It was only 11 years old when it died. Tragic. No life should be ended so quickly – too much unfulfilled potential. Cadbury’s answer to the omnipresent Mars bar was a short lived affair of nougatine and caramel wrapped in Cadbury’s distinctive milk chocolate. It was utterly wonderful and I remember my first taste of it. Bought at the newsagent in Harrogate near to where we lived. I was five years old. Maybe it was the sugar rush, maybe it was the exotic sounding name or the deep imperial purple of the wrapper which appealed, but I was a convert. I swore loyalty to Aztec on the spot. It was my first love.
Life moved on. I was packed off to boarding school aged eight with my tuck box and, my zealotry undiminished, Aztec bars filled it as the only permitted memento of home – teddy bears were banned. I confess, snuggling up to a chocolate bar – even two of them, which I had – didn’t yield the same comfort as my cuddly toy blue dog Fitzherbert. Our ménage á trois didn’t last: one day I woke up to find one of the Aztec bars gone. The next day, the other was gone. My cannibalistic alter ego had been at play, it seems: Mr. Hyde had had the munchies.Tell-tale chocolate around my mouth wouldn’t have kept Hercule Poirot occupied for long, let alone the deputy head master. The defence of having an eating disorder wasn’t an option in 1972 and I was caned for eating after lights out.
Tuck box – Holy of Holies
Every Wednesday, we were allowed to write a cheque for 4d (old money worth about one and a half pence in new money). With it we could buy our half weekly ration of sweets. You got to write another bank busting cheque on Saturday. I was like a small, less vicious version of Hernán Cortés, conquistador of all the Aztec silver and gold the school could give me. My enthusiasm undimmed by the punishment, I tried to corner the market for this delicious confection at school – I suspect that Bunker Hunt and his brothers copied my strategy eight years later when they attempted to corner the world market in silver. They were stopped by intervention from the Federal Government. My ambitions were thwarted by my rival, Gubbins Major in the year above, who always managed to get to the Tuck Shop a few minutes before me due to his prowess at running and the fact that double music with Mr. Christelow was a full hundred yards nearer the shop than my classroom for Latin when lunch break occurred.
In order to make supplies last, _ I was prudent. I cut each bar into 5 equal sized chunks. This was easy to do because school was so cold through the autumn term that the bar went solid and hard. It also meant that the process of the chunk melting in your mouth from rock-like lump to smooth chocolate and then flowing down your throat, made every mouthful last a long time. There are compensations to living in an ice box.
What I wouldn’t give for one more bar of that delectable taste of childhood? But Aztec, like so many things from childhood, has gone and can only live in memory. By 1978, when Cadbury withdrew the bar from the market under the onslaught of the Mars juggernaut, I was 14. Aztec bars played a less central role in my adolescent life. And they had become part of a repertoire of favourites. I flirted briefly with vanilla fudge and another Cadbury innovation, Amazin’ Raisin in 1975. Things were never quite the same with me and Aztec after that and in 1978, the year they ended Aztec’s brief life, I coupled up indecently quickly with, shamefully, her great rival and conqueror, Mars. It was, I suppose, the ultimate betrayal.
And that is the story of a doomed love affair. Not everyone will understand. Maybe we are not built for chocolate monogamy. Maybe it was naive to think that the intensity of emotion released by that first bite could make for a sustainable relationship over years. We will never know. For in that fateful year, the year of the Winter of Discontent, the year before the world changed for everyone and Margaret Thatcher came to power, the powers that be at Cadbury turned off poor Aztec’s life support and let her slip into history. She was in good company. Other confectionary brands burned longer, Terry’s Neopolitans, for example, or Terry’s Bitter Chocolate, but none burned as brightly. Not in my chocolate universe, at least. RIP Aztec 1967-1978
