Old biscuits never die

My father was a biscuit man. Not the Gingerbread Man, although when the factory cranked up the machinery on certain days of the week, the sweet, sensual spicy aroma of the ginger that went into the biscuits would engulf the town, drifting over the fields where I played football; he worked in the factory.

Whenever I visited him at work, I’d be led to his office which overlooked the factory floor, passing workers at conveyer belts or the drums of chocolate that would be spilled onto the freshly baked ovals. The smell of baking and cardboard was embedded in the white walls and steel workings of the plant. The women would smile at us as kids as we wandered through the bustle, observing their activity, and my father would conceal his sense of humour behind a façade of gravitas and a white coat as he walked with the stride of ownership from one workstation to the next.

Biscuits brought us to South Africa, his skills as a production manager being in demand. He worked in the Baumann’s factory in Woodstock and then as manager at Baker’s in Johannesburg, at what he called, with pride, ‘the largest biscuit factory in the Southern Hemisphere’.

My older brother and I worked in the factory in Cape Town during school holidays, packing the warehouse or trucks, filching armloads of chocolate and sneaking cigarettes with the workers during breaks. The workers spoke another language, and, since we were still new to the country, we were mocked a little – they’d swear at us in Afrikaans and laugh.

The factory churned out endless supplies of the brands you know well, Lemon Creams, Marie Biscuits and the ubiquitous Choice Assorted that graced the snacks table of every NGO and PTA meeting ever held. It takes skill to get to the best ones first.

A memory: huge bottles of something named “cheese essence” were used to flavour crackers. A whiff of the contents was eye-watering, it smelled like a Long Street pavement on Sunday morning, tart and vomitous.

He’d bring home boxloads of biscuits and I’d eat the things by the packet. He also branched out as a manufacturer or distributor of other products. I recall the seaweed snacks he did in the 70s, awful musty things that would probably work well now. Chips in the style of Flings, only in bizarre flavours like raspberry or orange. Those didn’t sell well (I imagine), so we ended up getting vast quantities to enjoy at home.

I guess it was a happy life for him, in the factory. Supplying biscuits to every supermarket in the country, making sure the conveyer belts did what they were supposed to.

There’s a piece of me that will always remember the scent of baking biscuits, fresh cardboard boxes and cleaning materials. It seems a far cry from what we’re encouraged to do now – work in manufacturing – but it was a respected position back then – and we should still be in awe of the processes that go into producing our neatly packaged lives and the people who work to do just that.

The pic is of a die used to stamp out those crumbly squares.

Why, dad, why – did you never manage to fix the way the top biscuit in a package is always broken?

Why?