Age about thirteen or fourteen*, I guess, I went off one summer's day to the sweetie shop at the bottom of Crewe Road and found there, to my great delight, a pineapple Mivvi ice-lolly, just launched. Irresistible. Licking this, I wandered back towards home and noticed that the telephone exchange on Crewe Road was having an open day, so as I had nothing better to do I went in and a large group of GPO employees gathered round and showed me all the exchange had to offer, using incomprehensible words like Strowger from time to time. So when I got home about 40 minutes later I told my brother Si that there were two exciting things he should know. One, you could now get pineapple Mivvis, and two, the telephone exchange was open and you could look around. After a while off he went too. About an hour later he got back, and I asked him how he had enjoyed the visit to the telephone exchange. "Well," he said, "it was a bit strange. The first thing they asked was 'Have you got a brother?'. I said yes, how did they know? They said, 'Well, we've only had two people in here the whole day. And both of them have been sucking a pineapple Mivvi'."
* I see from the Lyons history that the pineapple Mivvi was introduced in 1973, a long time after this when we no longer lived in Carrington Road, and I was at art college. So have I got the wrong flavour, or what?
