A trip down Petticoat Lane

​When we were children my sister and I were given shiny sixpences for our pocket money each Saturday morning. That’s 6d not 6p! My Dad used to joke that he’d minted them freshly in his greenhouse, but I knew that he really dug up pennies and halfpennies instead, as they were the same copper-brown colour as the Fenland soil in our vegetable garden.

Obviously, our Saturday afternoon mission was to then spend ever single penny on sweets from the village store which also sold boiled ham and candles. I liked to buy Fruit Salads and Black Jacks as I could get four for a penny and thus twenty-four of the little wrapped sweets in total (‘long multiplication’ always came easier to me than ‘sharing’).

This meant a huge brown paper bag of sweets and, somehow, the time it took me to peel off the papers of each one only served to increase the anticipation of a fruity or aniseed treat. We sell both in our pick n’ mix section in the shop and people usually have a selection of each – a bit like Cherry Lips and Floral Gums.

My sister is four years older than me so used to try and persuade me to buy Lucky Bags instead. Her reasoning was that there would always be something inside that I wouldn’t like … Flying Saucers and Sherbet Fountains quickly became my new favourites – such was my enduring and endearing brand loyalty - and, again, Flying Saucers in particular literally fly off our shelves today.

It’s nice that so many of our playground talking points still come up in conversations in the shop – unlike Spangles or Rickets – and I remember clearly the contents of the Retro Packs of sweets which Michelle makes up, as though none of the fifty years had subsequently come between us.

We had a Great Auntie Minnie who lived a short bus ride away. She was famous for her chunky knitted cardigans in various shades of green, and also frosted glass containers of biscuits that, though we couldn’t see them clearly, were surely soft and probably infested with earwigs as she often left the lids off while she at first listened and then always fell asleep to the Home Service on her transistor radio.

Auntie Minnie also kept about one hundred and sixteen varieties of shortbread in a battered old tin with a lid featuring a faded Scottish scene of stags on high alert and grouse looking dangerously nonchalant – much like the Famous Grouse on our whisky fudge tins and boxes of toffees. One of the fan-shaped types was, she used to tell me in a grand voice like a 1950s BBC radio announcer, ‘petticoat tailed shortbread.’

My sister explained nicely on the way home that all petticoats had tails but that little girls tied them up with colourful rubber bands – a lot like on ponytails – so that little boys couldn’t see them. She was full of tales such as these and, of course, I believed every word she said.

 thought of this when our new fairground collection of Christmas tins came in this week, containing petticoat tail shortbread in the form of a Magical Carousel. Thankfully, the Big Wheel and Helter Skelter tins that complete the set contain chocolate chip shortbread and salted caramel fudge. You know where you are with those two, even though they may not conjure up the same magic of childhood.