The Ice Cream Pirates

It was a Tuesday afternoon when I lost my first tooth.  I know it was a Tuesday because Granny always takes my sister Annie and I to the chip shop for lunch on a Tuesday and I could still taste fried haddock with chips.  I also know it was summer because bigger boys were all around the seafront playing pirates near the harbour.  They were using headscarves as pirate hats and Darren from up our street had one with a Jolly Roger on it and a smart eye-patch.

‘Granny, when can I start playing at pirates?’ I asked.

‘Next year I expect,’ she replied.  ‘When you’ve started school and made some new friends.  Those boys are a bit too old for you.’

We left Granny’s house and were about to go to the bus stop to take us home when another bigger boy ran down from the high street shouting ‘Van crash!  Free ice cream!’ at the top of his voice.  Darren and the pirate boys started to run up the side street to where the other boy stood.  There they stopped and cheered and ran off again up to the high street.

Annie smiled.  ‘Come on!’ she cried, ‘Or there won’t be any left for us!’

We hurried after the boys.  When we got to the high street we stopped and gasped; Mr Rossi’s ice cream van was on its side and everywhere we looked were ice lollies, fizzy drinks, chew bars and cold, lovely ice cream.  Mr Rossi was not hurt and was shouting at another man a few feet away, waving his arms in the air while local children helped themselves to what had landed on the ground.  We checked to see Mr Rossi was not looking and picked up an ice lolly each and crammed several handfuls of treacle toffees into our pockets.

Darren had picked up a huge vat of ice cream the same size as himself from the van and was hobbling around trying to balance it.  Mr Rossi suddenly turned round.

‘You boy!  Get yer hands off that ice cream!’ he shouted running back to his van.

Mr Rossi grabbed Darren by the arm causing him to topple over and the vat fell to the ground, opening and covering them both in vanilla whip.  Everybody laughed and I did too, but I hid mine behind my hands because Annie says that if Darren ever sees someone smaller than him laughing at him he will deck them.

‘We’d better catch our bus’ said Annie taking my hand.  So we walked back down to the seafront unwrapping our ice lollies.  It was very sunny and I couldn’t wait to taste the delicious, cold orange flavour so I bit hard on the corner.  My tooth, which had been wobbly for the past week, broke loose in my mouth and I nearly swallowed it thinking it was a hard piece of lolly.  Annie told me to keep it safe and place it under my pillow that night for the tooth fairy always rewards you if you do.

A Winter Meeting

Carefully pulling on his tatty leather jacket, making sure to fasten only the three well-affixed of six dull buttons, Tristram departed his dusty basement flat and thirstily sniffed in the crisp tonic of early Winter air.  Although he hated the clichéd phraseology of ‘exercise your body, exercise your mind’, he had little to lose by it; a good walk and time away from the computer – besides, he had run out of milk.

Around the corner, a hundred yards from the local Middle School, he happened upon a chattering of local schoolkids bustling, whirling and roaring their way along a highly-polished ice slide.  Tristram watched enviously as one hapless, pudgy boy with thick ginger hair and a permanent cowlick toppled unceremoniously mid-slide only to receive the thick, leather sole of a boot squarely on his backside as an unsympathetic classmate deliberately crashed into him.

“Makes you wish we were young again, don’t it?” said a voice.  Tristram turned, meeting the kindly, wrinkled face of an elderly gentleman.  He recognised a nostalgic sparkle in the old man’s eyes as if looking in a mirror.  Vivid memories of snowy schooldays flooded his mind.  For a second he was the pudgy, downtrodden schoolboy scrambling precariously along the ice.  He was one of a hundred unremarkable children sitting in uniform rows at Christmas assembly and laughing as their good-natured Headmaster Mr Jenkins told  them, with a certain inevitability, to be careful not to suffer from ‘tinsel-itis’ during the holidays.  Now, thirty years later, he found himself reminiscing obliviously for a time when winter and especially Christmas brought him excitement, hope and warmth and not the frosty, unsympathetic smugness of the satirical 'festive' radio special he was supposed to have finished writing.

Gone Fishing

“Fill your boots Lads!” I cheerfully choked as young Brian and Terry helped me sort through Alan’s old things.  I’d been dreading this moment, but life goes on as they say and his hoard of teenage effects has been littering his old room, and with it my mind, for far too long now.

Terry held up a shabby, misshapen hat, “What about this Mr Pearson?  This’d be good for my next fishing trip.”

My eyes welled up.  You’d never think of him as the shrewdest mind, but young Terry Jones really does have one of the worst cases of foot-in-mouth disease I’ve ever known.

“Terry, put that back!” snapped Brian, Terry’s older and wiser brother, who had been absent-mindedly leafing through a pile of Loaded magazines.  “Think about what you’re saying.  He’s sorry Mr Pearson.”

“It’s fine lads.” I eventually reciprocated.  “But no, I-I’d rather like to hang on to that if you don’t mind.”

To most people this hat would appear unremarkable: made of once fine Harris Tweed and covered in hand-tied fishing flies.  It had been my father’s and, as I grew up, there was barely a Sunday afternoon when I would not see him leave the house wearing it, his rod and tackle bag clutched in either hand.  It had long been his ambition to share these stolen afternoons at the waterside with me, but the gentle pastime of angling and a Kevin Keegan-obsessed, highly-strung ten year old really do not mix awfully well.  On the two occasions we did venture to his favourite spot by the river near Cambury Manor, he snapped angrily at my attempts to break my “keepy-uppy” record with an empty bottle of Dandelion and Burdock and erupted with apoplectic rage when I dared skim a flat stone across the water’s surface.

“For the love of Pete, you silly young tyke!” he bawled, convulsing with ire. “You’ll scare away the fish with your blessed tomfoolery!”

“But father, we’ve barely seen a stickleback all day.  Besides, aren’t you scaring them off now by shouting at me?” I demurred.

No, fishing trips with my father never did turn out to be happy occasions.  The closest we came to bonding was as we “legged it” together from the Cambury Manor Squire – who’d clearly been alerted by my father’s clamorous protestations – like a couple of apple-scrumping schoolboys, my father trying carefully not to drop his catch – that elusive stickleback.

But my father’s fishing legacy sat rather better on the shoulders of my son Alan – a keen angler from the day he could hold a rod without losing his balance - and, some years before his death, my father passed down his treasured hat and tackle bag to him.  Initially proud to wear the hat, Alan bowed to teenage fashion sensibilities and replaced it with a black Nike baseball cap a year after my father passed away.  I doubt either would have given much cushioning against his tragic fall by the riverside when a loose bank of earth gave way causing him to strike his head on a large rock and be carried unconscious down the River Aire.   I’d lost a son...and finally gained a hat.

“Thanks Mr Pearson!” shouted the two boys, their arms laden with various records, magazines and posters as they shuffled down the path through my front garden.  I looked hard at the hat.  After wiping it free of dust and re-affixing two my father’s hand-made flies, I placed it on my head and looked sternly at myself in the mirror.  Without switching my glance, I reached for Alan’s old rod and my father’s tackle bag which had sat mocking by the hatstand these last three months.

The Question is "Why Do They Do It?"

Being about the relaunch of the classic Police Academy series.

When Orwell wrote of 1984
He didn't predict screwballs taking the fore
And the stories of bumbling, zany recruits
Fackler, Hightower - all in cahoots

Reformed criminals Jones and Mahoney
Captain Harris' head up a pony
Zed and Sweetchuck clowning around
A stir fried shrimp from out of town

Be it an assignment to Miami beach
With a hapless boss whose face is a peach
The odd tango at the Blue Oyster Bar
Or the hilarious destruction of Copeland's car

So it seems the series will now be remade
Old friends and new back out on parade
And for any out there who said it was bad
I've got three words - don't move dirtbag!