Introduction

In Abergavenny, the small town on the Welsh border where I grew up, there were two places to buy home-made ice cream – Toni’s Café and Barney’s, which was a sweet shop. Toni’s had one of those enormous chrome boilers which hissed and bellowed and eventually produced a cup of coffee the colour of a day-old corpse. Its ice cream was much better, pale yellow and creamy textured, but somehow it didn’t have the hard, crystalline edge that Barney’s pure white version produced. Barney’s, too, had a little lacy room behind the shop where you could, if you were a grown up, take the weight off your feet after a hard morning’s shopping (well, perhaps I exaggerate – this was Abergavenny, Mon. not Knightsbridge) and tuck into what rosy retrospection insists was the nonpareil of banana splits. Were Aber and I specially blessed in having two places making their own ice cream? I think we probably were. I’m sure it was because I knew how good real ice cream was that I recoiled in horror one day when I was about eight, walking down King Street past Sergeant’s the printers and taking a bite out of a Wall’s wafer. That was the last time I ever had an ‘ice cream’ made out of non-dairy fat, the memory of that oily, chemical flavour staying with me to this day.