Submitted by Hazel Bell, Welwyn Hatfield u3a
I spent my first university vacation, in 1955, selling ice-cream on the promenade of Bognor Regis, encountering paper-capped, candy-floss-sucking day trippers through the day.
Hazel selling ices by the sea in 1955.
The majority of my customers proved incapable of:
(a) Reading the clearly printed price list
(b) Asking for two 3d. cornets without also enquiring what the total cost would be
(c) Understanding what could be the significance of the quaint terms, "strawberry", "vanilla", "cornet" or "wafer"
(d) Realizing the limitations of a kiosk, measuring roughly 10 ft. by 6 ft., and advertising only ice-creams for sale. Throughout the season we were confidently asked for cigarettes, matches, minerals, stamps, postcards, sweets, toffee apples, papers, magazines, chemicals, and trays of tea for the beach. We were also plied with queries as to the times of tides, trains, and shopping hours; for recommendations of good hotels, restaurants, dance halls and cinemas; and cures for sunburn.
(e) Many even had to ask us – how to eat a cornet.
Some small children were sweet. With solemn faces they would hold up a penny and ask for a 6d. cornet (and it was often difficult to refuse them). Or, proffering a warm and sandy shilling, order, "Please, Miss, a frepenny lolly and some change".
The ice-cream we sold was Sait's, manufactured at Chichester, eight miles away. The factories being so near, and there being also a dairy of the same firm's in the town itself, customers regarded our ice-cream as home-made (although Wall's ices, too, are made at Chichester). "Ooh, Flossie", we would hear outside the kiosk, "This is where they sell it home-made". Then, beaming, Madam would say to me confidentially, "You make it yourselves, don't you, dear?" She seemed to suppose me spending my evenings measuring sugar into a saucepan while the fridge stood ready.
One dear old lady, noticing I spent all spare time reading, came to ask me the names of the "nice new novels" I had with me. I was reading The Mediaeval Heritage of English Tragedy. Another asked if I were reading a nice love story, and was disappointed to see the title, Principles of Literary Criticism.
A fellow student was meanwhile working as a bus conductor based at Bognor bus station. Humming music by Sibelius as he collected fares, he was amused to hear:
"What's that noise, Mummy?”
"It's only the conductor singing, dear.”