Hitting the sweet spot

Barley sugars, pink shrimps and flying saucers: more than merely a sugar high, 'sweets were like currency at school', discovers Madeleine Silver as she gets stuck into tuck shops

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WHEN a girl broke into our house tuck shop with a hockey stick and it was subsequently shut for a month, it was as if 60 pupils were suffering a bereavement. No Space Raiders, no Wham bars, no sherbet Dip Dabs to see us through those dark January days. We weren’t alone in our reliance on that saccharine oasis. At the bucolic Dorset prep school Hanford, such is the importance of the Sunday afternoon sugar hit that a parent of a recent outgoing pupil donated a bench with a plaque inscribed: ‘Keep your friends close and your sweets closer!’ 

Queues are so long for the tuck shop at Heathfield, Berkshire (housed in a storybookworthy, bay-windowed shop), that one old girl whose dorm was above it remembers presenting Tuck Shop FM with her boom box on the windowsill, to keep the feet of patient customers tapping. A girl who left Tudor Hall, Oxfordshire, in the noughties recalls being given 50p pieces by sixth formers to corridor creep to the vending machine when the tuck shop (run by Mrs Tuckwell) was shut, before lowering the goods out of the window to them in a bag tied with a dressing-gown cord—a sound grounding for a future investment manager. As the Old Radleian and man behind the sweet empire Candy Kittens Jamie Laing has said: ‘Sweets were like currency at school.’ 

It is in Thomas Hughes’s 1857 novel Tom