooden door with nine panels of bevelled glass. With a horrible squeak Rosie managed to click it round.

‘There’s a knack to it,’ murmured Lilian.

‘Oh yes?’ said Rosie. ‘What’s that then?’

‘You get Rob the butcher to do it.’

Rosie shook her head in disbelief, pushing over stacked mail on the mat. ‘I can’t believe this has been going on for so long,’ she said. She moved into the middle of the tiny shop and turned round 360 degrees. The afternoon sun was struggling to penetrate the tiny windows.

‘Wow,’ was all she could say.

First off, there was no denying it, the place was filthy.
There were cobwebs in the corners. The windows were covered in grime. Things were toppled over, grey and crumpled. The antique till still had shillings and pence on its ancient keys. The scales, burnished and at an awkward angle, stood there as if the last seven decades had hardly touched them. It was a museum.

And there, too, inside, every square inch of the little shop was covered – in sweets, in posters, in things Rosie hadn’t seen for years. There were little tins of travel sweets and jujubes, neatly piled up in pyramids; great glass bowls full of striped candy canes tied with bows; huge slabs of dark red Bournville chocolate and neatly stacked alternating boxes of Dairy Milk and Black Magic. On the very highest shelves were the most enormous, elaborate boxes of chocolates, in red velvet heart-shaped boxes with huge ribbons, completely covered in dust. An old ladder was attached to sliding rails, as at a library, to allow the higher sweets to be removed from the shelves. Then, like an old apothecary’s shop, the back three walls were lined with shelves that held great bulbous glass jars filled with every imaginable sweet: neat pastel chunks of Edinburgh rock; haphazard slabs of peanut brittle; bright green gobstoppers and sharp little wrapped packets of Hubba Bubba; chocolate frogs and ladybirds; dolly mixtures and rainbow drops and cough sweets and bouncing fat pastel marshmallows and four different flavours of sticky, icing-sugar-coated Turkish delight. And tucked neatly by the old-fashioned black pop-up till, the classics, in neat and tidy rows: Mars Bar. Kit Kat. Aero. Fry’s Chocolate Cream. Crunchie. Twix. Oddly, the smell wasn’t too terrible; a sweet mustiness rather than a horrible decay.

‘Are there mice?’ said Rosie first off. ‘I bet there are mice.’ She looked around. ‘Wow,’ she said again. ‘I can’t believe you don’t get burgled all the time. I mean, how long …’

‘None of it’s worth much,’ said Lilian. But Rosie, taking in a deep breath, below the layers of dust and atmosphere of neglect, begged to disagree. In the few available bits of space between the displays hung old posters: a little girl in a purple furred coat for Fry’s, suggesting boys drink more milk by eating chocolate; a very smartly turned-out little boy playing cricket for Cadbury’s and a beautiful wartime dolly bird suggesting a Mars Bar was a meal in itself – the great triumvirate of British chocolate-making.

The floor, old black and white linoleum, had been worn smooth by generations of children beating a path with their farthings, their sixpences, their ten pences, their pound coins, clutched stickily in excited paws, eyes darting everywhere to decide what would be best; terrified of making the wrong choice.

‘But this is – I mean, it’s obviously once been absolutely amazing in here,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s fantastic.’

‘Shows what you know,’ said Lilian. ‘It’s all finished now. Anyway, it’s not what kids want these days. They don’t want gobstoppers any more. They want great big bars of Dairy Milk that you buy in six-packs from the supermarket. They want family packs and supersharers and litres of cola and hot dogs and nachos, whatever they are. Sweets are boring, and old-fashioned. No one is interested any more.’

Rosie looked around. ‘I can’t believe that’s true.’ Her eyes caught something at the back of the shop. Her face lit up.

‘Are those … sweetie cigarettes?’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen
these for years. You’re not allowed to sell them any more. Lilian, why didn’t you throw away all this stock?’

Her aunt looked cross but stoic.