Saturday 20 August 2016

Mind that child


Part of the training of British policemen is (or at least was) giving evidence in court. They arrive at the fake courtroom and are given a subject on which to burble facts about for a few minutes in front of their peers. Rachel is complaining about writer's block, and I said that if she has nothing to write about, it is a good exercise to write about it anyway. Today's subject is Ice Cream.

People of my parents' generation - i.e. the ones who lived through the war - are (or at least were) obsessed with ice cream. Not the fancy, good-quality stuff sold in tiny lumps in expensive restaurants, but the fatty great blocks of vivid yellow, with the overpowering aroma of chemical vanilla - like the infamous Walls Family Brick. They even called it a 'brick'.

Not realising that my father's roots were firmly in the working-class outskirts of East End London, our local ice cream van would by-pass our enormous house in a very rich neighbourhood of Surrey and make straight for the little estate which lay beneath the tree-lined embankment which was the bottom of our large garden.

Most Sunday Summer lunchtimes, we would hear the tinny jingle of 'Greensleeves' drift up through the dense vegetation, and my father would rummage about looking for a half-crown peice to give one of us to run down the bank with, trying to catch the van before it left the estate.

He always had a huge stock of stale wafers, left over from when he himself ran a shop which sold ice cream, and if we brought back a Brick, he would carve it up and slap it between the wafers, usually eating most of it himself.

Every Summer we would spend a week or two in Brighton with his sister, and every day he would eat ice cream, sometimes on the beach, and once - to my mother's intense embarrassment - with a knotted handkerchief on top of his head. It was like a dirty postcard, but without the innuendo.

I heard an ice cream van jingling away the other day, and was disappointed that they have replaced Greensleeves with some other peice of mildly classical music, but I was heartened to hear the driver maintaining tradition by cutting the melody off halfway through a line, just like the old days. Things have never been quite the same since 'Mr Whippy' arrived on the scene, and things have never been quite the same since its inventor - Margaret Thatcher - arrived on the scene either.

In the interests of preventing the deaths of their prime customers, most ice cream vans had a large notice on the back saying, 'MIND THAT CHILD - HE MAY BE DEAF!'

At the time this bothered me, not just because the child was always assumed to be a boy, but that he may be a deaf boy and, as such, represent only a small percentage of potential ice cream sales.

Surely it would have been better to say, 'MIND THAT CHILD - IT MAYBE AN IDIOT!'

Ah, British Summertime...


30 comments:

  1. In The Cayman Islands (British colony) they drive on the left, but all the school busses were imported from nearby USA. Children step off the busses into the middle of the road which is a tad dangerous, and overtaking when stationary is forbidden. No need for a 'mind that child' sign.

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    1. All over the USA, school buses have a little mechanical flag which sticks out when children are getting on and off. You get heavilly fined if you go past the bus when the flag is up (as I almost did in Florida, not knowing about the rules) and have to wait in line for the flag to go down.

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  2. I had a 99 this week in my dinner hour sitting under a tree where I took the photos used in the blog post which I actually wrote having broken through the block on Wednesday. You know a 99, with a flake in it. It was lovely. A lady sitting on the same bench started talking to me. Guess what about, two bloody dogs she could see in the distance.

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    1. I used to like Mivvies, eaten in the darkness of a cinema.

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    2. I loved Mivvies and remember them first coming out, magic with the ice cream under the ice. And choc bars we liked too, but only if they were Lyons.

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    3. And how did they stop those chocolate chips from melting in the Maryland biscuits...?

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  3. Oooooo .... I LOVED Lyons Maid strawberry and raspberry Mivvis .... Walls did a Split but it wasn't as good !!!! .... oh, and cider ice lollies .... they were lovely !! .... and, raspberry ripple ... and Jubblies .... I LOVED Jubblies !! XXXX

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    1. I can remember pre ice cream vans when a man on a bike sold ice cream wafers and small ice cream blocks in rectangular cones ..... that's all he sold !! .... stop me and buy one !!! XXXX

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    2. ........ or ' buy me and stop one ' à la condom machine !!! XXXX

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    3. Yes - a joke from my era too.

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  4. I grew up in Chicago in the 60's. Loved the sound of our ice cream truck! Dad kept change on the table just for that event which mom stole from for the trivialities of life like bread and milk. Da's argument was "ice cream IS milk." Go dad.

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    1. There is always justification. Children say, "But I NEED this ice cream."

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  5. I've recently seen a couple of ice cream trucks going down the highway in the city where I live. I didn't know they were still in existence!

    My husband loves ice cream and could eat it every single day. Since that's one sweet that has never appealed to me very much (and how weird is that, someone who doesn't care for ice cream?) I can buy it for him and not be tempted.

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    1. I like the idea until I have eaten it. I then feel bloated and disgusted.

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  6. Wall's Family Brick - a special treat after the Sunday roast. Nostalgia time. No freezers in those days so ice cream was an absolute luxury.

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    1. While growing up, we had ice cream for dessert every Sunday after the Sunday roast. Today I cannot be tempted. I am all ice-creamed out. But my husband would break chains, if necessary, to get to a Dairy Queen.

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    2. 'Walls Family Brick - enough to make you sick' was our chant.

      I like Dairy Queens, but only for their udders and three-legged stools.

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  7. Weekend treat was the three colours of Neopolitan from Mrs Smith's shop that was always open. That was 1950s just south of Reigate.
    Today the daily Lidl's sort of Magnum €o.338 each that is about what the whole brick used to be. Or was it? I can't remember how much money (£.s.d.)I was sent off with on my bike.

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    1. Magnums are quite nice, but still make me sick. A florin was 20 pennies, but not 20 pence.

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    2. You would probably have been sent off with a half crown at the most, more likely a shilling or one and six.

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    3. Indeed. 2 shillings went a long way. I loved the way it confounded foreigners - until I had to deal with marks and francs. Oh hell, we are about to Brexit... Why don't we scrap decimal as well and get some fun out of it?

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    4. It might have been a florin, but I know it wasn't a groat.

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    5. Florin = 24d = 2s
      Bob = 12d = 1s
      I must add that by the time I was behind a bar and adding up prices of drinks thank goodness my mental arithmatic did not have to cope with the various columns of shillings and pence not pees. No Tom, let's stay decimal!

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  8. I know, because she told me, my mother's childhood (depression) treat was a Coca Cola on Saturday evening. My father did not get three meals a day, let alone treats. We did not have ice cream very often; our desserts were home canned peaches, or fruit cocktails. My dad quit smoking when I was in college, and I remember him often telling mom, he needed a cigarette or an ice cream cone. Then, it was the shortest route to ice cream. All the grandchildren grew up eating ice cream cones several times a week, thanks to grandma.

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    1. You lot introduced us lot to the awful practice of dropping a lump of ice cream into a Coca Cola, I seem to remember.

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  9. During the war, in our village, there were two elderly ladies (sisters and unmarried) who used to make their own ice cream (it was deep yellow and tasted delicious, rather like frozen custard, which it probably was). They had a little table set up in the front doorway at the bottom of their stairs and you rang a little handbell to summon them. The ice cream tasted divine to us kids - would probably taste awful these days - memories are made of such things.

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    1. Now THAT was the real thing, Weave - yellow through full-fat, maybe Jersey - cream. Yes, I remember that stuff. Loseley House is as close as you will get now - I used to live nearby. A Jesrey herd.

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  10. The U.S. Postal Service has issued some lighthearted stamps this summer honoring ice cream, with pictures of cones, sodas, sundaes and floats. They are charming, and like this post have reminded me of lots of olden times.

    A new local gelato place opened up this summer and looked promising. However, they are charging $6 for a single scoop. No way will I pay that much...it's not even a very large scoop.

    Best wishes.

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