At least that’s what it says in the free guidebook. Calamity read it with a frown creasing her forehead as we waited in the queue.
Barnaby & Merlin’s rock foundry occupies the southern wing of the Old College on Aberystwyth Prom. It is built from warm yellow blocks of stone in an eclectic architectural mixture of Teutonic castle, monastery, schoolhouse and St Pancras station. On the tower at the end is a mosaic of Archimedes, the man credited with having worked out in the second century how many grains of sand there are in the universe. For his reward he stands immortalised in little coloured stones, looking out upon a beach on which there isn’t a single grain of sand, only grit and smooth pebbles. They say the mosaic is not opaque, it just appears so from the outside, and in reality it is translucent and behind it sits old Barnaby counting his money. That’s what they say.
There was a queue of around ten or twelve holidaymakers. We followed them, up the steps and into a neo- Gothic foyer: stone spiral staircases, pale sandstone banisters, arched windows and circular skylights with stained glass. The floor was laid out of shiny red tiles. An old stone griffin stood sentinel and the building hummed, a sound that seemed to come from all sides and also from nowhere. The same sensation is experienced by people in the engine room of ships. At Barnaby & Merlin work continued round the clock throughout the year; in winter the rock was stockpiled like hay. The pink smoke never stopped belching from the modest chimney.
‘I’ve been looking into the troll bride angle,’ said Calamity. ‘It seems that a number of girls have gone missing from the area around Abercuawg over the past century. The old folk reckon they were sent to the trolls. Usually they got rid of unpopular girls, slatterns who gave the village a bad name. That’s what they say.’
‘I see.’
‘Traditionally it was the Witchfinder who organised it.’
‘That’s interesting.’
Mr Williams, the man who conducted the tour, seemed neither surprised nor disappointed at the small turnout; indeed he seemed to consider it reasonable. The decline of an entire way of life could be read in his resignation. The world had forgotten about rock, they had forgotten why they needed to eat it, and that was not difficult because there was no reason. People ate it because it was one of those things you did at the seaside, one of the things everyone else did. It answered no great need. If all the seaside rock in the world disappeared tomorrow, the seaside holiday which itself had all but disappeared would not be greatly diminished. The same would be true if the donkey rides disappeared because sitting on a donkey is not particularly essential; and the same would be true of eating hot dogs, and bingo, and countless other things. The experience of the seaside holiday would not be diminished if any of them disappeared but if they all did there would be no seaside holiday.
Each of the slim pink alabaster-smooth rods of confectionery was made in strict accordance with a secret recipe invented by founder Ephraim Barnaby and his partner Merlin who didn’t exist. Ephraim Barnaby had been a man with an acute understanding of Victorian business practice and knew that you couldn’t get anywhere in those days without an ampersand. It was universally acknowledged that B&M rock was superior to all other seaside rocks and this was the result of a secret formula that was passed down from father to son on his twenty-first birthday in a sealed envelope.
When the time came, the elder Barnaby would take his son for breakfast at the Belle Vue Hotel. There, amid the shining silver and the crisp white linen spread on an alcove table commanding a kingly view of the Promenade and Cardigan Bay, they would dine on dry toast and tea without milk and the young son would intuit from this that the meal embodied a moral about those twin cheats, triumph and disaster. After breakfast they would take the Cliff Railway to the summit of Constitution Hill and spend the morning discussing matters of business. The culmination of this ritual would be the handing over of the envelope that contained the secret formula. There would be a pause on top of that hilltop with its dramatic vista of Cardigan Bay and the boy would then open the envelope and read its contents, having first given his father a solemn undertaking, sealed with a handshake, to strive to make his life worthy of the legacy being entrusted to him, and also to take pains to bring into the world a son into whose care he could entrust the same legacy in a similar scene on top of Constitution Hill in years to come.
The boy would read the letter containing the secret formula and return from the mountain, like other prophets before him, with an expression composed in equal parts of astonishment and fear. The torch had been passed on this way for five generations without mishap until the current one when young Gomer Barnaby lost his wits the same day that Gethsemane Walters went missing. After this, the elder Barnaby became a recluse in the turret of the rock foundry and devoted his declining years to caring for his broken son and focussing his energies on the betterment of mankind by developing a better type of placebo. It came to be known as Ampersandium and people swear by it.
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 diagonal: 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
