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... 

Memoirs of London - 6

In 1979 I was back on the road to work for the B.B.C., a company that, apart from the initials of its name, had nothing else to share with British state television. In fact, the Benjamin Building Company did not afflict people with boring programs, neither it  talked with shameless lies about national and international political events. Finally my Company did not even put its nose in the lives of the Queen and the other members of the Royal Family,  generally speaking.

The company I worked for delighted their customers  by selling ice cream and drinks, logistically relying on a chain’s shop of souvenirs, sweets and tobacco’s  strategically located at several points in the great London area known as West End.

 This vast and famous London metropolitan area, which also includes Soho district and numerous small and large parks, is bordered by a perimeter that runs through the important streets of Oxford Street, Charing Cross Rd, Shaftesbury Av and Regent's Street, forming an irregular trapeze whose four tops pass from Tottenham Court Rd to Oxford Circus; from there to Piccadilly Circus and  finally end at Leicester Square, couple of yards   from Trafalgar Square, where Admiral Nelson's statue, according to the likely intentions of the public authorities who wanted it so powerfully high, witnessed  the  British’s greatness and glory to all those who would walk from there: French people, foreigners  and British from all over the Empire.

 In those years, the greatness and glory of England, after the almost total depletion of the British Empire,  seemed more remote and far from the statue of the great conductor of the seas. And nostalgia, it’s all over known, is a feeling that more acutely manifests itself, when the best times are over and  a crisis is bound to come.

 And that Great Britain was in crisis at the end of the seventies of the twentieth century, it immediately became apparent also to the "street traders" who, living among the people, felt the moods of the average citizen in an emotionally direct way.

 On the street, they felt discomfort and nervousness, though the real troubles were still to come, shortly thereafter, with the irresistible rise to power of the Conservatives headed by Margareth Tatcher (later known as the “Iron Lady"), which would mark the end of a cycle in London's administrative life, characterized by a policy of traditional securing of democratic freedoms and sympathy for the weaker social classes.

Moreover, the English metropolis had represented since the rising of the first music liberation and protest groups (born on the wave of the American Hippies movement, also known as the "beat generation") a decisive cultural reference point, helping to make London the Capital of the Rock Movement, where refugees disappointed by the illusion of the failed revolution of 1968, could find a safe refuge escape from the backflow of the reaction which  had gone through  the whole world.

And it was right there, in London, that they could still see the last glow of brightness before its definite sunset. So, in a good way, I agreed to resume my job and sell ice-creams and drinks in the street. By my side I had a refrigerating machine that turned milk into ice cream and a refreshing machine dispensing orange and lemonade.

Where  else could I work, let alone  the road? And to do what? Maybe to get into some office with air conditioning in the summer, heating in the winter, and the stench of paperwork under my nose? There was no other world for me, now, if not that; no other destiny, no other life I could have wanted, than the free life  of street's traders.

 Returning to the road meant for me to relive from the very beginning my adventure in that mysterious and fascinating city that, unfortunately and superficially, is too often considered cold and inhospitable, considering also that never or almost never come into you get a direct contact with English or British people.

 This story is devoted to London and to the dear places where I have lived in.  But it is also dedicated to all the peoples that those places with such variety and vivacity animated in those years who will pass through the main scene of my story: the streets of London.

6. to be continued...