Memoirs of London - 9

9.

One of them, who used to work in the ice cream sell, was Bob, who had made me an instructor, a few years earlier, in the short period of previous work placement: in particular cleaning and maintenance of the machine, and preparing ice creams and ice drinks.

He wasn’t  very tall (you would say surely more than five feet but less then six, with light hair, combed with a line-centered brush;  his eyes were green colored and very  moving on the features of the face, made a bit irregular by two slightly pronounced upper incisors.

 At the left lobe, with a lot of naturalness, he carried a small round gold earring, fashion, which on our country  was still beyond to come. His clothing was both simple and well-groomed. Particular attention, however, he showed on  the shoes and the t-shirts, on which, usually stood out of immeasurable, numerous gold chains, different in appearance and size, as our women do when they wore  the  ancient folk costumes.

Bob was definitely nice. Very uneasy, he was always around in the nearby shops, he was a jumper, or a grocer's colleague. In his "pitch", which was usually the most profitable, he had during the high season one or more aides on whom he uploaded, in a casual and good manner, most of the workload. When it happened to be in distribution, at peak times, sometimes he was bizarre.

Once, for instance, there was an  orderly and long queue of customers waiting to be served at  the ice cream machine,  up to the outside edge of the sidewalk.

Suddenly Bob said  he had to go and make a  phone call. And so saying, he showed customers a ten-penny coin, holding it high between the thumb and index finger of the left hand and hissing, with the upper lip slightly curled on the teeth, in a string of  glottis shots : "I'll be back in a minute!”.

After he had  disappeared into the store I tried to do my best on serving the customers. When he was back, seeing so many people still queuing,  he asked me kindly,

to set aside, tracing  a semicircle with his left forearm and grabbed a dozen cones, he was able to fill them all by turning his hand skillfully under the ice cream faucet, simultaneously driving the lever with his right hand, and while I was struggling to get ice cream in both my hands, to distribute them, the customers, cheered him up with admiration.  And it seemed that these customers had the magnitude, because there were more and more behind them, and Bob's show was repeated until the machine could keep on refrigerating.

But when he stayed away for a longer time he used to ask me, with a significant gesture of the index rubbed on her thumb, if

I had any  banknotes, which he called in his funny slang “wonga”.

It was at that time of my first novitiate in London that I started to love the English.

 If he did not have customers, he read the newspaper: The Sun, the Daily Mirror and, above all, the Evening Standard, a London daily newspaper that published everything about horse racing, the other sporting events of the day, as well as some local, political issues and seldom  internationals.

He did not read much concentrated or for a long time, since he looked up from time to time to whistle or recall the attention of some glamorous girl of passage, on the goodness of whose forms we did not always agree, and if I tried to drag him to comment on some political news or abroad eco-social argument, its responses were always superficial, albeit not evasive.

At first I noticed a certain surprise in his eyes when listening carefully to my reasoning, and I did not know how to interpret it.

As time went by, I realized that it must appear unusual and even bizarre to him  that an Italian  ice-cream seller , wanted  to deal with arguments that not even the English and the Londoners , like he was, would to be  interested on.

 So, though seen as a sort of  phenomenon, a bit funny and original, I realized that his attitude towards me went gradually changing, from the initial snobbery and indifference into a cordial, sincere sympathy  that I was not able to turn into a deeper friendship, perhaps also because of my immaturity and insecurity.

Bob and the other dealers, including his two brothers and a sister, had left the school shortly after they had solved their attendance obligations; indeed, many even before that term.

Rebellious and refractory to the harsh rules of the English teachers, they preferred the free life of the street; without hierarchical supervisors invading or rebuking and  without any form of obligation (it was not rare he changed bad  words with some overly demanding or unfortunate customer).

 And with a great pay over the average earnings of workers and employees.

9. to be continued...