Memories are made of this

Back Home in Essex
So it was that James, Laura, and their newborn infant, sought happiness in their post war ‘House on a Hill’ secreted away amidst 3000 similar over-spill homes that some occupants seemed happy with, whilst others despondent and dejected with the quietness they found, which in fact was a blessing in disguise for James and Laura, as they reached out into empty spaces and open doors.
They now having a simple pride to be part of a modern and respectable town. The foundations came from the bombed out rubble left over from the destruction of London; with demolished air-raid shelters used as hard core on the spreading, winding and climbing roads where together they pushed Esther’s pram still talking of their little boy back home in the Shires.
James negotiating these roads to the train station along Peters- Field Avenue and Go Shays Drive to Generals Corner and then onto the main line station at Harold Wood where he commuted, with little fuss, to London and his telephonist job, feeling proud to be a ordinary dad, who worked and cared in a city of bustle and rush.
Meanwhile, Laura pushed their child past safe wide spaces and finding an open metal gate creaking and swinging on metal picket fence she sat on a slatted wooden seat, where she felt the need to pinch herself from the near normal life she now had.
Rooks wheeled round noisily above, painting the sky black, whilst house sparrows sang in the eaves. Laura then rose proudly again, with her still sleeping infant, and tapped gingerly past muddy playing fields. Close by, boys in red and white rugby shirts leapt as if to touch the sky pirouetting then tumbling and slithering into a heap, whilst Laura unseeing but ever knowing, continued slightly breathless her walk up the hill.
Into the shoe shop to buy laces for James shoes, grocery shop for baby milk, players cigarettes, stamps for more letters to send back home. Above these shops were maisonettes where other families got on with their lives. At the bus stop she heard a woman complaining.
“It costs ten pence to go to Romford and back.”
“Yes,” replied her companion.
“I am so lonely here, and I must have fun whilst I am young. I want to be part of life again. I would far rather live in a flat in London than a house in Harold Hill. If I have my way it will be a case of here today and gone tomorrow !” Laura just thought, and wondered, as she walked on past them and stopped to cross opposite a Roman Catholic Church, where a toddler in a white dress and matching ankle socks, scampered towards a tree. Laura heard a deep voice that resonated and called out stop and then wait!
The wheels of that pram spun many more times after this, and the babies that sheltered beneath its hood increased to two, and finally three. Esther learnt to keep close by to the same pram and was never allowed to run free. She loved to find solitary places and to find herself completely alone at the bottom of their little garden. Sometimes though, she would watch her father digging into the solid ground, as he forever whistled and sang; one day burying her doll into the mud with his potato seeds! Once, he had said to her how he could do with a bigger garden, and she replying…….
“Why not just move our fence, daddy, just a little bit?”
She would wait her turn each winter to sit on a sledge as it cruised and slithered on ice. Or sit clinging in summertime onto a go-cart her father had helped her brothers to construct. The wheels would spin out of control, and they tumble in the safety of the nearby park, laughing with their mongrel dog Rex running beside them, barking . Hot with excitement, they would lay there beside the banks of the trees. Housetops in the distance, telegraph poles, lamp posts and washing that blew on the lines in the warm breeze.
In a moment, and a sleight of the clock hand, Esther was at three seeing, yet of course not understanding, the Queen’s Coronation and why all the balloons, jelly and sandwiches down at the little metal hut community centre with her skipping outside. Jumping up and down in the gravel and getting stones in her shoes.
It was Laura who had taken Esther by the hand and introduced her to Miss Adams her Primary School teacher, who helped her to read, in those early years. Slowly Esther came to realize her parents were a little different and for that she was simply proud. She couldn’t understand, till many years later, why her mum always had tears in her eyes when she was guided to one of the tubular seats in the large school hall by her teacher, or why she always cried when Esther and her classmates sang at Christmas time. In the years that followed there were many more trips to feed the ducks at Gidea Park, as well as long glorious days at South End, where their tiny toes dipped in soft, warm sand and innocent squeals of delight rented high in the warm air. Eating torn tomato sandwiches ‘eye-ball sandwiches’ as their daddy called them, with the juices rolling unseen down their clothes, and into the sand. Ice pops. Wind in their hair on the roundabout going so fast that their fish and chips, just eaten out of newspaper on the promenade, splashed in their stomachs with candy-floss and toffee apples and fizzy drinks. Their happiness then set and sealed to go on forever it seemed. Later there would be donkey rides on the sands, no matter how bad the weather with their mum and dad standing shivering and saying, “No, you can't have another go,” or, “no you can't go into the sea...it's not safe!” Of course, they were unable to understand why they couldn’t. Then they would often be bumped and shaken in the small train on the narrow gauge railway on the pier with them hardly containing their happiness. Squeals of delight with tiny fingers glued with the remnants of earlier toffee apples and sugary candy floss sticking to their woolly jumpers. Always they all had sixpence pocket-money to spend, their father saying then, “Once it is gone it is gone.” Money spent at the sea-side would mean none to go on toys at Peter’s Field, only toy shop skipping there in the summer in plastic jelly shoes which were all the rage. It seemed to them, that material things didn't matter for wasn't their love in abundance? Although the realization their parents were somehow different only became apparent when friends asked why their mum and dad reached out when they walked, or why did they use a white stick and how did they read to them with funny looking books with bumps on the pages?
They were puzzled by the tiny bell in all their rubber balls, which jangled as they rolled or threw them. They all played snap together as a family, with Braille markings for their parents. At night time brailed stories followed with little Esther piping up, “Oh read some more mummy. I'm not asleep yet!”
“You are a scamp, Esther. How much more must I read? You were nearly asleep there!”
Esther just giggled, and then pulled down her night-dress tighter over her thin legs and stuffed her pillow below her elbows, and waited patiently as her mummy sat down on the floor again beside her single bed with her checked skirt swirling out around her. Then her hands fleeting again across the brown thick paper as she read and felt the raised dots that, of course, Esther did not understand then. She was in fact as mesmerized with the speed as with the story about The Famous Five or What Katie did! There was the fun of Esther's parents spelling out words like birthday, holiday or Easter egg. The latter not working, as Esther and Mark had discovered the hidden Easter eggs on the top of the wardrobe and almost had the wardrobe topple on them as their eggs tumbled…. then they ate them at the end of February instead. But their nana in Coventry did not know this! There were shriveled skins of birthday balloons on the floor near to the piano that Laura played …. as the three of them pulled back cushions or lifted the corner of the new sitting room carpet to find hidden treasures their happy mum had previously secreted around the house.
Laura would stop playing the piano, whilst they searched for the hidden sweets whilst their mummy laughed, and daddy too. Accidents happened though!
Then there came the day that their daddy found Mark laying floppy and still on the sofa…