by Jenny Colgan
Praise for Jenny Colgan
‘She is very, very funny’
Express
‘A delicious comedy’
Red
‘A Jenny Colgan novel is as essential for a week in the sun as Alka Seltzer, aftersun and far too many pairs of sandals’
Heat
‘Fast-paced, funny, poignant and well observed’
Daily Mail
‘Hugely entertaining and very funny’
Cosmopolitan
‘A funny, clever page-turner’
Closer
‘Chick-lit with an ethical kick’
Mirror
‘A quirky tale of love, work and the meaning of life’
Company
‘A smart, witty love story’
Observer
‘Full of laugh-out-loud observations … utterly unputdownable’
Woman
‘A chick-lit writer with a difference … never scared to try something different, Colgan always pulls it off’
Image
‘A Colgan novel is like listening to your best pal, souped up on vino, spilling the latest gossip – entertaining, dramatic and frequently hilarious’
Daily Record
‘An entertaining read’
Sunday Express
‘The perfect summer sunbather, easy to read, packed with gags and truths’
Irish News
Also by Jenny Colgan
Amanda’s Wedding
Talking to Addison
Looking for Andrew McCarthy
Working Wonders
Do You Remember the First Time?
Where Have All the Boys Gone?
West End Girls
Operation Sunshine
Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend
The Good, the Bad and the Dumped
Meet Me at the Cupcake Café
Copyright
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 9780748121960
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 Jenny Colgan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
Contents
Praise for Jenny Colgan
Also by Jenny Colgan
Copyright
Acknowledgements
A Word From Jenny
Author’s note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Coda
Don’t Miss the Next Irresistible Novel From Jenny Colgas
Meet me at the Cupcake Café
West End Girls
Operation Sunshine
Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend
The Good, The Bad and The Dumped
Has Rosie Hopkins Got Your mouth Watering?
To my wee sweeties, and my sweetheart.
Acknowledgements
Huge and massive number one mega-thanks to Jo Dickinson and Ali Gunn, particularly that Century lunch (‘a dentist??’), and Rebecca Saunders and Manpreet Grewal subsequently. Thanks also to Ursula MacKenzie, David Shelley, Emma Williams, Sally Wray and all at Little, Brown. Céline Menjot at Patisserie Zambetti, as always. Geri and Marina – thank you thank you. To all on the board. Chums, well beloved. Thanks also to the Roald Dahl estate, to Deborah Adams for the copy-edit and to Viv Mullett for the great map.
And a special thank you to all you readers. I was reflecting that I was getting quite a lot of nice comments and a friend said (before I got too big-headed!) that it was so much easier to get in touch these days what with Facebook and Twitter and so on. And she was right, of course. Anyway, I can’t tell you how nice it is when someone gets in touch with me or my publishers, it really makes my day, so thank you all so much for your feedback, pictures, recipes and cheery remarks. I can be found, as always, hanging around on www.facebook.com/jennycolganbooks and @jennycolgan on Twitter.
Long live books!
A Word From Jenny
Her name was Mrs McCreadie. Do you remember the name of the lady who ran your sweetshop? They tended to come in two flavours: nice and rounded, or grumpy kid-haters you couldn’t believe ever chose this line of work, complaining about sticky coins and glaring at you if you looked like you might touch anything.
Mrs McCreadie was in the first group, always ready with a smile and a gentle hand on the scales that would round up your ten or twenty pence-worth, not down. It was such a treat to go in there, marvelling at the colours and the choices, the big ten-pence piece growing hot and grubby in your tightly clenched fist as you weighed up your options – long-lasters or delicious melt-in-the-mouth? Expensive chocolate or cheap chews?
Then, with the fashion for things retro and handmade, they started to return. When an old-fashioned sweetshop opened just up from where we were staying in London a year or so ago, my husband and I were very excited about it and took the children up there and, in the manner of Willy Wonka, said, ‘Ta dah! And you can choose anything you like!’
Our poor children, brought up on the absolute nonsense that passes for sweets where we live in France – small hard jellies, horrible chews that you can’t get the paper off – and the nasty salt liquorice my husband gets sent from his homeland of New Zealand, just gazed around, confused, completely unaware of the treasure store that surrounded them. Flumps, jelly beans, cola cubes – black and red – humbugs, sherbets, toffees, caramels, nougats, rocks and eclairs stretched up to the ceiling as far as they could see. Our eldest, aged five, looked around, slightly panicked, for a long time then, very quietly, pointed at a plain liquorice pole and said, ‘I’ll have that please,’ whereupon the three-year-old, whose sole aim in life is to replicate, as far as possible, every detail of the existence of his elder sibling, went ‘Me too, Ah wan that,’ and my husband and I looked at each other, shrugged, bought them the liquorice then splurged on half the rest of the shop and guzzled it walking up the road in a way that couldn’t possibly have imparted any meaningful life lessons.
And every penny chew, every Black Jack, every Highland Toffee (yes, I was raised in Scotland) is a direct path, a running track to childhood, comfort, sweetness and sharing, or not. I remember, once I hit my grim secondary school, the anticipation of sharing a Twix with Gillian Pringle while hiding from the horrible kids on the back stairs was about the only thing that could get me through the day. I haven’t eaten a Twix since.
By contrast, when I got a little older, about to leave school and go off to college, and getting invited to parties and beginning to feel freer and happier, I went through a period of basically existing off creme eggs (and staying a size 1
0, back when a size 10 really was a size 10. And teenagers think they’ve got it tough!). I do still love a creme egg.
I remember the excitement when my first American friend was sent three huge bags of Hershey’s Kisses, which we binged upon, the little silver sweetheart wrappers littering our chilly dark dorm in Edinburgh. I thought Hershey’s Kisses were just about the most sophisticated things I could imagine. And I can measure my first trip to America in the flaking of Butterfingers and melting into Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on the everlasting Greyhound bus.
And now? Now I have moved to a country that has almost no interest in sweets at all, otherwise they wouldn’t wrap them like they do (in cheap paper that sticks to the surface, so you invariably get a mouthful of candy flecked with wrapping). France, where I live for my husband’s work, is the country of patisserie; of cakes that float like air; of pastries and millefeuille and macaroons and schoolchildren who, when I make a tray of tablet for ‘tastes of the world’ day, gather round to tell me solemnly that it is ‘trop sucré’, a fact that is hard to argue with, given a recipe starting, ‘Take one kilo of sugar …’
But I do miss them. Chocolate limes – what a perfect combination of flavours that is. I can eat Edinburgh rock till I’ve burned off the roof of my mouth. My plan, before I get really old and have to start worrying about pulling out one of my teeth, is to eat as much toffee as I can. If I ate as much fudge as I could, they would have to take me to hospital in one of those reinforced animal ambulances. After knocking down a wall. My grandmother, and this is true, ate nothing but sweets from the day she retired, as a staple diet. And she reached a ripe old age.
So this book is a way of channelling my affections, really. It is my homage to the sweetshop; to Star Bars and Spangles and Refreshers and liquorice allsorts and gobstoppers and Hubba Bubba and Saturday mornings and playtime and friendship, and all the Mrs McCreadies of this world; to all those who are kind to nervous children when they have only pennies to spend. And I’ve included (because, I’m afraid, I just can’t help myself) some of my favourite recipes, for toffee, and tablet, and Turkish delight, and other little treats. The smell of syrup gently thickening in the kitchen on a chilly afternoon is my idea of heaven. I have been reminded to warn everyone, even though obviously you already know, to take care, especially if you’re cooking with children, because boiling sugar is very very very hot. There you go: I have fulfilled my health and safety commitments!
Anyway, in the manner of a wine waiter at a fancy restaurant, I consider this book best enjoyed with a large bag (paper, ideally a pink and green faded stripe with a serrated edge) of sherbet lemons, and an epically large mug of tea.
Then brush your teeth!
With very warmest wishes,
Author’s note
As usual I’ve tested all the recipes in this book and they should all be tasty and delicious – watch out for the very hot sugar!
In 1932 the Milky Way appeared in the US, followed by Mr Mars junior’s invention, the Mars Bar, in the UK in 1933. 1935, the Aero, 1936 Maltesers, and in 1937 the Kit Kat, Rolos and Smarties. In music the equivalent would be the golden age of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. In painting it was the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance and the advent of Impressionism at the end of the nineteenth century; in literature, Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens …
Roald Dahl
Chapter One
Soor Plooms
This is a Scots term that translates as sour plums, but in its original language imitates exactly the contortions of your mouth as soon as you pop one in.
More of an endurance exercise than a treat, this is a hard candy of exquisite, roof-of-the-mouth-stripping bitter intensity; the occasional rush of sweetness comes as a blessed relief. Near-impossible to bite and still maintain an entire set of teeth, they are therefore the ideal purchase for the pocket-money-strapped child as, number one, they last for ever, and number two they are something of a rarefied taste and therefore require less sharing than other sweets.
Downsides include being a choking hazard; their bright green colour which renders them very visible to teachers, and their density – a correctly projected soor ploom can knock out a dog from forty feet.
Rosie put the very peculiar book down. She was in any case sitting near the front of the bus, hopping up every now and again, anxiously; trying to peer through the grimy windows. The little single-decker green-painted bus with ripped, ancient leather seats looked like it should have been retired years ago. Why was the countryside so dark? Every time they left a tiny village with a few streetlights, it felt like they hit a great sea of blackness, a vast wall of nothingness surrounding a few scattered remnants of civilisation.
Rosie, a city girl born and bred, wasn’t used to it at all. It was sinister up there. How could anyone live amid so much dark? The few people who had joined the bus in Derby, old ladies mostly, and a couple of foreign-speaking young men whom Rosie took to be farm workers, had all got off ages ago. She’d asked the driver, who had an enormous beard, to tell her when they got to Lipton, but he’d grunted at her in a noncommittal way, which meant that now she was hopping up and down nervously every time they entered a village, trying to figure out from his head movements whether it was this one or not.
Rosie stared at her reflection in the dark window of the bus. Her dark curly bob was held back with hair clips above a button nose full of freckles. Her large soft-grey eyes were probably her best feature, but now they looked worried, lost and anxious. A sturdy suitcase sat above her in the ancient luggage rack, feeling irrevocably heavy; reminding her that there was no easy route back. People’s lives, she thought to herself, were meant to be full of excitement, lightness and freedom. Hers was just baggage. She checked her phone to ring Gerard, but there was no signal.
The bus chuffed and coughed up another endless hill into nothingness. Rosie had thought England was a small country, but she had never ever felt so far away from everything she had known. She glanced anxiously at the driver, hoping he had remembered she was still there.
That last day at work, though. Really, when you thought about it, her mother couldn’t have chosen to ring at a better time.
‘Where the hell is that sodding bedpan? What the hell is going on here? What do you think you’re doing?’
The young doctor didn’t look more than twenty years old, and absolutely terrified to boot. He was covering his terror by being aggressive; Rosie had seen it a million times before. She rushed to his side; every other nurse had disappeared from view and he was trying to help an old lady who appeared to be reacting to the lancing of a particularly unpleasant boil by peeing the bed at the same time. Which would have been fine, but Rosie had only been on the ward ten minutes, and no one had bothered to give her even the most cursory tour – she didn’t blame the staff nurses, they were up to their eyeballs, and there were different agency nurses in every day.
So she had tried unobtrusively to change sheets, bring water to those who needed it and take lunch orders, and do the tea round and empty the bedpans and the sharps boxes and generally help as much as she could without getting in anyone’s way, even though she’d worked a twelve-hour day in a different hospital across town the day before and was still absolutely exhausted, but was terrified that the agency would take her off their roster if she ever turned a job down.
Meanwhile the very young, rather posh-looking doc was getting positively hosed with pee and pus, which might, Rosie tried not to think, have been funny under different circumstances. As it was, she managed to dart to another elderly patient and grab a large cardboard bedpan, pushing it in front of the doc to catch the remainder like a doubles tennis player.
‘God,’ said the doctor, rudely.
The old woman, in pain and upset, started to cry. Rosie knew the young doctor’s type. Straight out of medical school, he’d have barely met a real patient before. Had spent years in nice lecture theatres, being treated like the crème de la crème by his friends and family for being a student doctor, a
nd now getting his first unpleasant wake-up call in the real world; discovering that much medicine was looking after the old, and the poor, and very little was performing dramatic life-saving operations on fashion models.
‘There, there,’ said Rosie, sitting on the bed and comforting the old lady, who was a shapeless bulk beneath her humiliatingly open hospital robe. It was a mixed ward, and the young doc hadn’t even pulled the curtains properly. Rosie did so now. As she did, she heard the shrill tones of someone she could identify even at this distance as the Grade 2.
‘Where’s that bloody agency G grade? They turn up, hide out drinking coffee all day and make twice the wage of everyone else.’
‘I’m here,’ said Rosie, poking her head out. ‘I’ll be right with you.’
‘Now, please,’ said the Grade 2. ‘There’s a mess in the men’s loos you’ll need to sort out. I’d plastic up if I were you.’
It had been a long, long day, not helped by getting home three hours after Gerard to find that the breakfast dishes were still on the table, next to the huge pile of post, and he barely turned round from grunting with a mouthful of pepperoni pizza and Grand Theft Auto. Their little flat needed a window open. And, Rosie thought with a sigh, probably the sheets changed. The chances of her changing another pair of sheets today were, frankly, very small indeed.
So dark, Rosie thought, trying to make out shapes behind the streaky glass of the bus window. It never really got that dark in East London, where she’d grown up. The streetlights, and the cars, and the hum of the traffic and the people and the police helicopter … Then, when Mum had left for Australia, she’d moved to St Mary’s, the hospital in Paddington, where you were never far away from sirens and people shouting, and thronged streets. She thrived on living in the city, had always adored London; its shiny side, and the dark side she stitched up on a regular basis when it came in through Accident and Emergency, or post-surgery. She’d even liked the grotty nurses’ lodgings she’d lived in, although buying her own place with Gerard had been …