Read Online Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Candia McWilliam
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Queen Victoria, whose profile appeared on them with a wispy ribboned bun at the nape of her slender neck. The name for these pennies was ‘bun pennies’. They were smoother, naturally, than more recently minted coins. Their smoothness gave them a silky warmth.
He stole these treasured pennies from his mother for their face value, to buy sweets and squibs. The money he took from his father Alec took from his one coat’s hem. He regularly made a hole in his father’s left-hand pocket that his mother regularly mended. He took pennies from him at the shop, too, muffling the ping of the till with a hastily dropped pint of mussels or, which must be worse, he thought, a song.
Mairi had a chipped front tooth, the left rabbit-tooth as you looked at her. The enamel was gone in a grazed dip that did not reflect light. She chipped this tooth on the stone of a peach. Jim bought her this peach when she was expecting Alec. He got it from out of the box where they put the bruised fruit at Rankins the superior greengrocer. Fordyce Macrae, his partner, had heard that fresh peaches cured the morning sickness. With just the few fresh peaches to go by in her pregnancy, Mairi could never be sure, she said, if they’d held down the sickness, but she did enjoy the flavour, around the bruises.
‘So I bit right in to the first peach in my life and inside I meet this chunk of wood that takes a piece off of my tooth. White they are, so they’re soft with it, my teeth, made of sugar.’
She was fond of sweets though she had chosen not to work at the chocolate factory that had been the other place to work near enough to home when she was a girl. She’d a cousin who had worked there as long as she herself had with the fish-gutting. The cousin reported that you went off sweets early on. She took to drinking vinegar water to whisk the sugar-spinnings out of her tubes. Satin cushions were a favourite with Mairi, snips of sheeny boiling in shades of shot pastel, plump and cornered like film-stars’ pillows. She more often was able to afford an ounce of cherry lips or a McCowan’s chew, a rubbery ingot of toffee sold three for tuppence, in a twist of greased green-and-red tartan paper.
The continuity in the names of sweeties eaten by Scots children is considerable to this day, Alec thought as he stubbed and blotted the flakes of stale croissant from his teeth in the shop-shed in Moorea. The most doted-upon sweets, the penny treats babies start on to bring out their sweet teeth, are named not for their industrialist overlord or by committee, according to market forces; they are named with deference to the addiction that is as strong as the addiction to sugar among the Scots – a nostalgia for the nation’s happy childhood.
Happy childhoods return to haunt self-deceivers mostly. Those who have had them seem to sink into an adulthood that is a state of depletion, or to advance without consciousness of their luck into a happy adulthood. In childhood, the moments of consciousness that we later recall occur precisely when we are not happy, but those high moments transform themselves by a miracle into a memory of happiness, as though stones had hatched. What makes them sweet to us is that they took place during a time we have forgotten but which is part of ourselves. Memories yielded by that time are as from a golden age, although their gilding has almost certainly been subsequent.
He thought of Mairi, and her fondness for old-fashioned sweets: soor plooms she relished, sugar greengages like the eyeballs of ginger cats, and Berwick cockles, red-and-white pellets tasting of face powder and mint, puffing to dust against the gums, leaving toothpastey mastic between the teeth. Old English was the unlikely name of a sweet she favoured, a dense pack of Spangles with several peculiar tarry and spicy tastes like cargoes, wrapped in pyjama-striped papers. Their smell lasted as long as tobacco’s.
She accumulated small scars, at home and at work. The cuts
He stole these treasured pennies from his mother for their face value, to buy sweets and squibs. The money he took from his father Alec took from his one coat’s hem. He regularly made a hole in his father’s left-hand pocket that his mother regularly mended. He took pennies from him at the shop, too, muffling the ping of the till with a hastily dropped pint of mussels or, which must be worse, he thought, a song.
Mairi had a chipped front tooth, the left rabbit-tooth as you looked at her. The enamel was gone in a grazed dip that did not reflect light. She chipped this tooth on the stone of a peach. Jim bought her this peach when she was expecting Alec. He got it from out of the box where they put the bruised fruit at Rankins the superior greengrocer. Fordyce Macrae, his partner, had heard that fresh peaches cured the morning sickness. With just the few fresh peaches to go by in her pregnancy, Mairi could never be sure, she said, if they’d held down the sickness, but she did enjoy the flavour, around the bruises.
‘So I bit right in to the first peach in my life and inside I meet this chunk of wood that takes a piece off of my tooth. White they are, so they’re soft with it, my teeth, made of sugar.’
She was fond of sweets though she had chosen not to work at the chocolate factory that had been the other place to work near enough to home when she was a girl. She’d a cousin who had worked there as long as she herself had with the fish-gutting. The cousin reported that you went off sweets early on. She took to drinking vinegar water to whisk the sugar-spinnings out of her tubes. Satin cushions were a favourite with Mairi, snips of sheeny boiling in shades of shot pastel, plump and cornered like film-stars’ pillows. She more often was able to afford an ounce of cherry lips or a McCowan’s chew, a rubbery ingot of toffee sold three for tuppence, in a twist of greased green-and-red tartan paper.
The continuity in the names of sweeties eaten by Scots children is considerable to this day, Alec thought as he stubbed and blotted the flakes of stale croissant from his teeth in the shop-shed in Moorea. The most doted-upon sweets, the penny treats babies start on to bring out their sweet teeth, are named not for their industrialist overlord or by committee, according to market forces; they are named with deference to the addiction that is as strong as the addiction to sugar among the Scots – a nostalgia for the nation’s happy childhood.
Happy childhoods return to haunt self-deceivers mostly. Those who have had them seem to sink into an adulthood that is a state of depletion, or to advance without consciousness of their luck into a happy adulthood. In childhood, the moments of consciousness that we later recall occur precisely when we are not happy, but those high moments transform themselves by a miracle into a memory of happiness, as though stones had hatched. What makes them sweet to us is that they took place during a time we have forgotten but which is part of ourselves. Memories yielded by that time are as from a golden age, although their gilding has almost certainly been subsequent.
He thought of Mairi, and her fondness for old-fashioned sweets: soor plooms she relished, sugar greengages like the eyeballs of ginger cats, and Berwick cockles, red-and-white pellets tasting of face powder and mint, puffing to dust against the gums, leaving toothpastey mastic between the teeth. Old English was the unlikely name of a sweet she favoured, a dense pack of Spangles with several peculiar tarry and spicy tastes like cargoes, wrapped in pyjama-striped papers. Their smell lasted as long as tobacco’s.
She accumulated small scars, at home and at work. The cuts
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