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Ice Cream Barrow.

Years ago when I was a boy of ten or eleven years of age a man cycled around the streets selling ice cream. His call was always the same ‘Stop me and buy one’. In those days money was terribly short hardly anyone had work and the little dole money paid to the out of work workers; was certainly not enough to buy ice cream. One day I found a penny in the street. I know I should have given it to my mother but the ice cream man distracted me and yes I bought a penny ice cream cornet. Strawberry flavour. I took my first lick at the ice cream delighted with the cold feel of the soft ice in my mouth.

What happened next I can only tell you that I was suddenly far away from home; in a strange place and I could not understand what the people around me were saying. How long I stayed in this strange place I do not know. I saw children playing; people were walking in and out of shops most were carrying bags of shopping. A horse and cart came along. Sitting on the cart holding the reins was a man. He smiled and waved to me, I should get up on to the cart. There I was with my ice cream in my hand now I was sitting on the coach watching the powerful muscles of the horse’s backside as it easily pulled along the cart.

Suddenly I heard the words that my mother had often said to me. (Don’t accept things from strangers.) There I was sitting beside a stranger being taken to I do not know where. I sprang from the cart and ran back down the way we had come. I still had my ice cream in my hand. I was not eating it, just holding it. That the fact that I had found the penny and had not taken it home to give to my mother for food was what perhaps was worrying me; God knows we needed every penny that we could get to keep a family of six in those days I could not eat any more of the ice cream.

Children were still playing in the street but no one took any notice of me it was as if I was not there. The ice cream in my hand or better in the cornet was beginning to melt and I pushed it into a little girl’s hand. She dropped it. The last thing I saw was the girl as she ran off and I was back in our street standing next to the ice cream barrow, it was as if I had not been away at all and my ice cream was now melting away on the floor. Where I had been or how I got there I do not know. I do not know how I got back home. It must have been the ice cream. Bern