There are more good things about Quakers than many people know. They may not indulge in traditional British pastimes such as swearing, betting, falling down drunk, or grovelling to the aristocracy, but they don’t lie, cheat or steal. This was a winning combination in the 18th century, as it didn’t take their potential clients long to figure out that it was safer to do business with people who weren’t going to screw you the minute the deal was done, spend all your money at the track or the pub, or otherwise deviate from the relentless pursuit of good business.
The Quakers went into chocolate because they cannily perceived that, given a choice, any right-thinking person would prefer it to gin. Also, it was less likely to interfere with the ban on lying. (I often tested out the connection between chocolate and truthfulness on my own children, and can report that waving a bag of chocolate buttons under their noses almost always resulted in the answer one wanted to hear.)
My maternal grandfather was a Quaker and a chemist, and when the first world war washed out his dreams of a scholarship to university in Berlin, he went to Leeds University, and then to Rowntree. He was a particularly valuable employee because he and my granny were even more fanatically teetotal than most Quakers of that era, so his hypersensitive palate could detect even micrograms of alcohol. Rowntree had discovered that a whiff of booze enhanced the attractiveness of an Orange Cream, but the company hadn’t got where it had by throwing money about, so the minute my grandad could taste booze, they stopped pouring. He must have saved Rowntree millions, if you think how many boxes of Black Magic it shifted.
But I’m not allowed to eat Aero, KitKat, Smarties, Quality Street, or most of the chocolate a person might affordably enjoy, because Rowntree was taken over by Nestlé, and my big sister, keeper of the Quaker flame, pointed out to me that Nestlé has a habit of persuading women in the developing world to buy milk powder instead of breastfeeding, which has a wide range of benefits, as evidenced in many studies. Sometimes the fruit of the tree of knowledge tastes bitter. Yet even I cannot deny that a newborn’s life probably outweighs my yen for a Caramac, and at least she has refrained from researching the working conditions of the cocoa farmers who supply Belgian pralines.
Visits to my grandparents’ house were the closest thing I knew to home. A lot more like going home than going home. From the pork-pie picnic in the car, past the cooling towers at Ferrybridge and grey roofs of Doncaster (“Nearly there!”) it was all thrilled anticipation of the smell of Izal and coal dust, crumbly pastry and delicious peppery sausages, custard creams with milky tea at mid-morning, perfect Victoria sponge after the ham salad at tea. Above all, there were quiet voices, domestic peace, a grandmother who enjoyed her place at home and evenings tucked up in bed overhearing not raised voices, but Gilbert and Sullivan or piano quartets from the grownups.
And the chocolate. My grandfather only made a modest wage for his labours at the Cocoa Works in York, and couldn’t stand even the smell of it, but there was always plenty for us. And at Christmas there was waste, which looked like what happens when chocolate bars are allowed to marry their sisters, but were actually just the sad casualties of the production lines. Mutant Smarties, bulbous KitKats, arthritically swollen Lions. And all fused together, so that if you chose carefully, one piece was as big as three.
In New Earswick, we could eat our fill of these monsters. Maybe I was a greedy child. At home, I was often hungry. But at some level the hunger was not for chocolates, but for my mother to take off the brakes. Of course, it never happened, and if it had I’d probably have thought something was terribly wrong. But under a different roof, and sanctified by Christmas, it was comforting to know that even Quakers believed in indulging guilty pleasures, now and then.
