The sweet life

Opposite Mosman Primary School was a lolly shop. Every so often I would be given some money by the neighbours, specifically to be spent on lollies - I guess because they knew my parents didn't understand about lollies and how
much Australian children loved them. Things like boiled lollies must not have existed in Germany when my parents were growing up and my mother had a horror of the violent colours of the sweets that were available and which I thought absolutely appealing!

The shop was tiny with wide shelves laden with big metal lidded jars that held, so it seemed to me, an Alladin's cave of sweet delights.

The choice was almost endless, I thought. The shop taught us about value for money. A freckle (chocolate disk covered with hundreds and thousands) and which could be eaten in a flash was expensive at a halfpenny. You could get 2 cobbers (chocolate covered caramel) for the same amount. I liked the 'cigarettes', aniseed flavoured sticks with a bit of red at the end to simulate a lighted cigarette, because you could twirl them in your mouth until they came to a point and that took ages.

Rainbow balls, or gobstoppers, were really popular. They cost 1 penny but were really good value because they were big and filled a whole cheek. You'd have to take them out to check regularly because the colours changed so they lasted for ages but you would end up with very sticky fingers. I loved them.

You could get jaffas and plain boiled sweets, fudge, minties, jujubes, bananas, milk bottles, snakes, tiny musk lollies, raspberries, all day suckers, toffee apples which weren't anything to do with apples, just a large round red and green sweet stuck on a stick, bullets, liquorice straps and liquorice all sorts, tubes of many flavours of 'Lifesavers' and my favourite of all, musk sticks. I'm sure there were masses of other sweets I can't even remember.

My mother was horrified when I brought a musk stick home for the first time. Artificial colour, artificial flavour and a surfeit of sugar. She told me I'd get cancer if I ate such stuff. I loved them though and ate plenty over the years, although the appeal was lost ages ago, so if I ever get cancer (please God NO) I'll know the cause!

The lady who owned the shop obviously enjoyed sampling the various treats! She wasn't fat but I don't think she had any teeth. She had a helper in the afternoons when the shop was crowded with multitudes of children all of whom ummed and aahed about spending their cache of coins, mainly pennies.

There was nothing hygienic about the lolly shop. These days it would be closed in a flash. The ladies would just reach into the jars and get out what was requested such as two musk sticks or 4 cobbers and pop them into a little white paper bag. They only had a scoop for the little lollies such as bullets. We didn't mind, just got stuck into the sweet treat as soon as we had squeezed past all the other customers.

We had a canteen at primary school and I was allowed to buy my lunch on a Friday sometimes. I really liked 'savoury mince' on a bread roll which wasn't always available and then I'd have a meat pie instead. I am not good at eating out of paper bags and would invariably spill some of the meat sauce down the front of my tunic. My poor mother was always sponging stains out of my tunic using vinegar (I think) but whenever we got the tunic out of the cupboard after school holidays, there would be a patch of mould growing where I had made a mess during the previous term.

Another item I loved which was available at the canteen was 'straws' - potato crisps cut in skinny little straw shapes. A packet would last the whole of recess as I would nibble each straw individually. I could never understand the girls who would open their mouths and tip a whole packet in! My friends would beg to share and I would grudgingly give them one or two straws. If they were the owner of their own packet, they also would dole out one or two of the salty sticks.

There were a couple of cake shops at Mosman Junction and if I was given the money to buy morning tea, I would buy a cream bun from the shop my mother never frequented. This was a real old fashioned Australian cake shop which sold lamingtons and sponge cakes, cream buns and eclairs, neenish tarts, custard tarts and custard slices with passionfruit icing, finger buns with lurid pink icing as well as cinnamon logs and apple pies.

I loved the mock cream in the cream buns and would sneak a fingerful of cream when the teacher wasn't looking. We had our school cases beside our desks from fourth grade on so it was easy to do. Had I been caught however, I would have been in big trouble.

My school lunches, which came from home, improved over the years thank goodness. My mother started buying more rye or potato bread which was available from the delicatessen at Crows Nest, rather than the dense black bread that I was forced to eat when I was in the Infants School. Mutti made what we called 'meat salad' - diced Berliner sausage, mixed with diced gherkins and mayonnaise, which was delicious, and ham or cheese rather than liverwurst which gets pretty pongy in a warm suitcase. She always gave me fruit and sometimes even cake, so usually I enjoyed my lunch and morning tea as I sat with my friends under the shady trees.