Playbox Biscuits

I’ve just discovered a hoard of Playbox biscuits in the office. They are my most favourite biscuit in the world. I am in gratitude to the jolly coloured icing brightening up an otherwise monochrome childhood. Playbox biscuits meant a friend was coming to tea and there might be a sludgy looking chocolate cake with Smarties dotted around to go with them. The Smarties went a bit white round the edges as the colour seeped into the wet cake topping. The edges of the chocolate cake would always be a bit crusty and dry – I don’t think my mother’s oven worked too well back then. The icing wouldn’t make it right to the edge, so plates were always left with a handle of disappointing sponge. We had a jelly mould which came out for special occasions. Sadly, my mother never left the jelly long enough to set properly and we would have to scoop bright red, droopy globules of tepid slops onto our plates. I never did see the promised voluptuous structure with domes and columns.

The cake and biscuits were laid out on the dining room table, which was huge. It had been a conference table in a previous life, and a large crank could wheel open a yawning gap in the middle, where extra mahogany slats could be fitted in. I enjoyed turning the handle, like the starting handle on an old car, and seeing the table drift open on its castors. It was always a bit annoying that the slats, having been kept in the darkness of a cupboard, never properly matched the rest of the wood.

The table was so big, that you couldn’t reach food laid out in the middle without more or less standing on your chair. In the middle was ceremoniously placed a pair of ‘Willow Pattern’ candlesticks containing two rather bent candles. We were never allowed to light these candles, which always seemed a bit odd to me, and they became yellow and jaded as well as knock-kneed over the years.

My father was a devotee of classical music, and meals were accompanied by tapes of warbling, opera-singing women. My father, fancying himself as a singer, would add to the ambience by singing along, humming and ta ta di da-ing. If he stopped singing, it would be to ‘twang’ whoever was present. This involved making deliberately antagonistic statements - aimed at the jugular - and when the target became riled, he would laugh and say, ‘Only twanging, why are you getting so terse?’. This meant meal times quite often sank into a simmering silence of resentment.

There was a gas fire in the room, but the table was so big that anyone sitting on the wrong side of the table was likely to get burned. The organ bench was placed this side, as there were never enough chairs, and the smallest children crammed on to roast. Anyone sitting round the other sides would be cold – such is the magic of gas fires.

The youngest child present would get the worst seat, the plate that didn’t match, the bent fork and the scrag ends of the meals. You can see why the Playbox biscuits were so popular – they didn’t discriminate, they were bright and jolly for everyone.