Page 11 of The Custard Tart Cafe by the Sea
“Back then it was billed as the finest covered amusement park in the world. Which would make any teenager from 2021 piss themselves with laughter, in this age of instant gratification from YouTube, TikTok and Xbox– oh, I know all the terminology from my grandkids and our Skype calls.” I smile at Frank, encouraging him to continue at his own pace, wondering where his grandchildren live if they have to video call one another.
“Even twenty years ago, that lofty claim would have seemed ridiculous,” he continues. “What with Disney theme parks scattered all over the globe and daredevil roller coasters everywhere, but that was how small our world was in the early sixties. We lived in a big little snowglobe. It was more than enough for us. The excitement over progress was palpable. We valued everything and took nothing for granted. Things really seemed to be coming along in leaps and bounds, and the pier was our barometer for that, in a funny way. Games were upgraded, Wall’s ice cream added new lollies to their menu, and as a fifteen-year-old lad in ’63, I certainly appreciated a good-looking girl. I spotted Millie, next to the Laughing Sailor. Ugly thing it was. Out of all the romantic places you’d like to imagine first meeting your one true love, it is not next to a freaky-looking, coin-operated mannequin and his annoying peals of laughter. But there we have it. Somehow I swept Millie off her feet with a corny joke about the monstrosity, and it was me who had the last laugh, that old mariner never got a look in.”
Frank stops to take a breath and catch up with his tart, so I re-fill our tea cups to give him a moment.
“It’s an unusual meeting point– but as good a place as any for love to blossom!” I acknowledge.
“We swiftly moved on to the slot machines, chatting all the while,” he continues. “And that’s where I came into a little windfall, meaning I could treat us both to fish and chips on the beach. I guess she decided then that I was a keeper.”
“Aw. I don’t blame her, Frank, and I’m sure it was more than the money and the al fresco dining Millie was attracted to.”
“Oh, ay. I guess I was a looker myself back in the day.” Frank winks.
I sweep the flaky remnants of my tart to the side of my plate. I really should get back to work. Tim and I have a couple ofavant gardefillings to experiment with this afternoon. One of them is so ‘extra’ that just the thought of putting it out for sale and a certain somebody deciding to barge back in here as if he owns the place, makes me want to cackle like a witch. It’s unlikely I’ll ever have the ‘pleasure’ of communicating with him in person again though. No, viciously typed words seem to be more his style…
“And that was our routine as we started courting.” Frank draws me back into his tale. “Not the gambling, but taking a stroll on the pier on a Saturday night. Every time we walked those boards together, I felt more and more blessed at my good fortune. Never mind those arcade games, Millie was the real jackpot. The way those single lads out on the pull looked at us, I knew they were envious. It was just so lovely to wrap ourselves up in the nostalgia of that first encounter, every time we stepped out on the pier.” Frank sighed, caught up in the memory. “We did it for years. We did it with the babies as they turned into boys, then loveable rogues, then husbands, then parents themselves. We did it for decades. We did it until the fire.”
“Oh, Frank.”
“I know you’d like to hear that we continued to do it after that awful day, after the pier was rebuilt. But sadly my Millie never got to see the end result. She passed in her sleep a week after we’d put the blaze out. The same week I retired. I know it was the fire that did it. Left her broken-hearted.”
What do you say to that? Clearly Millie had loved the pier as if it were an actual family member, understandable really when she’d spent so much time with Frank and her boys there, and when it had provided her parents with the means to bring her and her siblings up.
“Everything changed after that. Peter and Paul– my sons,oursons– ran a very successful magazine business together in Bath. Millie’s death, and my retirement, happened just a couple of months after they were given a golden opportunity to open up offices in Dubai, taking their wives with them. The business was too precarious to move back. Now they come over to visit when they can and they bring my five grandchildren, of course. But it’s once a year at best. I don’t hold it against them. They have their own lives to live.”
“Could you visit them there once or twice a year, too?”
“I gave it a go, but I can’t stand the heat in that part of the world, Willow. Truth be told, it reminds me of the intensity of a fire. I know they’re all kitted out in the Emirates with state of the art air conditioning, in their giant luxury penthouses. But there’s not much for somebody like me to do there, beyond sit inside and watch television or read. Nowhere in particular for me to potter about, or wander off to, without succumbing to heatstroke. Granted, it was good to see their set-up for myself, but all that opulence isn’t for me. I’m a man of simple comforts. One night their live-in cook-stroke-nanny served us all up some kind of pudding topped with gold flakes that you could eat! If memory serves me correctly, it was only a Monday teatime and nobody was celebrating a birthday. It was very pretty, but as you and I know, nothing rivals a fuss-free custard tart.”
“Except maybe a fuss-free custard tart with a bit of a surprise filling.”
We both laugh at that. Never a truer word spoken.
Now Frank is off home again. My selfish wish has been granted, and I now understand my friend’s backstory a little more. I know why nostalgia swept over him the first day he set foot in this place, and I understand what drives him to want to rip the petition– and its owner– to pieces. But I still can’t find the motivation to raise my own proverbial fists. It’ll be soul-destroying enough if the petition gets the right number of signatures to carry any legal weight.
“This is ridiculous!” Reggie had said a week earlier, waving the papers around in the air as if they were flags (thankfully the café was empty at the time). “It… or rather,he, let’s not kid ourselves, cites ‘an infringement ofgeographical indications and traditional specialities’ as his gripe. He’s saying it’s misleading for us to let people think these are authentic Portuguese custard tarts. Next he’ll be accusing the beach of trying to mimic the Algarve.”
“And what part of The Custard Tart Café says Portugal in it, exactly?” I cried. “When have I ever claimed these are Portuguese per se? Where am I hanging the country’s flag, either inside or outside of these premises?”
Damn and blast those blue and white tiles for turning up at all…
“Exactly,exactly!” Reggie’s expression matches my outrage. “In any case, custard was probably invented by the Romans, they often added eggs to milk to thicken it. It’s mentioned in Apicius.” Sensing how lost I am, Reggie adds: “You know, the ancient Roman cookbook that was supposedly put together in the first century AD….”
Is there anything my friend doesn’t know about the literary world?
“We aren’t attempting to do anything controversial, like make our own version of Cheddar cheese,” I add. “For crying out loud. Can’t the man stop at humiliating me in front of a full café? To think that I gave him those complimentary tarts as well.”
“Legally, we probably could make Cheddar cheese as the town of Cheddar is only ten miles away.”
“You know what I mean.” I shake my head in exasperation. “And I doubt even Cheddar would bat an eyelid in protest if we did. Canada gets away with it, after all.”
“Canada doesn’t claim their Cheddar is West Country Farmhouse Cheddar, though. That’s the rub with the PDO.” I shrug in response. Reggie is a walking encyclopedia. “That’s foods with Protected Designation of Origin.”
“Oh, Reggie, please stop taking us off on tangents! It’s not helping me think straight.”
“I’m sorry, Willow. I’m just trying to make light of his crazy idea. He hasn’t got a leg to stand on. You must realise that?”
Well, that was Reggie’s initial verdict, but he, like me, hadn’t read many petitions at this point. No sooner had he done some homework on my behalf than Reggie assured me it was, in fact, a properly worded petition, not like some of the cobbled-together examples one might find floating around Facebook and Twitter. Nevertheless, the easiest thing for me to do is to go with the flow and stick to the path of least resistance. Aka bury half my head in the sand. Not literally. Although it has been tempting recently, with the beach on my doorstep.
