Hearing a story from the family trove for the first time is always a treat. I'm spending time with my Dad in the UK while my Mum is in the hospital and in between visiting hours we've been reminiscing.
My parents still live in the small market town of Crowland, Lincolnshire on the border of Cambridgeshire in the Fenland region of England, where my Dad was raised, as were several generations before him. Mum and Dad will have been married 60 years this September and they live in the same house in which they started their married life together, which is rare these days.
Last night, over dinner we talked about some of the older buildings in town and the various shops and businesses that my Dad remembers from his childhood during and after WWII.
There was a shop (Mrs. Taylors) on the corner of North Street and East Street in which the proprietress made homemade ice cream on occasion. "When word spread that there was a fresh batch, once a week or so, my mother would send me out on my roller skates with a bowl," said Dad.
"But didn't it melt before you made it home?" I asked.
"Either it wasn't very warm those summers or I was a fast roller skater," Dad replied. I can picture him sitting down to a bowl of ice cream with locally grown, sliced strawberries, small, red and summer-sweet.
Well, I never knew my Dad had ever roller skated for one and I hadn't ever given any thought as to the availability of ice cream in the provinces during WWII.
That set me to thinking about an old photo I have in my collection of my Dad's auntie Margaret as a girl, selling Walls Ice Cream in Crowland on a Walls Tricycle.
Ice cream, on further research, became popular in England in the mid 1880s when Swiss emigre Carlo Gatti set up the first ice cream stand selling scoops for one penny outside of bustling Charing Cross Station in London.
Before this, ice cream was reserved for the privileged who had access to a brick ice house (with ice gathered from frozen lake or pond water).
Ice Cream manufacturer Walls of London issued tricycles in London around 1923. When the Second World War started in 1939, the cycles were requisitioned for use at military installations. Ice Cream became a rare comodity.
After the war, Walls introduced ice cream freezers for shops.
Now I know the story behind Auntie Irene's ice cream selling enterprise, part of her parents' business as small business owners/shopkeepers. My grandmother, her sister, married a local businessman and small town enterpreneur who also went on to open several shops in town. My Dad and my Uncle continued the family business for many years.
Comments