Read Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams Online
Authors: Jenny Colgan
Welcome To Rosie Hopkins' Sweetshop Of Dreams
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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
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
Contents
Don’t Miss the Next Irresistible Novel From Jenny Colgas
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.
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!
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 10, 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,
