Dandelion and Burdock, by Dominic Faraday

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Mr Rossi drove the pop lorry onto the Fernhill estate every Thursday afternoon in the hot summer of 1976, and we heard the crates rattling long before we saw it. The lorry was open at the sides and stacked with bottles of cream soda, limeade and dandelion and burdock that flashed in the sun like a sweetshop window. He had a moustache like a yard brush and wore a brown warehouse coat with a pencil behind his ear. He carried every order up to the front door himself, two crates at a time, and took the empty bottles back in the same crates. Any child who brought him a stray empty from the rec got two pence for it, and he never asked whose it was. Families who were short could pay him the following week; he wrote their names in chalk on the inside of the cab door and rubbed them out when they paid. He never forgot a name or a debt. When the drought went on into August and the taps ran slow, he left a free bottle of limeade on the step of every house with a new baby in it.

List five things you learn about Mr Rossi in this extract.