06-05 John Cohn

His little shop was just across the road from our grandparent’s home. I was 13 years old. I remember John Cohn for his sliders (soft ice cream between wafers). John was an essential part of our visit to Ireland, and our grandmother's best friend.
At least once a day we were over to see John, and in the photo with Ian and Robert, you can see what a British style confectionary store looks like with all its various forms of candy and chocolates. Sliders cost “thrupence” and were not rationed.
John Cohn and his older brother George are seen with mother in this photo. They were a couple of old bachelors, and once a week, John came over for tea with Grandma. The Bulloch sugar rations were used to make cake which is always served with tea. No one put sugar in tea.
I became very sensitive to the rationing issue in Northern Ireland in 1947. Our family had to apply for ration books, and the sweet ration was a quarter pound per week, which did not seem like rationing to us. And those one quarter pound boxes of Cadbury chocolates were magical to us kids at the time. Naturally, we bought our chocolates from John Cohn.
Rationing that hit home was the shortage of meat. Once a week we used all our coupons to buy a small roast, and the slice on my plate was the size of a silver dollar. Most nights we ate Spam, which Dad had sent over with an enormous trunk of canned goods. Watching Grandpa eat a can of peaches was really something. You would think he had died and gone to heaven.
During a trip downtown, Dad took us to a hotel for a nice meal. The meat offered on the menu was seagull. I remember Ian being grossed out. At Centre island back home, feeding bread crumbs to seagulls put them in the category of pets rather than food.
If any family member loved John Cohn, it was Uncle Herbert because he was the youngest and the confectionary store was a big part of his childhood. I remember them chatting about the War and people they knew who had died. And we have a great photo of Uncle Herbert with one of those famous sliders.
After several visits over the first month in Belfast, John Cohn and his brother became my friends. And one day, John pulled something out of a drawer below the counter that was the basis for a story a child never forgets. It was a pocket from his WWI uniform that showed a bullet hole and a bar of hard soap that had diverted the bullet out the other side of his pocket. His life had been saved by a bloody bar of soap.