The origins of Kendal Mint Cake lie with a man called Joseph Wiper. Wiper married into the Thompson family of confectioners who were based in Kendal, a market town on the edge of England’s Lake District National Park. One night in 1869 a batch of Thompson’s glacier mint sweets that were being prepared by Wiper were left boiling overnight. By morning the mixture had turned a cloudy white colour and the Kendal mint cake was born.
It was normally by around the fourth hole at Blackmoor Golf club, following an ill-tempered third where ball and clubs once more refused to cooperate, that Grampy would produce a bar of chocolate covered mint cake to remind us that, for all its vexatiousness, golf was just a game and that we should try to enjoy it.
Grampy was Canadian. He served in Bordon Camp, Hampshire, England, where I grew up, as an Officer in the Second World War, during which time he met my grandmother in neighbouring Farnham. After a twenty-year stint back in Halifax, Nova Scotia, they returned to England with five children in tow and a few useful business contacts. It was lucky for me that they did, or I would not exist. I don’t know if Grampy knew of Wiper’s eventual emigration to Canada in 1912, or if he was impressed by Sir Edmund Hillary’s use of Kendal Mint cake on the first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953, but whatever his reasons, he felt it was the necessary form of sustenance for a round of golf with his grandson.
I was not complaining. I loved chocolate and the mint bar underneath was the closest a thirteen-year-old English boy could get to a legal high. That stuff packed a punch. It would best be described, to the uninitiated, as intravenous sugar. One bite and any signs of fatigue were banished in a fury of sweetness that set your teeth on edge. A few chunks of mint cake could add fifty yards to your drive, regardless of direction.
I had played golf since I was ten years old. Having been brought up one hundred yards from our local course this was inevitable. Grampy and I shared an almost complete lack of natural talent for golf, but I played every day and eventually rose to a good standard.
Grampy took golf up as a hobby to keep him amused during his retirement. He didn’t seem to derive a huge amount of pleasure from the game, but his competitive nature kept him hard at it into his eighties. He loved to regale his clubmates with tales of how far his grandson could drive the ball. The figures varied and I am just glad I was never asked to provide evidence of these supernatural abilities, which I did not possess. But his pride in me was something I enjoyed and, whilst our games together were filled with a kind of suppressed rage (only surpassed when Uncle Spike once joined us one sunny afternoon, where blood vessels were truly tested) the real pleasure was in the time spent together.
I can’t tell you if our golf improved, I suspect it did not, but the sharing of the bar was a moment between us that made sense of a regular sporting outing that seemed to create far more pain than pleasure. I loved it not so much for its taste, but because it was something that I uniquely associated with Grampy. I don’t think that I ever had Kendal mint cake on any other occasion in my life.
When Grampy died in his late eighties, an old back problem had caused him to be practically bent over at forty five degrees. He had been forced to give up golf some years before as his back condition worsened. With golf no longer an option, he turned his hand to Bridge, but this was a journey I did not share with him and so our sporting adventures ended. I wonder in hindsight if Grampy ever produced a bar of mint cake for his Bridge partners to up the stakes when things were getting tense. It certainly had the potential to create a competitive advantage. That level of sugar, suddenly introduced to an octogenarian gathering, could have had spectacular consequences.
I don’t know if I will ever taste a Kendal mint cake again, but if I do then I will be immediately transported back to the fourth tee of Blackmoor Golf Club with Grampy, sometime in the mid nineteen-eighties, as we companionably play some bad golf.
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This post was previously published on The Memoirist.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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