The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #122469   Message #2686749
Posted By: alanabit
24-Jul-09 - 08:51 AM
Thread Name: BS: Great Practical Jokes
Subject: RE: BS: Great Practical Jokes
In the UK you can get "Toffos" – tubes of individually wrapped toffees.

In the spring of 1971, I was working in the garden at our house in Cornwall, when my younger brother Jem, then four, asked me, "Alan, where do Toffos come from?"
"From a Toffo tree of course Jem".
He looked a little puzzled for a moment. "Are you sure?"
"Of course I am Jem. You don't think they just make them in a factory somewhere, do you?"
Dad had overheard this conversation, so when Jem asked him, the reply was, "You don't think Alan would just make that up, do you? Of course they grow on Toffo trees. You plant one Toffo in the ground and then on your birthday up shoots a little silvery tree – looks like one of those silver Christmas trees – and on it are packets of Toffos."
Within minutes, I had been led to a sweet shop and half an hour later, a Toffo had been planted in the ground and the spot marked. Jem attended to it diligently – watering it even when it rained.
Jem's birthday is in September, so this had gone on for months. On the day before his birthday, Jem rushed indoors in great excitement to tell us that a silver shoot had appeared in the ground. Dad and I examined it knowingly.
"Looks like a Toffo tree, wouldn't you say Al?"
"I reckon so. Aren't they a bit delicate in the final hours?"
"That's right. We had better protect it with a polythene covering."
On the night before Jem's birthday Dad had thought I would forget and I had assumed he would forget. The result was that when Jem harvested his Toffo tree the following morning, it was very generously laden with the appropriate "fruit". Jem harvested it proudly in his new wheelbarrow and of course told everyone about it back at school! Even today at the age of forty-two, he remains an enthusiastic gardener.