O but certainly ice cream men constitute a separate species of contented human!
‘Twas Saturday and Mother England had kindly bestowed on us a sky of an Italian blue, vibrant with the sunshiny tremolo of a Vivaldi sonata. Kindly or not so kindly, as our route for the day included the main road to Weston, the destination of choice of scores of sunburn-seekers. After two and a half hours of a journey that should have taken at least an hour less, a journey that found us alternately blowing off our heads by means of open windows and freezing our feet with air conditioning of a highly (or rather lowly) un-uplifting nature, the adjective “sunshiny” had lost all of its glamorous connotations.
Still, the prospect of ice cream was something to keep us going. Ice cream men have a way of always putting a smile on your face. There was that one back in Bibione, who always honored us with the most absurdly large scoops. “Our” ice cream man, we called him, though what law justified this ownership I haven’t a clue. During our whole two-week stay in Italy we only partook of his ice cream some three times – and we must have fondly recalled these incidents a thousand times more! No one ever sold ice cream as good as he, and yet, the ungrateful customers that we were, many was the time during that holiday we tasted ice cream from the forbidden tree of other ice cream men, always with a pang of guilt and a sinking feeling of disappointment.
Most certainly Cleeve Abbey was not the place all the cars we had met on our way were heading for. All the better for us, all the worse for them. But let me leave its description for some later date, for the flow of ice creamy reminiscences will not easily be disturbed. Already I can see in my mind’s eye that ice cream man in Dubrovnik...
Of all the ice cream men we had known, he was most certainly the most learned.
“Dzień dobry. Co podać? ” he said with just a hint of a foreign accent the first time we strayed by his cart. The sound of your mother tongue in a faraway land is always a welcome surprise (well, usually; when that faraway land is Britain, “surprise” is not often the case, and “welcome” can sometimes be debatable). A good marketing trick, to be sure, but a good deal of kind nature and sheer brainpower it must have taken (Polish was by no means the only foreign language our good man spoke.)!
But what of the flavors of our ice cream? Those of the Italian vacation remain shrouded in the uncertainty of memories from times long gone – but no, a flavor is emerging. Stracciatela, most certainly. The first time I tried that flavor was at “our” ice cream man’s stand – no wonder I immediately decided it was my favorite type.
In Croatia we were so greedy as to ask for two scoops each. Green apple and chocolate, I remember. It took me a whole day of weighing possibilities to decide on these two.
And it has taken me some excessive amount of time to write what I have written so far of this article. So, let us proceed on to Dunster, our destination after Cleeve abbey, site of a beautiful castle and our longed-for ice cream.
Clotted cream, mint chocolate chip, blueberry and cream, rum and raisins – ah, what flavors!
“Hello, I’d like to buy some ice cream. Four scoops, actually.”
“What flavors?”
“The first one will be clotted cream, please”.
The wallet slides out of the pocket, opens, and – oh no! An apologetic smile:
“Actually, for the moment I’ll just have one scoop; that’s all I have the money for. I’ll just go the nearest cash machine – by the way, where do you have one? And when are you closing?”
“In five minutes. And there isn’t any cash machine in the town. But it’s no problem. What were the other flavors you wanted?”
“Oh, no!” (Here follows a score of other polite exclamations.) “How terribly kind of you!”
How I love that “terribly kind” Dad used! Perhaps such a use of “terribly” is a trifle ungrammatical, but “very” will never convey the same emotions. The joy, the utmost joy, the thrill – and the horror. For what deeper joy is there than that submerged below some minor mishap?
Was it the blue sky that brought us an ice cream man of an Italian or Croatian nature? Nay, not of an Italian nature, ‘tis the nature of every ice cream man. ‘Tis a part of the nature of every human – o, let us all be more like ice cream men!
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