William Brown used to eat bulls' eyes. We used to cut them up in science classes - a messy business regarded as essential to our knowledge of biology.

It was the first time I had noticed the north/south divide. Young Brown, anti-hero of the Just William stories, revelled in bulls' eyes. They were his favourite sweet, and big enough to render him uncharacteristically speechless, but seemingly unknown in the north.

It was only when William started extolling the size of a certain type that we cottoned on - bulls' eyes were the southern answer to the gobstopper (a name which the Brown family, middle class and Home Counties to their core, would have found repellent).

I got to thinking about long lost sweets while visiting friends in Lancashire. There was a shop in the small town where they live which sold, among other things, draught sarsaparilla. Well, we had to have some of that. One gulp and the world of Edgar Allen's herbal drinks parlour opposite the Mecca in Manningham Lane came rushing back. Peppermint cordial and horehound brew (whatever that contained) were also available by the pint at Allen's, and licorice root, which looked like a twig, tasted sporadically delicious, but ended up looking like a drowned dog's tail.

If you wanted the real taste of licorice, there was the halfpenny spanish, black and potent and reckoned to be good for whatever ailed you. You can still buy it, but usually in chemists and a damn sight dearer than a halfpenny these days.

Too expensive, in fact, to turn it into spanish water, that indispensable accompaniment to a childhood outing, made by snapping a couple of sticks of hard licorice into a bottle of water and allowing it to stand for a couple of days, shaking occasionally.

When the froth stopped being yellow and started being a rich, brown colour it was ready.

My recollection is that it tasted disgusting but it was considered slightly unnatural not to like it so we grinned and drank it.

There was Everlasting Toffee, which didn't taste like toffee (road tar would be nearer the mark) but lasted for hours, causing the jaw muscles to go into spasm and giving parents a fright - tetanus, or lockjaw, was a feared disease once upon a time.

Chewing gum was another feared comestible. Legend had it that if you swallowed it, it turned into stone inside you and would Never Go Away.

But the only sweet that could kill was the gobstopper - there were always stories of some unfortunate youth who had swallowed one of these one-and-a-half inch diameter spheres of sugar whole and had perished horribly.

And we once saw it happen - well almost.

It was at school dinners and in the midst of the horseplay which always preceded lunch, one lad, who shall remain nameless because he's probably still about, so we'll call him Watmough, managed to swallow a gobstopper.

He went a rather interesting colour - a green much more lurid than any gobstopper had ever turned. This was not asphyxiation, but fear taking hold. The sweet wasn't in his windpipe - it was just hovering somewhere between mouth and stomach. But it wasn't going anywhere.

Watmough gasped a bit and his eyes watered a bit but there was nothing to fear, because there were teachers on hand and they would know what to do. Wouldn't they?

He tried the new maths master. Any man who could understand Pythagoras and had shiny leather patches on his sleeves should be a dab hand at removing a gobstopper from the upper digestive tract.

The new maths master slapped the hapless Watmough on the back. Watmough, who had now gone from mint green to the sort of red you got on a partly-sucked aniseed ball, refused to be parted from the gobstopper. Slapping was not going to be the answer.

There was a faint whiff of panic by now. Sudden, gruesome deaths didn't look too good on the school's prospectus. People gathered round Watmough, who was bent double, with his arms sticking out behind him, and doing the sort of goose impression which would have got him a panto date in perpetuity at the London Palladium. But there was no sign of the offending sweet.

It was at this point that the benefits of a classical education became evident.

The Latin master, a brawny. chapel-reared Welshman who had been the terror of the Valleys in his rugby-playing days, stepped up. 'Look out' he commanded the audience, and they cleared a space.

Then he thumped Watmough in the stomach hard enough to fell a giant redwood.

It worked. There was an 'oof!' you could have heard in Forster Square and the gobstopper left Watmough's mouth, surprisingly slowly, and trickled away under a table, where it lay gleaming pinkly and where it remained for the rest of the lunch hour. Nobody wanted to touch it.

The Latin master may not of heard of the Heimlich manoeuvre to relieve choking, but he certainly knew when a bit of muscular Christianity would come in handy.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.