IN reply to Ivy Eden’s letter of January 5, in the mid 1930s, I too queued at the school dentist’s mobile van to have my teeth inspected.

My parents kept the village shop which stocked provisions of all kinds, but best of all were the wonderful glass jars full of boiled sweets – pear drops, sherbet dabs, bull’s eyes, aniseed balls, butterscotch, etc.

I had to taste all of them so I could tell our customers how good they were. I would savour a boiled sweet almost to the end and then crunch the last bit until it had all gone.

The crunching didn’t do the enamel on my young teeth any good, so the school dentist had to use his foot drill to give me the occasional filling, but 75 years later I still have most of my own teeth, including three with the fillings the school dentist did.

My dentist x-rays them every two years and finds that those fillings are still in good order.

Mrs EW Peacock, Haxby, York.