(continued from previous post)
When I was a child, the milkman would arrive on his milk float on our street, around 5am every morning except weekends. We weren’t the biggest milk drinkers, so we had a delivery twice a week, but to this day when I hear the clink of glass on glass in the early hours, I imagine him walking along our drive, collecting the empties and replacing them with bottles brimming full of creamy milk.
And it was creamy – I used to fight my sisters for the ‘top of the milk’, the uppermost inch of thick, rich, delectable cream. I would have opened each bottle, scooped it out and eaten it then and there, if I’d been allowed.
Mum took advantage of this reverence for cream with a ‘quickie’ midweek dessert – bananas and cream. We didn’t have bananas all the time and they certainly weren’t around for snacking but, from time to time, mum would chop them up and serve them to us with a liberal serving of cream. Or sometimes, if we were really lucky, she’d produce a can of Carnation condensed milk and pour that over instead. To be continued…