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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Steve Canale
Oral history recording with Steve Canale. He grew up in the Rhondda but his family were from Cervaro in Italy. His family have also been recorded - See AV 11357 - AV 11362. Steve was recorded as part of the Italian Memories in Wales project (2008-10), delivered by ACLI-ENAIP and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Stefano (in Italy) or Steve, as he is known in Britain, began to talk about his life and from the very beginning and was overwhelmed by the strength of his own feelings. Visibly moved, he spoke about the hard working life of his parents before and after the Second World War. He remembered how his father was the first to take a handcart and, later, a horse and cart, selling ice-scream street by street. In those days ice cream was actual 'cream', made with fresh milk and butter. It was very hard work for all the family, particularly in the days before refrigeration. Steve remembers going, as a young lad of ten, in the cellar to chop big blocks of ice for the cart, but to this day, Steve emphatically stresses, he has never tested better ice cream.
He recollects that his father and another Italian were the only two people who were not deported in concentration camps. He couldn't explain why, it is possible that his father’s conversion of his Italian passport into a British one may have helped. When I asked why he did that, Steve explained that, prior to the Second World War his father realised the nature of the problems that he could be facing. The measure he took saved to some extent his business and, possibly, his life. In his early twenties, Steve took his first trip to Italy, he went to Cervaro, where originally his family came from and there, peeping over the fence of the next door garden, he saw Lina, the girl he ended up marrying three months later. They have now been together for sixty years.
Steve's life rotated exclusively around his father's ice-cream business, an activity that he carried out - in the sixties, seventies and eighties - very successfully. At its peak, Steve had a fleet of thirty ice-cream vans, with an average of ten to fifteen people working for him, from Cardiff and the surrounding areas to Merthyr Tydfil and the Rhondda Valley. He loved it. He really enjoyed talking to people as they would stop to buy an ice cream from his van and he had good quality ice cream. These features made him a very well known and a popular character amongst the people of the area. Famous people and people from many different nationalities stopped at his van, and he took the habit of asking them to write their name in his book. He now holds an enviable collection of names, including those of some RAF pilots, who stopped their helicopter on top of the hill where Steve was, to get themselves some ice cream.
However, after the recording Steve went on describing a less pleasant side of his business, that of the competition in the shape of other Italian and Welsh vendors. He remembers that already from the early days, competition was tough and not always honest. For example, his father was the first in the Rhondda Valley to use a refrigerator (which came from the USA) because he could no longer get the ice or the milk from his usual suppliers. They stopped supplying him with ice and milk after three Italians, who were in the same business, threatened to withdraw their custom if they had continued to do business with his father. Today, his son Mario has continued with his father’s activity. They now have four remaining vans. The business is dying out and, according to Steve, within the next ten years it will disappear all together as it is impossible to compete with the cheaper (and, he argues, the lower quality) ice cream sold everywhere in supermarkets. Since his retirement, Steve and Lina have been going regularly and for long periods of time back to Cervaro, where they have a well-kept property, with some cultivated land. In the past, they used to travel by car and bring back oil, wine, cheese, fruit and vegetables from their land. But now, both in their eighties, they can no longer do so, especially as their health is deteriorating. Moreover, without the help of their son, who takes them and picks them up from various airports, they would not be able to go to Cervaro at all.