Memories are made of this

An excursion
With a final shout “Goodbye!” to her home-help, followed by “I’ve left six ounces of best ham on the bottom shelf of the larder next to the butter dish!” to Joe, Laura withdrew her moccasin foot from the bottom stair and reached into the small hallway for her winter coat.
“I don’t know exactly what time we will be home. The train from London to Wellingborough is hourly, so it will probably be quite late, but will you be alright?”
No answer.
Esther and her brothers, and their mother’s sight, hadn’t grasped the fundamentals of the underground system or the circle line and so there was no way of knowing what time of the night they would be returning home.
They later ran in and out of the bus shelter opposite the butcher’s and off-license which, during the war, used to be a munitions factory. Leather-laced shoes and grey rumpled socks and short trousers, pockets bulging with marbles, running across broken glass from the bus shelter, kicking a beer can that spun out from the shelter beneath the manicured hedge of a manicured home.
Whilst they ran and laughed and forgot for a while about Joe, Laura chatted with Diane, who lived on the A6 and was there with her basket with a handle waiting to go the Saturday market on the bus. Esther shook her head.
“No, we have never been to Sunday school, have we, Mum?” Laura didn’t answer. Diane then looked down at Esther’s brothers still kicking the can across the pavements, muttering,
“Pavements were much tidier years ago”.
Then Esther’s eyes rolled as she overheard Diane say,
“Oh how we all loved the old prize band that played in the evenings and what a wonderful conductor Mr Remington was!” She continued as they patiently waited for the bus they just saw going in the opposite direction (they would have to wait for its return in another twenty minutes or so).
“We didn’t have a lot then but, as kids, we always did as we were told by our parents and that included going to Sunday school”. What was she hinting? Wondered Laura, as she and her children eventually boarded the bus.

Perhaps, with the aid of miracles, they managed to find their way to the reading competition for the blind in Westminster in London and sat with their mum for most of that Saturday morning, impatiently waiting for her opportunity to read to the chosen adjudicators a passage from a selected Braille story. How delighted they were for her to be short-listed to read in the magnificent church rooms in the afternoon. Transfixed and pained, but proud, they watched as a guide led her onto the wide stage where she was carefully placed at a small desk where a microphone and Braille book lay waiting, open at the chosen passage. Confidently and fluently she began after a slight hesitation. Excitedly they shot from their seats on hearing, later, she had won first prize in her section and it was a cash prize, so money for her pocket instead of Joe’s – at least that is what they hoped as she was carefully guided away and down the stairs to rejoin them in the vast hall.It was blissfully quiet as Laura’s key turned in her front door, as Joe was still down at the club and so they were able to go normally with quieter minds to their beds. Esther to her copy of Bunty (her brothers favouring the Dandy and the Beezer), carrying a cup of cocoa and then hearing hurl the marbles they had carried that day into a tin and them saying how silly all girls were and never in a month of Sundays would they ever think of having girlfriends, not ever!
Then there was an unprepared flurry and the switching off of lights as they heard Joe’s key turn in the front door and then an almighty bang and slam of the door as they heard him going into the front room, where their mum was listening to the radio, which she quickly turned off.
“If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking on either you or your kids. What right have you got to expect any more than you have?”
She always remained quiet and dignified, with never a swear word on her lips, but that didn’t appease his vile and angry words and their deficiencies underlined. They had eyes whilst he did not. They had youth whilst he, just then, with nightmares of things going wrong and how cruel people had been to him in his childhood. They were not his children, so easier to hate and resent being there in his sordid inebriated house. He was a member of nothing and few friends to call on, only the Roman Catholic lay-preacher to forgive his sins and cruelty, week-on-week, year-in, year-out. The quiet magnitude of their lives, slipping one second into the other, and looking at each other and wondering about how things might have been if…and so they lived in that squalid tempest of sickening brews, spirits and fag ends, waiting for their days to end. He was, for the most part, utterly and thoroughly foul, although he did help Esther to understand fractions and undid and redid her knitting when once she went wrong and refused, otherwise, to go to school, to the teacher with bitter words and demands!