INLSA

Esther Lewis

CHOCOLINA. Jolly Jelly. Custard Dream. If you know what those are and you’ve been taken back to the summers of your youth, congratulations, you’re totally on my level.

For those who don’t know, those aren’t movie titles one would expect to find hidden under a teenage boy’s bed. Nor are they Father Christmas’s off-season aliases.

They’re ice-cold treats from a world I had almost forgotten.

But back to the present.

This week has been bittersweet for me.

Bitter because with deep summer comes the frequency of sweaty people who disregard personal space, not to mention deodorant.

On Monday morning I scrambled for the seat at the end of the train carriage, figuring I’d only have to deal with one person next to me. I didn’t foresee that the man next to me – spread across two seats and who appeared to take a shine to my side – would have cold, clammy arms.

He was reading a broadsheet newspaper, and every time he turned the page his cold, sweaty arm rubbed against mine.

What I really wanted to do was report him to security.

And I would have done so had there been any in sight. So I gave up my seat to a school child.

But despite the random sweaty strangers with no respect for personal boundaries, I love this heat.

Sweet. Or sweat, depending on your disposition.

I don’t understand why people keep complaining about it, or why we’re shocked when the mercury rises above 30º. It’s summer. It’s Cape Town. This happens every year. It’s been happening since I was a child.

After my rub-in with Mr Cold Sweats, I thought I was done with the train. But being a creature of habit, I was back on track the following day. The usual vendors walked by peddling the essentials, including sewing needles, ankle socks and CD holders. But the man who caught my attention was the one selling ice-cold “suckers”. Old-school suckers.

Within moments the train started to pull away, putting distance between me and my Chocolina. I all but wrestled the poor man through the window. Good thing he was wearing his running shoes.

Eating that chocolatey treat, with most of it melting and dripping on my white top, I was timewarped back to my youth.

Summer holidays were always made official with a trip to the Gatti’s factory in Lansdowne.

My father would come home with boxes of the above-mentioned suckers. My siblings, cousins and I would carefully select our loot. There was always an adult woman around to chase us outside because the floors had just been washed.

Once the sucker was done, my cousins and I collected the sticks. Some would be sharpened and used as (sticky) weapons against pretend monsters, some washed and glued into pyramids or stick men. Older children were able to build ashtrays, rafts and jewellery boxes.

That was also when only one house in the neighbourhood had a pool. Once in a while the children would go there for a proper swim – or to doggy-paddle. But most days we were content with stripping down to our underwear and running through the sprinklers dotted around our neighbourhood’s public spaces. Even though it meant we would itch for the next two days.

The alternative, long before water restrictions, was filling up large steel tubs and submerging ourselves until our toes resembled prunes.

The only thing that would lure us out was the unmistakable, tinny sound of the ice cream van.

We shrieked hysterically at our folks for 80 cents to buy a curly cone.

We’d run our little feet off, shouting: “Ice cream man! Wait for me!”

The trickiest part was not letting your ice cream fall. And not eating the ice cream-soaked serviette along with the cone.

Back then I was a lot more hardwearing. So of course I refused to wear shoes and would run across hot gravel trying to keep to the shaded parts. (Yes, I said gravel. Our road was only upgraded to tar after I had started high school.)

There was nothing like withstanding the heat, then splashing with both feet in a puddle where someone would be washing his car. I wasn’t thinking about how many pedicures it would cost to fix the damage to my feet.

I may very well accost the sucker man on the train tonight. Or listen out for the dulcet tones of the lesser heard ice cream van. Perhaps I’ll drive around my old neighbourhood and see if there are any children playing in the sprinklers.

There’s nothing like a bit of nostalgia to beat this sweltering heat.