Short story: The Ice Cream Man
May
The summer Cardiff decided to bake was the summer nobody could quite explain.
The weather people on the telly offered their graphs and satellite maps, pointing out a pressure system that had stalled somewhere out over the Bristol Channel. But for the beef-red people of Llandaff, they didn’t need charts to tell them what their skin already knew.
The dust-dry roads and pavements radiated heat from first light. The Taff trickled low and slow, dry as a Sunday biscuit. The hanging baskets outside the pubs wilted by midday, their petunias collapsing in pink and purple heaps. And children played in paddling pools on squares of yellowed grass while the grown-ups sat in doorways fanning themselves with the Echo.
That was the summer Ieuan Morris and his ice cream van came.
Nobody knew quite when he first appeared. Memory is slippery in heat like that. But at some point in late June, the melody began, a tinkling, slightly too-slow rendition of We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillside that drifted through open windows and down terraced streets like something half-remembered from childhood.
It would announce itself around two in the afternoon, winding through the Cathedral Road end and down toward the residential streets behind Pontcanna Fields. Within moments, the doors would open and children would bolt barefoot across hot tarmac, adults emerging blinking into the white light with pound coins already in hand.
The van itself was the colour of old cream, with a strip of faded red along its side and a hand-painted sign that read Ieuan’s Ices in lettering that had once been blue but was now the pale grey of a winter sky.
Through the hatch, Ieuan himself would appear, a small, smiley man in his late seventies. His face was weathered as driftwood, white hair pressed flat under a white cap, and eyes the clear green of sea glass. He moved without hurry. He spoke in a low, accented Welsh that he mixed freely with English depending on his mood. And he remembered orders. Not just what people wanted that day, but what they’d had before. It made them feel special.
“Flake again, is it, lovely?” he’d say to nine-year-old Seren, who always asked for a 99 with raspberry sauce and always changed her mind to strawberry. He’d already be pouring the strawberry by the time she’d changed her mind.
He sold soft whip and scoops from tubs and lollies in colours not found in nature – neon oranges, electric greens, and he charged, everyone quietly noted, a little less than you’d expect. Not so little as to seem odd. Just enough that you left feeling you’d been treated kindly.
Pauline, who lived alone at number 34 with her two cats and her late husband’s record collection, began timing her afternoons around the melody. She had not, she realised, been sleeping well since April. The bills were mounting in a way she didn’t like to think about too directly.
There was the council tax reminder and the final demand from the gas company that she’d turned face-down on her kitchen table. But at two o’clock, when the tinkling of We’ll Keep a Welcome in the Hillside curled through her open kitchen window, she would fish out her coins and walk to the end of the road. She’d order a vanilla cone and stand in the sunshine eating it, and for seven minutes, perhaps eight, everything felt entirely manageable.
In conversation, Ieuan always asked about her. They weren’t prying questions, nothing about her finances or her health, nothing that required too much thinking or careful answering. He asked about the cathedral. About what Llandaff had looked like when she was young. He asked once whether she had ever swum in the Taff as a girl, and she had laughed properly for the first time in months, and told him yes, and that it was absolutely freezing even in August; he had laughed with her, a quiet chuckle, and handed her an extra flake without being asked for making him smile.
July deepened and Llandaff sizzled. The grass on Pontcanna Fields turned the colour of straw and crackled underfoot, and the city centre, sitting in the haze, shimmered at its edges in a way that felt faintly foreign. It felt almost Mediterranean, as though Cardiff had quietly relocated overnight. The scent of cut grass gave way to dust and dry earth and the sweetness of buddleia. And in the evenings, people sat outside the pubs until ten, watching bats flicker over the grass, nobody wanting to go back inside to their homes where the warm air sat heavy.
And every afternoon, without fail, Ieuan came.
He became, without anyone deciding this, part of the season itself. He became as essential and expected as the long light evenings and the wasps in the lemonade and the particular yellow quality of afternoon sun on sandstone walls. Children drew pictures of his van in school holiday projects. Rhodri from the corner shop started leaving a cold bottle of water out for him. Old Mr Banerjee, who rarely left his house, began sitting on his front step at ten to two, waiting.
Then, in the first week of August, the van stopped coming.
It was Seren who noticed first, standing at the end of her road at five past two with her fifty pence, looking up and down an empty street. Then Pauline, who stood at her gate for twenty minutes before going inside, scratching her head, and standing in her kitchen, feeling a loss she couldn’t quite justify. By the third day, there were small conversations on doorsteps. By the fifth, there was genuine concern.
It was Rhodri who decided to act. He’d once taken a delivery from Ieuan on a rainy morning in spring, the only time he’d ever seen him outside the van and had clocked the address on the invoice out of habit. It was a flat above a newsagent just outside Llandaff. Rhodri took the decision to head there, and knocked, not entirely sure what he was expecting.
A woman answered. Early forties, kind-faced, tired-looking. She introduced herself as Carys, Ieuan’s daughter, and when Rhodri explained who he was, that he was from the neighbourhood, that people were asking after her father, she scrunched up her mouth.
“He’s all right,” she said, carefully. “He had a fall. Nothing broken. But he’s resting. He won’t be back out this summer.”
Rhodri passed this on. There was relief, and then there was a collective, unspoken decision that something should be done. It was Pauline who suggested the visit. It would be a small group, nothing overwhelming, just a few people who wanted him to know he was missed. Carys, when Rhodri called back, sounded moved and slightly flustered, and said yes, Sunday would be fine.
Six of them went. Pauline, Rhodri, Mr Banerjee, a young mother called Ffion whose boys had practically lived at the van all summer, and two teenagers who had, without being asked, made a card. They brought a fruit cake and some flowers from the market and felt strangely self-conscious on the stairs while they waited to see him.
Ieuan was sitting up in an armchair by the window when they came in, smaller somehow without the white cap, his sea-glass eyes a little watery but very much alert. The flat was tidy and full of afternoon light. There were photographs on the dresser; one of a woman who must have been his wife, young and laughing on what looked like Penarth seafront; children at various ages; a photograph of the van, very new, its cream paint brilliant, parked somewhere with mountains behind it.
They sat with him for an hour. He asked about the neighbourhood. He asked whether the Taff was still low. He smiled at the card that had been made by the teenagers, reading it with great attention and setting it on the window ledge with a shaky hand.
It was only as they were leaving that Carys stopped Pauline quietly in the hallway.
“Can I show you something?” she said, and she led her to the small kitchen table, where a cardboard box sat open. Inside were receipts. There were dozens of them, rubber-banded in small bundles. Utility company receipts. Council tax payment confirmations. Rent arrears settlements. Each bundle was tagged with a small strip of paper carrying a street name and a number.
Pauline looked closer. She recognised several addresses. A woman on her own road whose electricity had been cut off last autumn. The young man at number 14 who’d lost his job. A family on Romilly Road whose landlord had been threatening proceedings.
“He never told anyone,” Carys said. She was folding her arms across herself in the way people do when they’re trying to hold something in. “Not even me, not properly. I found these going through his things when he fell. Years of them. Going back further than this summer.” She paused. “He was keeping the prices low on purpose, you know. Barely breaking even on the ice cream. The rest, everything he made over the minimum, he was paying it forward. Looking up arrears on local notice boards, ringing the council pretending to be a family member, asking which accounts were critical.” She looked at the box for a moment. “He had a system.”
Pauline thought about the final demand on her kitchen table. Face-down. She thought about how, in late June, she had received a letter from the energy company, a brief, impersonal note saying that an error had been corrected and her account showed a cleared balance. She had assumed a mistake in her favour and decided not to say a word. She had put her coins back into her purse and thought no more about it.
She walked home through the afternoon heat, down through the cathedral grounds where the trees were loud with bees and the old stone held the warmth of the day and gave it back slowly. A child was chasing a dog across the seething grass. The air smelled of dry grass and distant autumn and the particular fullness of a summer that knew it was ending.
She thought about a small man in a white cap, moving without hurry through the hot streets, asking about the Taff and remembering strawberry sauce and handing out extra flakes.
At home, she turned the energy letter face-up on the kitchen table.
Outside, distantly, she thought she could still hear it, that lilting, unhurried melody, the one nobody had asked for and everyone had needed, drifting through open windows on the last warm breath of the afternoon.
We’ll Keep A Welcome In The Hillside.
By Patric Morgan
