MORNING SERIAL
The Berni’s sold sweets and chocolates of course, but centre stage was given over to the enormous chrome and steel edifice of their coffee machine.
It was polished to a mirror shine and towered over their high counter emitting gentle hissing sounds until called upon to make frothy coffee by whooshing a jet of pressurised steam, loud enough to drown out all conversation, into a jug of milk. A marvellous contraption, it could double up by means of a special attachment, as a cooker of ‘steamed pies’ – a distinctly Valleys delicacy – which would be flopped, soggy, hot and delicious, on to your plate; steaming away like a freshly wet nappy. The café also boasted a chest freezer with a sliding top that dispensed orange Jubblies in their odd triangular packs, as well as choc ices and lollies: Mivvies, Orange Maids, Funny Feet, Fabs and Funny Faces and, my favourite, Zoom Rocket lollies. Mr Emmanuelli also dispensed, from a fridge behind the counter, bricks of Sidoli ice cream, wedged between two wafers, with or without a chocolate flake. The whole place smelled of coffee and tobacco and hot milk. On damp and dismal days it was a pleasure to sit in the sheltering warmth of the café, sip at a cup of hot milk and peruse the colourful postcards pinned up on the sweetie shelves, with their pictures of sun-drenched Italian towns and seaside views, the Colosseum and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I pictured my future self strolling through an Italian garden in the Mediterranean warmth, enjoying the shade of the cypress trees as the Valleys rain belted down outside.
If we had a Corona pop bottle to return to the café, my reward for fetching Dad’s Player’s Navy Cut was to spend the deposit due on the bottle on whatever I wanted. ‘Please Return Bottle 3d’, it said on the lids. This was enough for two ounces of loose sweets, extricated from one of the three long rows of sweetie jars arranged along the shelves on the back wall. I would agonise over the choice between boiled sweets (like Rhubarb and Custard) which were longer lasting, or Needler’s Fruit Pastilles, which tasted better but had to be eked out by squashing them with my tongue to the roof of my mouth, letting them slowly dissolve whilst resisting the overwhelming urge to chew.