Jamie's School Dinners
In which it turns out I've got more to say about sweets than I do any other issue of the day
When I was in high school, my mum would give me £2 for dinner money.
Every day without fail, £2.
It was never an afterthought scraped from the bottom of her handbag, or a loose collection of coins clawed out of the car glovebox or centre console cupholder. It was always two one-pound coins left in a neat little pile on the kitchen side – a golden blur on the dark granite worktop, each and every morning.
After many cellophane years of squashed sandwiches and popped yogurts, dinner money was a new and novel thing for me, and I took to spending it diligently, with absolute care and consideration. This was money, that was mine, and I wasn’t going to waste it.
I was going to buy five chocolate bars with it.
Every day, I’d arrive at school shortly before 9am and head straight for the vending machines – ‘the venders’ – in the top canteen, so named because the school had been built on a gentle hill, with the cafeteria, playing fields and staff car park at its crest. Here, I’d use my newly acquired care and consideration to make my diligent choices: one bar to eat first thing before registration; one for morning break; two to eat at what was actually lunch time; and then one for the walk home.
It was a perfect system, and one that only ever varied in the decisions I took.
I made a point to only ever select one or two, a couple of bars, that I really liked, that always managed to feel treaty, like a Galaxy Caramel or a Crunchie. The rest I padded out with what felt like a fairly unindulgent selection, bottom-of-the-tin chocolate like Mars and Snickers, that sort of thing. I’d do my time with them, maybe even choosing something as uninspiring and raisin-ladened as a Picnic or a Topic for the first half of my lunch, so as to really savour that bag of Minstrels that then felt like a proper dessert.
Yes, I may have been buying five chocolate bars a day, but the way I saw it, I wasn’t being greedy – I didn’t allow myself to overindulge.
After the first few terms of picking and mixing from the same vending machine – of watching some amalgamation of the same eight or nine primary-coloured packets twizzle free of their whorled prongs – I grew bored, and endeavoured instead to keep hold of my lunch money until the end of the day, when at the final bell I’d race down to the newsagent at the bottom of the hill in search of a broader selection. Now starving hungry, and in open rebellion, I took to buying the most peculiar sweets I could lay my eyes on, desperate for some more variety in my diet.
First, I discovered Wham bars in their Roy Lichtenstein wrappers; purple and sticky, they’d cling to the roof of your mouth and would glue your teeth well shut. Then came Milk Chews, cuboidal and creamy, individually wrapped sweets that were like Starburst in texture, but entirely dairy in taste; I think they’d been popular during the Second World War, when milk was perhaps a more rarefied flavour than it is today.
And then there were Brain Lickers, which caused no end of trouble.
Shaped like a roll-on deodorant, and with their distinctive snot-green lids, these cylindrical plastic containers were filled with a sweet and sour liquid that could only be tasted by licking it from a plastic bearing in a ball and socket joint – the pressure from your tongue swirling it around in its housing, coating it with flavour.
Back in 2004, Brain Lickers had a period of unbelievable popularity in our school – well and truly in vogue, they were everywhere. This is because in 2003, the headteacher had banned them. After the British Food Standards Agency issued a warning to parents that the contents of these little tubes was ‘as acidic as lemon juice’, that excessive enjoyment may result in oral burns, oral blisters or oral scarring, and that the inventive delivery mechanism was in fact a choking hazard thinly disguised as an accident waiting to happen, schools across eight council boroughs in the United Kingdom came down hard.
And yet, as with any ban, prohibition only encouraged consumption.
Practically overnight, Brain Lickers became the Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the moonshine, of the confectionery world. They were dangerous and sexy, and were quickly synonymous with the wrong crowd. The wrong boys would watch the way the wrong girls attacked them, tongues dancing across the synthetic raspberry hemispheres, and they’d think things previously limited to break-time bananas.
I didn’t do that.
For the teachers that patrolled the corridors, it was something else for them to worry about. Soon enough, when caught outside of lessons students across all years had to turn out not just their pockets but their mouths, presenting their flat tongues for inspection. For as with all worthwhile sweets, the chemical flavouring stained your tongue and gums, and quickly the trademark green of Sour Apple became the anti-vandal paint of the I-didn’t-do-it brigade – an indelible smudge of guilt that caused faculty staff to recoil when confronted by young adults with mouths blotchy and dark like inkblots, or necrosis.
‘Look at the colour of your mouth!’ they’d say.
An impossible ask.
‘Let’s get your name in the book, shall we?’
And yet, mindful of all dietary and safety concerns, the biggest problem with Brain Lickers came not with the licking of them, but when they were empty. Rather than disposing of the drained containers as rubbish, kids took to placing them down on the ground, side-on to the way they were standing, before stamping down hard, with the force projecting the large plastic pellet from its housing and toward any target of choice.
Now, the teachers really did have a fight on their hands.
The first I saw fall victim to these makeshift munitions, Mr Smith, was a PE teacher and a nice guy. A nice guy, but flash. He’d played lacrosse for England when he was younger, and he continued to play it for England during our lessons, often sending students into the dirt with sharp elbows and enthusiastic body checks. He was good at basketball, and even better at football, which was enough to draw the ire of most of the school’s teams.
One day, just after the final bell, walking home with a Toffee Crisp, I was startled to hear an impassioned adolescent voice cry out behind me, cutting through the rumble of cars that queued along the main road outside the school.
“Forward battery, ready!”
Turning, I saw a half dozen boys lined up along the pavement, facing the road where a long traffic jam had formed behind the school bus, taking on passengers at the stop opposite the main gate. In front of them, I could see Mr Smith’s blue Volvo, and a dark figure inside frantically winding down the driver’s side window; there were no electric windows back then, or at least not in Volvos, and so I could just make out his elbow jutting up and down as he cranked the handle round and round.
His cry of, ‘Don’t you little bastards even think about it!’ was drowned out by a second voice, bellowing, “Ready on the quarter deck!”
And as our teacher raged louder and louder, gesturing through the open window, so too the boys carried on with their maritime pantomime, back and forth, elbows folded across their noses and mouths and blazers draped over their heads to obscure their faces.
‘If anything so much as comes near my car, I’ll…’
“Bring up the howitzers!”
‘I am not joking, I will…’
“Brace the sails, lads!”
‘I will be writing to your parents to…’
“Prepare to fire!”
Each boy was leaning toward the road, standing with front legs bent at the knee while their rear limbs angled back behind them. Stooping low, they each trapped a Brain Licker beneath their front foot, taking a moment to line it up with their target, Master-and-Commander style.
It was only at this point that Mr Smith gave up hope of taking down any names and started rocking the car back and forth on the clutch, trying to inch out around the jutting back end of the double decker, still moored at the stop. As the despairing man revved his engine, neck craning to look beyond the double decker to the open road ahead, the cry finally went up.
“Fire!”
The mutineers sprang forward, stamping down hard in unison as plastic pellets shot from the containers at their feet, pinging loudly and pimpling the Volvo’s paintwork on impact.
I kept watching as the boys raced, laughing and whooping, into the street to retrieve their sherbet ammunition, hands slapping against the Volvo’s bonnet, boot, roof and side panels as they crossed the road, arms reaching under stationary cars to grab for their projectiles. I’d not long turned away before I heard another voice shouting joyfully, ‘Let’s give him another broadside!’ and so I put my head down and walked briskly on as the revving and shouting started up again.