by Grace Wells
At the end of the afternoon the boys climbed back onto Filipos’ bus, tired and happy and glad to be heading home. Alex snuggled against his father and shut his eyes. His head was a whirl of pictures from the market: fruit and vegetables, people and animals, fish and meat and noise. All day he had listened to Papa and Pedros selling ice cream. All day people had said, ‘Mm, yes, but what’s in it?’ And all day Papa had said, ‘it’s handmade, home-made ice cream. There’s nothing but the best of cream and eggs, sugar and fruit.’ Now, as the empty bus jolted and the engine started, Alex thought about all the things that had happened.
He thought about all the ingredients in their ice cream, all the eggs laid by the dusty chickens, which each day were fed and tended by the mothers of Moutsouna. He smiled when he thought of all the different village goats that had given their milk; he grinned especially hard when he thought of stubborn Kalimara. He thought too of the huge green melons that he’d watched swell through the long summer and he thought of the bright shiny lemons from the trees in the back yards. He thought of how the people had gone without sugar and he thought of all the arms that had beaten the custard and the wrinkled hands of the old people that had carved the little wooden spoons. He knew that everybody in the whole village had done something or said something or made something that had helped make the ice cream. He tugged on Papa’s sleeve.
‘Papa, you could never list all the ingredients that went into our ice cream, could you?’
Papa put his arm around Alex’s small shoulder and squeezed.
‘No, my son, you could never list them all, but I think you can taste them,’ he said, pulling out a small bag in which nestled two last pots that he had hidden away earlier on. He handed one to Pedros to share with Ios. ‘You can taste all the things people did or said or gave. That’s why it’s so delicious. That’s why everybody wants to buy more.’
20
We Need More Time
Nina chewed on the end of her pencil. It tasted woody. She wrinkled her nose and frowned. She breathed out a long deep sigh. She bit her lip. She sucked on her pencil once more, and frowned again. No, it was no good. No matter how hard Nina tried to write down her story, the words wouldn’t come. It was too hot and the afternoon was too long, and it was too hard trying to write, what with all the waiting for Alex and Papa to return. Nina heard a noise outside her window. She jumped up to look, but it was only two children rolling a huge melon down the road toward the harbour. They were headed for the evening barbeque, laughing with one another and giggling every time the melon steered out of control. Nina went and sat back at the table. She picked up her pencil. She tried again. But it really was no good. How could she write anything when the future of Moutsouna was so uncertain? How could she write anything when a huge melon had to be rolled all the way to the harbour? She couldn’t write a book with so much going on. Nina dropped her pencil and ran outside shouting to the children to wait for her help.
By the time the melon reached its destination, the evening barbeque was ready, the villagers had gathered, and the ice-bus was back in the harbour! Nina ran to join her Papa. She had to push her way through the crowd of people swarming around him, eager for news. Nina squirmed through legs and squeezed between bodies until she was right beside him, and Papa was scooping her up into his arms.
‘Today was a great day,’ Papa shouted, planting a big kiss on Nina’s cheek. ‘Today was one of the finest days in the whole history of Moutsouna. We succeeded. We sold every last drop of Moutsouna Ice Cream.’
The crowd cheered.
Papa gave Nina a squeeze, then gently he let her slide down to the ground.
‘The trouble is,’ Papa began, and his voice grew slow and serious, ‘for this to work, we need more time.’ He hung his head and drew a deep breath. Nina stood shyly beside her Papa. She clung to his hand, running her small fingers over the big black hairs on his wrist for comfort. ‘For this to really get going,’ Papa hesitated, ‘we need to produce more ice cream and for that we need more chickens and more goats. Until we have more animals things are going to be very difficult, we’re going to have to do without.’
Nina felt the atmosphere change around them. Like everyone in the village she knew the only way to get more chickens was to allow a broody hen to sit on a clutch of eggs. She knew that a broody hen needed to sit on her eggs for twenty-one whole days before the tiny fluffy feathers of chicks appeared, and she knew all too well how long it would take before the tiny fluffy chicks were old enough to lay their own eggs. Goats were even worse. For a goat to have a kid, and a kid to grow old enough to have kids itself and make milk was longer than the time between one olive harvest and the next.
Papa Papadopolos spoke again, ‘We’re going to have to tighten our belts.’
Nina looked down at her trousers and saw she wasn’t wearing a belt. She looked at Papa, but he was speaking out to the disappointed villagers.
‘We’re going to have to do without. Save every last penny we can. Save electricity. It might be weeks or months before we make a go of this. It’s time to unplug our radios and hair-dryers, to stop using our fridges. We’ve got to drink water and eat plain food every day, until … until …’ Papa’s voice trailed away. The trouble was, he couldn’t say until when; no one knew how long this might take, or indeed whether it really could work, really work well enough to support a whole village.
Nina could see the worried faces of her friends and neighbours. They were all turned towards Papa in sorrow. It was as if they had all believed that selling the ice cream in the market would be a magic wand. As if that alone would be enough to save the village. Now Papa was telling them things were going to be difficult for a long while.
‘This is a time for us to pull together. We can do it. We’ll all be fine,’ Papa reassured them, but it was too late for reassurance. The people had begun to fret. They turned to one another helplessly, their faces full of doubt.
Papa’s hands began to shake a little. Nina tried to comfort him, but she didn’t know what to say. It was obvious that this strange, tense and busy time would carry on until who knew when? Nina shook her head slowly. It wasn’t just the fate of the village that was so uncertain. It was obvious that until things calmed down she wasn’t going to have the chance to write her book. Suddenly there was a loud noise from the road. A rusty old van swung into the harbour. It came to a juddering halt just by the barbeque. Then another van swung into the harbour. Behind it came a car and another car and then a seemingly endless train of vehicles, motorbikes and bicycles, even the village bus, driven by Smelly Dimitri Simitos. Suddenly, there were people everywhere and as they got out of their vans and cars and clambered from the bus, the air filled with the bleating of goats and the squawking of chickens. From inside one rusty old van came the triumphant crow of a cockerel.
‘People of Moutsouna,’ Smelly Dimitri shouted, ‘we the people of Apiranthos and the people of Filoti and Halki, we want to help you. We have gathered all that we can spare, every last goat and chicken that we can do without, and we give them to you now, with our wishes for the success of your ice-cream factory!’
Papa opened his hands in a big shrug as if he didn’t understand. Then Mama stood up and said, ‘Thank you!’ Then everyone was standing up and saying thank you and all the people and children were moving around amongst the squawking chickens and the bleating goats, shaking hands with one another, exchanging stories and jokes and news.
Nina just stood watching, smiling at Alex who was chasing after a runaway goat and laughing out loud.
21
Nina’s Book
So it was that the people of the island of Naxos began to appear daily in Moutsouna. From every nook and cranny they came, for they had heard the story of the ice-factory and they knew the history of their islands. They brought whatever that had to spare. At last they had a chance to help stop the endless drift of islanders to the mainland and the city of Athens. They brought chickens and goats, empty plastic pots, cheese and bread an
d olives; in short they brought whatever they thought might help. One man brought a sack of oranges. Mama divided them between the ice-cream factory and the village children. Someone else brought charcoal and someone else brought wine. By degrees Moutsouna became a popular place to be. Children all over the island begged their parents to bring them to the famous ice-dream factory to sample the delicious ice cream. Moutsouna became something of an island attraction. Visitors swam in the sea and there were legendary football games on the beach. The bright young people of Naxos Town arrived in the evenings to gossip and chatter and dance on the beach and they left early in the mornings, just as the old people of Apiranthos and Filoti and Halki were climbing off the bus with their arms full of knitting and advice and encouragement.
Business was always brisk in the market on Fridays in Naxos Town. Moutsouna Ice Cream sold out before the market was over. It wasn’t long before the hotel owners from the beaches outside Naxos Town came to the village to order ice cream for their restaurants. With them came the foreign tourists, people from Germany and France, from England and Ireland and beyond. They had their photographs taken in front of the factory and they bought ice cream and left donations, because like everybody else they wanted to help. Everybody who heard the tale was moved by the story of a village that was trying to save itself. People were always touched when they heard about Moutsouna; some of them laughed with joy, some cheered or clapped, and some, who had quite forgotten what it meant for people to do things together, and help one another, why those people even had tears in their eyes.
The time of doing without did not last so very long, but it was a time that everybody in Moutsouna remembered and talked about for many years after, for even though people did without they were rich in many other ways. There was always plenty of talk and laughter, plenty of good sharing and fun.
The ice-cream factory grew in strength until a day came when Papa Papadopolos, who had been elected by popular demand to manage the factory, was able to give all the workers a proper wage. The villagers set the factory up as a workers’ co-operative, which meant everyone in the village owned it and helped make decisions about how it was run. It meant that whenever anything new occurred, like the purchase of a refrigerated lorry to deliver ice cream across the island, or the invention of a new flavour or new ice lolly shape, all the people of Moutsouna, the mothers and the fathers, the grandparents and children and babies, all turned out to pass comments and offer advice and make decisions.
Moutsouna Ice Cream came to be exported to all the other islands in the Aegean. Before long it was being sold in shops right across the mainland of Greece. It was even sold in Athens. In time every one in Greece had heard the story of Moutsouna Ice Cream, but this was not because Moutsouna Ice Cream was available in every shop in the country, it was because Nina finally sat down and finished her book. It was, of course, this book that you are reading now and it was the kind of story that people liked because it was about children and ice cream, and it was a popular story because it reminded readers that when people work together anything is possible.
It was not an easy book for Nina to write because so much had happened and so many people had done so many things to help with the ice dream. At first Nina tried to write down all the things that people had done, but she found herself filling up notebook after notebook with details of village babies who had cut their first teeth, or taken their first steps during the excitement. She wrote about the time Ios’ mother cut her finger slicing a lemon, and about a cockerel that caught a cold and couldn’t crow properly, and about many other small incidents, until she realised her book would never be finished if she carried on that way. Her grandfather advised her that some of the villagers were private people who might not want to be made famous by being in a book, and so Nina decided she would only really write about the people in her own family, which was what she had wanted to do right from the start.
In the end Nina was glad not to have written too much about other people in her book, because after it was published visitors came to Moutsouna more than ever. And once the visitors had walked around the harbour and strolled along the beach noticing all the changes and developments that had happened to the sleepy, little village of Nina’s story, they began to look at all the villagers themselves. They wanted to know who was who and what they had done to help the ice dream come to life.
For the most part visitors could not tell who people were unless they went right up to them and asked, yet there was always one character they recognised when they reached Moutsouna. In fact many visitors recognised him in Apiranthos and even in Naxos Town because, despite all the small changes in the village, one thing remained the same: on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Filipos Velcanos still drove the bus. It didn’t seem to matter how many years went by, he still drove it in exactly the same way. He still welcomed everything with a smile. He was glad for the dangerous road, unafraid that it had no wall to protect you. He was glad for the stray goats and the dropped melons. He welcomed the tired, old grandfathers that shuffled aboard slowly and he made time for the small children who ran and tripped and dropped their Moutsouna Ice Creams. He had a smile for everything and everyone, driving with his heart in his hand, ever ready to hand it out whenever it was needed.
Mama says: It was the Chinese who first taught the Arabic people the art of making iced desserts and drinks. They saved winter snow in caves and specially built icehouses, so that they could have ice cream in summer. It was Marco Polo who brought the invention to Europe in the 13th century. To make really smooth ice cream the mixture has to be kept moving while it freezes so ice crystals can’t form and make the mixture sharp on the tongue. Modern, electric ice-cream makers do this and take away all the hard turning work that Alex and Nina had to do. Such machines can be fun things to own, but you don’t need one to make the following recipes.
Mama’s Vanilla Ice Cream
500 ml cream
4 egg yolks
3-4 drops vanilla essence
2 teaspoons custard powder
1 heaped tablespoon caster sugar
1 Whip half the cream (250ml) until it thickens. Chill in the fridge with an empty plastic box & lid.
2 Make the custard. Separate the egg yolks from the whites in a medium-sized bowl.
3 Beat the yolks, vanilla essence, sugar and custard powder together until the mixture is smooth.
4 Heat the remaining cream (250 ml) until nearly boiling. Do not let it boil.
5 Whisk the hot cream into the yolk mixture.
6 Pour the mixture into the saucepan and whisk over a medium heat until it thickens and comes back up to boiling.
7 Pour the custard into a bowl. Place the bowl of custard into a bowl of cold water. Stir it every once in while.
8 When the custard is cold, fold in the whipped cream. Pour the whole lot into the cold plastic box and freeze.
9 After two hours scoop the ice cream into a large bowl and whisk again. This will help break up any ice-crystals. Put the ice cream back in the freezer until it is refrozen. Then enjoy!
Easy Ice Lollies
You will need:
* Pots & sticks or you can buy special plastic lolly moulds from kitchen shops
* Real fruit juice or yogurt
Pour the fruit juice into the pots and add the sticks. Put them in the freezer until solid. You can experiment by adding chunks of real fruit, chocolate sprinkles or other treats or you can try lining the moulds with melted chocolate, freezing them and then pouring the juice in on top.
About the Author
Award-winning poet and author Grace Wells grew up in London, England. From the earliest age her dream was to be a writer. Before being able to make that dream come true she had careers as a florist, a television producer and in arts administration. Now she lives with her partner and her two children in County Tipperary, writing and growing organic food. A full-time eco-worrier and part-time eco-warrior, she is committed to environmental protection. She likes to visit schools to dis
cuss her work and talk with children about their heroes, heroines and dreams.
By the Same Author
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GYRFALCON,
an award-winning novel for ages 9+
from Grace Wells
‘Magical and marvellous first novel’
The Sunday Independent
‘A very imaginative coming-of-age story … Gyrfalcon will stir
the imagination of its young readers’
Leinster Leader
‘Uplifting … Seldom have I read such vivid and passionate
descriptions of the environment’
Books Ireland
‘Wells has given us a striking début novel’
Robert Dunbar, The Irish Times
‘A beautiful story … I had tears in my eyes
reading this very soulful story’
Catherine Ann Cullen, The Pat Kenny Show
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2012 by The O’Brien Press Ltd,
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First published 2008
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84717-498-7
Text © copyright Grace Wells
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© The O’Brien Press Ltd
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