Memories

I want to write amusing things. Daft things. Heartwarming things; but at this stage of my story I can't. There was nothing remotely funny about the man who controlled us. Maybe it may not have been so piercingly painful if we hadn't first known about love; delivered by our dad in a rhapsody of tumbling days and years; when we all knew just where we were in life.

We didn't live with a concertina of doors smashing against walls, or anything that got in the way, as plaster fell like flaky snowdrops in our decaying home.

Entering the cold living room with bed-warm feet on on morning cold lino floor I would feel nothing but relief if he wasn't there; dead to the world with drink that must have turned off his soul.

I wonder now. He must have been pure upon delivery into the world. Maybe, I muse now, he lost the sparkle, the love and the care when he was sent to boarding school in infancy. Sighted peers sharing ordinary days of teeters and tumbles and squables with people they loved and who loved them whilst he awoke to boarding school echo's and soap in his throat; so he said to us when his mind wasn't scrambled and love taken away.

Jack De Manio, I think that was his name, was playing on the wirless.You, mum, in the kitchen; your small oasis of sink, cooker, blue brick painted walls and shelves that ran so high round your station that you had to climb on a chair to reach your saucepans.

You would make us lumpy bumpy porridge that tended to match your lumpy stews; this didn't matter as we knew that everything you did was made with love. You whistled and sang as the radio called life played on all around you.

On the hearth in the living room, where none of us could really live as the pint mugs flew and angry muddled words imbued themselves in our souls forever, lay the discarded bottles of watney and and whisky; paid for by dole money.
Funny really how the state paid for your alcholism as it still does now for those crazed on any type of addiction. I work in the benefit sysem and have questioned why this should still be but no-one comes up with any answers that makes sense to me.

Your braille books no longer dance with half pint glasses or fag ends spill from your ash-tray of life; discarded and diseased with your spittle but I still ask why!