Ice cream van

When we were little the ice cream van used to come round the streets and down our road play it ‘ding-dong-dingy-dong’ chime. He only had a chime, not a tune, or a recognizable song, but just the ‘ding-dong-dingy-dong’. We usually bought ice-lollies, and I seem to remember them being triangular, a long cardboard triangular  tube, which the ice cream man would cut in half – a whole tube was one penny, 1d, and obviously half a tube was a halfpenny ½d. I really only have a hazy memory but I feel sure that they were red or green or orange. There were ice lollies on sticks, and I’m sure he must have sold ice cream, either to have in a paper or in a wafer cone. There wasn’t ‘soft’ ice cream, let alone the squirty sort you can have as a 99 with a flake and red sauce. I don’t remember having ice cream from the ice cream van; we did have ice cream after lunch on a Sunday as a treat, and usually it was Neapolitan, pink, white and brown, which would be sliced and either eaten in a bowl with a spoon or between two wafers as a sandwich. Sometimes we would have plain vanilla ice cream, and maybe with a spoonful of treacle (golden syrup) on it; the treacle would go hard and chewy and was yum! We didn’t have a fridge, let alone a freezer, and the ice cream would be brought home by my dad, wrapped in newspaper. he would go to the pub to meet his friends on Sunday before lunch, and cycle home with the  ice cream for Sunday roast. He was a very helpful dad and did a lot of the cooking and other household chores as well as the gardening, so mum never minded him going to the pub for a pint!