I’m sitting in the garden, enjoying the warmth of a July day when the tinny chimes if an ice cream van cut through the hawthorn that screens the back of the house and I am transported way back in time.
I say it’s an ice cream van though I’ve never seen it and it plies its trade at the oddest hours and even right through the winter season. Perhaps the good folks that live behind us are partial to the frozen emulsion that serves as a delicacy in England or he has found a more entrepreneurial way to make ends meet.
The tune is easily recognisable however, though the melodious notes of Green Sleeves always strike me as a strange choice for an ice cream seller to announce his arrival but then I am no expert.
But the tune did take me back, to a time that I cannot even remember. I cannot because I wasn’t there. We have created, my wife and I, a shared memory of a time in her youth when she used to listen with her father to comedy recordings by Allan Sherman, an American comedy writer who became famous by parodying songs. “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” is one of his most famous, you may have heard it.
She has told me all about the songs on many occasions, how her dada loved them and we have pieced them together to create a fabricated past and now I can see her and her Dad, laughing away at the humorous lyrics yet it all happened in a time before I met her.
Of course Green Sleeves was one of the songs that he spoofed on the album ‘My Son, The Folk Singer’. By the way there is also a song called ‘Sarah Jackman on the album but the tune in question tells the tale of a knight in Sherwood Forrest and goes by the title of ‘Sir Greenbaum’s Madrigal’ and so every time we hear the ice cream seller wind up his chimes we end up singing along:
All day with the mighty sword
And the mighty steed and the mighty lance
All day with that heavy shield
And a pair of aluminum pants.
It was a lovely time in my memory. I wonder how many more of my recollections I have made up.
p.s. I’m going to sing this instead:
Behind our house is an ice cream man
And he plies his trade any way he can
He drives his van along the streets
To the melodic chime of green sleeves.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 