Introduction

Chocolate has always enthralled me. It has loomed large in my life ever since I was a small child of four or five in Addis Ababa. Each Saturday, with my sister and brother, I attended catechism classes there in a spooky crypt where an ancient priest paced the aisles, and afterwards my mother would collect us, proffering Cadbury’s Milk Tray bars. However hard I try, I can recall nothing of the doctrine, only the agonizing decisions about which shape to eat first: the lime barrel, the strawberry creme or the hazelnut caramel? Equally popular were the Italian Easter eggs, elaborately wrapped in crisp metallic paper, and each containing a surprise: once the chocolate shell was broken open, a small toy would be revealed. A year or so later we were back in London, where our next-door neighbour was Granny Scala. She was famous for the artificial roses she planted in her garden in the winter, and also for her seemingly endless supplies of threepenny bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk; long, thin, flat tablets, wrapped in purple foil. Then there was our family doctor, kind grandfatherly Dr Barnes, who always produced a packet of chocolate buttons when we visited his surgery. I’m sure everyone has childhood memories like these.