The great Quality Street robbery . . .

WHEN sweets came off rationing in February 1953, my folks ran the village grocer’s and the parents of my great pal roger ran the local sweet shop. we were both nine. Over the following months, ‘sweeties’ began to appear, and so roger and I were never short of friends. It was then I came across in my parents’ shop a tin of colourfully wrapped sweets named Quality street — they’d been around since 1936, but I’d never seen nor heard of them. Of course, I had to tell roger, and he found his parents’ shop allowance. and although we only had two tins, we assumed there’d be plenty for everyone. so we spread the word at school and met all our pals at ‘the gang’ HQ — the local air raid shelter — and in very little time we’d distributed the entire contents of both tins! and that was when the trouble started: one tin was the total allowance per shop for the month. we both knew we’d be in bother. It all came out into the open when the mum of one of our pals dragged her to our shop with some of the offending evidence — she thought her daughter might have been stealing. as the tin had not yet been offered for sale, theft was out of the question —but where was that tin? and more to the point where was David — that’s me? up the road, at the sweet shop, the same questions were being asked: where’s our tin and where is roger! Punishment was swift in those days, but we survived, although there were no sweets for roger and me for many weeks. Incidentally, I’m quite sure those particular Quality street were bigger and better back then! David Woodhead, Meltham, W. Yorks.