Mr Williams hurried through the first three halls because he knew from experience that no one cared. We rushed through a warehouse and unloading bay where the main ingredients, sugar, water and pink colour, were unloaded. We passed a kitchen in which people wearing hats and masks supervised steaming saucepans the size of small swimming pools. Inside the pans, constantly stirred by automatic spoons, was the hot mixture. At some point that was not disclosed the secret formula would be added from a glass phial by Ephraim Barnaby V personally; and some time after that would come the peppermint flavour and the pink colour. Lesser brands of seaside rock use a variety of artificial colours but B&M’s was a traditional firm and only used one. This was a mildly interesting discovery: the scintillating red of the letters, the pink of the outside and the white middle were all products of the same sugary dough. It was beaten and pulled and slowly aerated, a bit like bread, and the more it got aerated the lighter it became. Pulled and pulled and pulled until finally it was white. Along the way, a scarlet lump would be broken off for the letters, and further on down the line the pink casing would be set aside.
No one was interested in any of this. There is only one part of the tour that people care about, the typographer’s room; and only one question dominates all thought: how do they do it? How do they put in the letters? In keeping with the air of profound mystery that surrounds the letters passing through the rock we expected something equally impressive in the room where the rite was enacted: an enchanted grotto filled with bright shiny cogs and wheels and levers and all manner of fantastic machinery, but there was nothing: just a long table and tubes of the red, pink and white sugar-dough. But most importantly there were men. No machine can put the letters in seaside rock. There were three typographers, and a superintendent who I could tell was the ex-con from the Slaughterhouse Mob.
How do they do it? What is the great secret that baffles all those who have ever bitten into or just sucked a stick of seaside rock? Jam sandwiches are the secret. This is the visual analogy which will unlock the puzzle.
Imagine you have a jam sandwich, a square sandwich rather than one that has been cut into triangles for arranging on a plate. Look at it end-on and you will see a layer of red in between two layers of white. Now imagine that the white is not bread but white rock, and the filling is not jam but red rock. There you have it: this is your building block. All the lettering is created out of these sandwiches.
All the letters are in upper case and in Helvetica, or at least a sans serif face. This is because it already takes twelve years to teach a man to write A B E R Y S T W Y T H and that time would be even longer if he had to learn to do lower case as well with all its extra curves and flourishes. On its own, without need of any embellishment, a jam sandwich gives you the letter ‘I’. Put another one on top and you have a ‘T’. Add two more branches to the tree and presto! You’ve got an ‘E’. Already after six sandwiches you have the word ‘TIE’. Add two more sandwiches and you have ‘TILE’. In between individual letters you put spacers of white, which are sandwiches with no filling. Slightly more difficult are the ones where the cross-beams are diagonaclass="underline" A, W, Y, and these require a certain degree of jiggery-pokery with your sandwiches, but nothing insurmountable to an enquiring mind. And that brings you to the tough ones, the ones for which the rock master spends twelve long years learning the craft: the ones with curves. But the principle is the same. Consider the letter ‘S’. To make this, first imagine wrapping the jam-filled sandwich around a tube of white, like a Swiss roll. Looked at from the end you will have a circle of red. Now bisect the circle with a knife to form two half circles. Move one up and you find you have an ‘S’, and it takes little skill to see how this arrangement can be adapted to make a ‘D’ and a ‘B’. All that remains is the Cellophane and a specially blurred, washed-out photo of Aberystwyth.
The tour petered out in the gift shop and we were free to wander round. Calamity went back to the office. I followed the chief typographer out into the yard and sat on a bench next to him as he had a smoke. I took out a brown paper bag that contained tongue lubricant without which in Aberystwyth the engine of detection grinds quickly to a halt.
I said, ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’
He didn’t answer.
‘I guess you don’t get to see much of the summer, working inside all day.’
Still no answer.
‘Apparently this building was originally built by the railway company as a hotel, but no one came. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
Apparently it didn’t.
‘Is it hard getting the letters in?’
Finally he spoke, without turning to look at me. ‘Ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’
‘I just like to talk.’
‘No, you like to make other people talk, I know. Spotted you the moment you walked in, knew straight away you were either cop or snooper. Spotted the brown paper package too. Cops don’t come bearing gifts.’
I let the top of the rum appear through the paper. ‘You mean this?’
‘That’s what I saw. You intend drinking it all alone?’
‘Would it be a bad idea?’
‘Drinking alone is the thin edge of the wedge, I generally advise against it.’
‘Know anyone round here who could help shoulder the burden?’
‘I’m not busy at the moment.’
I unscrewed the cap, took a drink from the bottle and handed it to him. He tried not to look too eager but his hand was shaking.
As he drank, I said, ‘I like a nice conversation when I drink.’
The typographer swallowed a third of the bottle in a series of glug-glug sounds. He let out a long gasp of satisfaction and held the bottle away from him and examined it as if he had never seen such a wonder before. He said, ‘I can get downright chatty when there’s liquor around.’
‘They tell me you used to be a member of the Slaughterhouse Mob.’
‘Yes, I was a bodyguard.’
‘Did you know Goldilocks?’
‘You could say he and I were acquainted.’
‘Story goes he escaped from prison while awaiting execution.’
‘I heard that story too.’
‘How did he manage to escape?’
‘By magic.’
‘Oh.’
He took another swig. I waited. He took another swig. It was one of those silences.
‘By magic, you say?’
‘Yup.’
‘Just like that.’
‘Yup.’
‘A mystery.’
‘Sort of.’
‘Care to throw any light on it?’
‘What sort of light?’
‘You know, the stuff made of photons.’
He nodded. ‘Oh that.’
I sighed.
‘Dewi Stardust,’ he said. ‘Conjuror to the mob. It was the Christmas party and he went to give the prisoners a little show. He was going to make someone disappear and needed a volunteer. Since Goldilocks was on death row he was the obvious choice. We all thought it was really funny. Dewi Stardust had a big animal cage on the stage and Goldilocks went inside; they shut the door. He threw a drape over the cage and waved his wand and stuff. Then there was a bang and a flash and that was quickly followed by the bark of a dog. He whipped off the drape and it seemed Goldilocks had been turned into a dog. Well, they all cheered and clapped thinking it was a pretty good trick.
‘Then at the end, when the show was winding up, Dewi tried to change the dog back into Goldilocks and it wouldn’t work. He tried and tried, using all the magic words he knew, but nothing happened.’ The ex-con paused for lubrication. ‘That was the last anyone ever saw of Goldilocks.’