Black Jacks and Fruit Salads...

Black Jacks or Fruit Salads? Down at the bottom shop octagonal three-penny piece in my hand I have to make a decision. Black Jacks or Fruit Salads? Or a mixture of both? Two for a penny, six for thrupence. Which should it be?

A mixture of both, it always was, it had to be. Such different tastes, such a different look to each.

Black Jacks – black as faded coal, liquorice and sweet, the taste of far away desert islands. Gollys and palm trees on the black and white waxed wrapper – sticky and exotic, at least that’s the way I remember them. Summer, hot, hot summer - tar melting fluid in the road, sticking to the bottoms of my sandals and walked into the house.

‘Get out! Get out!’ She says shaking a broom at me, so out to the kerbside to sit and eat Black Jacks with Jimmy Braham. Chewing, chewing, chewing.

Fruit salads – pink and fruity. Pineapple, orange, and melon melded into a sticky chew. And the only pineapple I’d ever seen - a chunk inside a tin of syrup - and never as a boy did I see a melon. What was melon anyway? Was it like an apple?

Small sweet rectangles of fruit fields in much hotter lands where women wore brightly patterned cotton shawls bound around their heads, the men sucking on sugar cane from rich dusty fields.

Summer, wet, wet summer. Watching Blue Peter with Jackie Woods in the living room at Kings Close - Beep, Booster, Petra the dog, and Uncle Chris and Auntie Valery.

Black Jacks, Fruit Salads - how each of their tastes make my memories flow like childhood saliva. I bought some today. A mixed packet with both. Black Jacks and Fruit Salads in a single pre-packed bag, not the small white paper bag passed to me by Mr Bingham at the corner sweet shop – “Thrupence please young man.” He's saying as he smiles down at me.

The wrappers may have changed – not a Golly in sight, nor palm trees, or badly printed pineapples - but the taste was just the same. Delicious!

So how about you? Which would you choose? Black Jacks or Fruit Salads?