A lunch is being held in honour of a French writer who is in Dublin to organise a writers' festival. The conversation turns inevitably to food and as often happens with a large group around a table, the general conversation breaks down into sub-plots of chat. After a while, the visiting writer noticed the animation of your neighbours at the table and wanted to know what was the reason for all this excitement. He seemed puzzled when you told him - biscuits.
But he need not have been so surprised. Marcel Proust unlocks his past not with a rare steak or a slice of pΓtΘ de foie gras but with a small tea cake, a madeleine. Sweet dreams are our key to memory. The naming of biscuits was for the Irish guests at the table a guided tour through childhood - the sugared crumbs a trail of recollection. Marietta was there at the beginning of the path. The round coin of austerity with its suggestion of poorly-heated parish halls and convent parlours and prudent excess. Or else the dismembered Marietta biscuits reduced to the scale of the doll's world, sustaining Sindy or Barbie through those endless afternoon teas of the winter months, miniature dramas played out with droplets of milk in scratched red plastic cups and the occasional scolding from the director when Barbie fouled her twin-set with great boulders of biscuit. Butter redeemed Marietta's puritan plainness. Spread on two biscuits that were then put together, the butter that oozed through the pinpricks on the surface like inquisitive earthworms, carried with it the promise of luxury and a faint intimation of decadence. Digestive biscuits in their gritty wholesomeness were associated, like all things that are good for you, with the sickroom. In the same category as coarser breakfast cereals, they suggested disciplined recovery from mumps or the measles or a bad flu. Hot lemon drinks and the tentative crumbling of the plain digestive biscuit broke up the sickday routine of endlessly re-read Treasure and Tiger and Jag comics from the last school garden fΩte - where it always rained despite the promise of Gallic summer in fΩte. Chocolate on digestive biscuits was always confusing, like a category confusion in logic, so that these biscuits were consumed with something like lingering guilt as if you were found stuffing yourself with Belgian chocolates on a health farm.
Rich Tea and Morning Coffee. The decorous abandon of late morning, the fountain trickle of talk radio and the house huge with the silence of the children gone to school or a day snatched from work, yawning with possibility. The biscuits that adorn the dark tables of meetings never seem to have the same effect, as if the suggestion of leisure is scotched by the seriousness of purpose, the tea going cold and the biscuits, more worry beads than sweetmeats, dismembered by fidgety fingers. Afternoon Tea Assorted. The panic of want as the unexpected arrival of a neighbour or a relative ("Just thought I'd say hello, Margaret") means turmoil in the kitchen. The only biscuits left are four Lincolns, soft with age, and shards of cream cracker.
Behind the welcoming smiles are urgent, whispered commands to go to Donnelly's and buy a packet of biscuits. While your bike carries you to the shop, your mother is back at the house talking to the neighbour or relative as if she was an accomplice in a robbery, distracting the police officer's attention with bogus requests for directions to go to Blackhall Place or Constitution Hill. As the tray arrives with the tea and the biscuits are spread in a bountiful landslide on the plate (not too large, of course, otherwise the biscuits thin into insignificance), the complimentary guest ("How big you are now! What class are you in?") secretly appraises the offering. Excessive plainness in the biscuit is a subtle affront, the Marietta snub. Chocolate fingers or bourbons suggest a social ambitiousness that needs to be watched. Away from the grand manoeuvres of the Good Room, there is however the campfire of gossip in the warm kitchen where biscuits are dunked and time dissolves in the Great Plains of a weekday afternoon and the doilies stay in the sideboard.
With Empire came the lure of the exotic. Kimberley, Mikado, Coconut Creams. A late Victorian map of plenty, handlebar moustaches and steamships plotting passages for the cargo of raw materials and spices from the four corners of the earth. But our minds soon tired of the Look and Learn immensity of overseas possessions and began to focus in on the one abiding passion of childhood - demolition. The trick was to use your front teeth like a barber's razor, removing the two white banks of coconut, leaving the thin stream of strawberry in the middle, resting on its biscuit base. A similar gopher-like application was used to remove the coconut mound in another biscuit from its base, the cleaner the cut, the keener the triumph. Chocolate snack biscuits were other contenders for the demolition derby. Here, the aim was to remove chocolate in a series of quick, decisive bites until only the biscuit was left, pale, slightly moist, the cream fragment of bone exposed by the energetic dig. The pleasure was in removing whole sides of chocolate in one carefully aimed nip. if only a piece came away or the top section had to be scraped off, there was a vague sense of irritation, an irritation that returns in adult life when taking off wallpaper, obstinate islands of ancient paste interrupting the triumphant march of the paper stripper. Chocolate mallows involved more delicate surgery. Here, the fine chocolate membrane had to be removed from the sticky dome underneath while leaving the dome intact. Only when the marshmallow lay exposed, vividly white, could the next operation began, the severing of the marshmallow from its base. As the sweet oyster dissolved in your mouth, the final act was to eat the base itself - moist now and striated with the ploughed ridges of teeth marks.
Biscuits were our Gold Standard. All important events in early life were quantified by their sweetness. As the coins and notes were slipped furtively into your First Holy Communion palm, the cogs of the great machines of imperial division turned in the counting-house of the mind. Two pounds, fourteen shillings and six pence. Twelve pennies in a shilling, twenty shillings in a pound. The lava spill of coins on the bedspread and the uneven columns of halfpennies (there were some, from the witch in number ten), thruppences, sixpences, shillings, half crowns, rising from the bedside locker. The orange and green notes, exotic rugs in this shattered Parthenon, refusing to stay flat with blue-biroed telephone numbers scribbled in their grubby margins. A man has two pounds, fourteen shillings and sixpence. He goes to a shop. The biscuits cost threepence each. How many biscuits will he get for his money? Levers were pulled and cogs meshed as the lordly denominations of half-crowns and shillings were reduced to the workaday, proletarian brownness of the penny. Two pounds, fourteen shillings and sixpence, that makes (frown, pursed lips) six hundred and fifty-four pennies. The noise of the machine is now a roar as the mind runs from dial to dial excited and alarmed at the monstrous prospect before it. Six hundred and fifty-four divided by three (find a pencil and tear open an empty Senior Service box), let's see, that makes, two hundred and eighteen. Two hundred and eighteen Disc-O-Chocs! The bodhrβn-rattle of the heart increases as you repeat the arithmetical operations and a dizzy Edisonian wunderkind, you stagger through the failing light of the basement workshop, numbed by your discovery. Two hundred and eighteen Disc-O-Chocs!
This is storybook wealth, a cave of sweetshop legend. In your short pants and communion blazer, you are an unlikely candidate for the grim contentment of advanced age, pottering around in Mutual Growth Funds and indexing happiness against the FT, NASDAQ and Dow-Jones. But now riches beyond reckoning lie waiting in Mrs Byrne's shop - the chocolate biscuits individually wrapped in heavy foil, piled up like so many forms in the pirate coffers of the glass-fronted counter. The expression on Mrs. Byrne's face as you demand two hundred and eighteen Disc-O-Chocs. The look of momentary panic and then the whispered instructions to Sheila (the one with the Red Hurley badge) to go to the storeroom, the bank-robbery tenseness of the scene as the boxes of Disco-O-Chocs are brought in nervous haste from the vaults and I back out of the shop, sweaty palm strangling the top of the transparent sack, a whole lifetime of idle nibbling in store for the Disco-O-Choc Kid. You never manage to carry out the raid. Long before you turn up at the premises, most of your money has been impounded by the Juvenile Assets Bureau (JAB) in the form of your parents who hand you back a light green Post Office Savings book in return for the bedside hoard.
When you do manage to buy a Disc-O-Choc with a salvaged thruppence, you stand outside Mrs. Byrne's, a forlorn refugee from a speculative crash, your money now gone in some magical abstraction of high finance, biting into the chocolate surface and resigning yourself to a life of honest toil and Arrowroot.
In geography class, national wealth is again a matter of a plates piled high. When we progress around Ireland on the Stations of Memory, stopping in each town and city to repeat the principal economic activities of these urban centres, the great plainchant of enumeration filling the classroom - brewing, boot-making, coal-mining (Castlecomer), textiles, sugar (Clonmel) - very occasionally in the grey fog of industry, the word "biscuits" would stand out. Along with stout, whiskey, close relatives and bellowing cattle, it was one of our few export industries. Bolands and Jacobs were the Gog and Magog of this world, two giants looming over the shelves, fixing their followers with a fierce, possessive stare. There were Jacobs' families and Bolands' families just as in France in later years you could tell what people read for breakfast and how they voted once you knew what car they drove (Citroδn or Renault). Then there were the double agents, who went with Bolands for the Cream Crackers but stayed with Jacobs for the Bourbons.
A friend in school had an aunt who worked in the Jacobs' factory in Tallaght and he seemed possessed of a special grace, an infant Lama, the cover of his tupperware lunch-box peeled away to reveal the sacred treasure of coconut creams, lemon puffs and club milks. Like mendicants scurrying after the sahib's taxi, we courted him and flattered his interest in racing cars (yeah! Jackie Stewart! yeah!) in the hope that some of his family fortune might make its way into our own lunch-boxes. He had, however, all the canniness of a Renaissance prelate and though we heard many tales about the opulence of the court of W. and R. Jacob, we remained obstinately outside, cursing our parents' career choices and fingering with disdain the Calvita-filled triangles of white bread and the greasy surface of the Granny Smith.
In the dull tramp of necessity down the supermarket aisles, loading up milk and butter and rice and sausages, only the biscuit shelves seemed to offer a holiday of choice. Being allowed to choose the biscuits by your mother was an obscure but momentous favour, soured only by the exasperated grimace from the end of the aisle that We Hadn't All Day. Not total freedom of course. Nations still guarded our larders so the sight of McVities or Burtons in the trolley meant the swift rebuke of dead generations and the immediate suspension of all privileges. Anything with chocolate was expensive so you had to instinctively balance the budget of desire with the harsh realities of till receipts. Later as the trolley is replaced by the flatland basket and queasy Saturday morning expeditions to the mini-market, your mouth musty from last night's fun, there is the crossing of some invisible threshold as you surrender the right to choose the biscuits for your bedsit to your girlfriend. These increments of trust do not make for the high drama of romantic prose ("He turned ever so slowly and said to me, 'Take them, darling, I'm willing to try them out'") but they do map out their own intimacies. Sometimes, of course, nothing works out and you are left mournfully masticating her choice - rectangular Nice biscuits that you never liked anyway.
One day you drop by to see your friend from college and he circles the kitchen, a haunted man. He talks but he is not listening and every so often his gaze travels to the white formica cupboard with the scallop-ended silver handles. A jittery Raskolnikov, fiddling with guilt and wondering when the unmarked car will pull into the car park opposite. No, not quite, but he is being picked at by conscience. Finally, the pints in the late evening lounge draw the confession. His Italian girlfriend has issued a formal edict, no more biscuits in the flat. Eating between meals is bad for you. Rots your teeth. Like animals in a sty, forever grunting and snuffling and licking the trough of early morning, late afternoon, midnight snacks. Look at how big they are in the United States. No appetite left for their dinner. The sacrifice seemed minimal in return for the brown-eyed attentiveness of Alessandra. He dutifully ate his luncheon apple and sucked in his dinnertime banana, smiling at his virtue and Alessandra's blue toe-nails, He even felt lighter, his teeth less clogged, more pence in his pocket. Like an ex-smoker in the giddy first week, he marvelled at the apparent ease of this transition to a world without sweetness. In the local Spar he headed straight for dairy products, his eyes chastely averted from the come hither wantonness of Raspberry and Custard Creams ranged on both sides of the aisle. Like a busy politician, he politely declined the fig rolls on a side plate offered to members at his local Amnesty branch meeting.
He alarmed his mother by leaving a saucerful of Jaffa cakes untouched, the biscuits an obvious bribe to get him to come out to see her more often (as she polished off the cakes later on that evening she wondered what she had done to deserve him). But he was finding the absoluteness of his vows increasingly intolerable. He felt every billboard, every magazine, every television advertisement (poured chocolate was the most poignant reminder of the erotic motives of his own sacrifice) was taunting him in his Lenten solitude. The darkest night was mid-morning. The pot of tea and the newspaper in the empty flat, long a blessed island of meditative peace, were now dauntingly incomplete. A basic element of the ritual was missing so the Gods of ease stayed away, refusing to be summoned by the hand groping blindly from behind the newspaper for biscuits that were no longer there. Even Alessandra's vigorous afternoon lovemaking lacked the essential afterword of dazed conversation over Ginger Nut and Lyons Green Label. Your friend began to thrash about for the alibis of relapse. His sugar levels were too low. Maybe he was a diabetic but he had never known before. Young men need lots of energy (for sports he never played, he admitted in his more lucid moments). Before long, he was back on the habit again. His life was now involved furtive expeditions to the supermarket on the other side of the river, adulterous circumspection in the incineration of empty packaging and the disposal of crumbs and the careful removal of chocolate smears from the corners of his lips. As the call for last orders rocked the intercom, your friend said he could no longer continue with this double life, he must make a clean breast of it (his words, not mine) and he was not going to give up all that Alessandra meant to him for a packet of blackberry rolls.
You met the friend two months later outside the 24-hour shop in Westmoreland Street. The girl he was with had blue eyes. In her left hand she was holding his pale, pink paw and in the right a Jacob's Coconut Cream Gang Pack.
The bare necessities of life are a matter of taste. Dieticians are routinely appalled by the dental carelessness of the poor, tut-tutting the sugar sandwiches and the jam doughnuts and the endless tuckfeasts of biscuits. Glossy leaflets detail the low nutritional value and make appalled comparisons with storybook fruit and vegetables. Grim budgets highlight the debt trap of the sweet tooth. Like televisions in prison cells, biscuits on the tables of the destitute are an affront to the right-thinking ("Isn't well for them to be sitting there eating their chocolate polos, more than you'd ever see in this house, I can tell you"). But poverty is a long sentence. No matter how many competitions you enter, no matter how many times you write in not more than ten words, "The reason I like not being poor is", you are condemned to the endless trench-days of private miseries. So when you rummage under the cushions of the sofa or rifle the pockets of old coats in the wardrobe for the forgotten manna of small change, your thoughts are not on the dizzying vitamin count of lentil soup but on the lotus moments of tea and a full packet of biscuits. The vanilla-scented, cream-filled squares eased with the gentle pressure of two fingers from a pack, listing heavily on the chipped kitchen table, are the sacred hosts of forgetfulness, a brief supper, a snatched cigarette in the no-man's-land of Final Notices and school bills.
Christmas took the biscuit. The tins piled precariously high in the local supermarket were bright advertisements of abundance. The memory would linger through the year as the tins were recycled as resting places for shoe polish and J-Cloths, the incongruous clutter replacing the orderly maze of the red paper partitions in the newly-opened box. The Empires of the Boxes were from the New World. USA Assorted, a ritzy invitation to the melting pot. All eyes focused on the round chocolate biscuit with the jellyfish spread languidly over the hole in the middle. With the swiftness of Fagan's pickpockets, small hands snatched this piece of biscuit exotica and the tongue savoured the dissolving sugar of the jellyfish, wrested by beaver teeth from the chocolate base.
One night in Barcelona, the Catalan wife of an Irish friend told me that when she thought of Ireland, two words came to mind - tea, biscuits. Tea and biscuits, this indeed is where the Remembrance of Things Past might begin, in the pockets of detail, the crumbs from our tables, the touchstones of memory.