Memories are made of this

In a Coventry Living room
Her life had seen two world wars and the austerity of those times. Most didn’t think too much about what the neighbor’s had for most had little. Most feared a visit from the national Assistance Man. Eve had learnt how to make do in her scullery with fudge bread made with mashed potato, sour milk added to cooked dishes instead of cheese, and grated vegetables to scones and cakes.
Her singer treadle sewing machine was one way of managing; making coats out of blankets or unpicking outgrown boys’ jumpers in order to make scarves and gloves. Lace unpicked from pillowcases to trim her two daughter’s summer dresses. No matter how hard she tried……her tears dripped onto James old school photo……. Then the memories were there once more. A sad half smile crept across her face. She didn’t seem to notice how long she had been sitting there with the photo of their now only son in her hand. So many thoughts crowded her mind. Reflecting upon all the traumas that the Nesbitt family had somehow managed to emerge from. Where had all those years gone she wondered, as she sat there stroking absent-mindedly her best rose entwined teacup with tea-leaves that she refused always to have read by her kind neighbor, wanting to offer her comfort when life had seemed so hard. Of course there had not been one member of their family who hadn’t worried about James future. Opportunities for any blind person were scarce. Disability was a swear word! It seemed an interlude, rather than a decade of memories, that flooded like pictures on a cinema screen one clip after the other flowing back and back until…..
“Wasn’t it bad enough for an adult to be robbed of their eyes but this was her child and him not eleven until weeks after bonfire night?” Her husband’s voice echoed through the years and the pain.
“I’ve cried as you have sweet-heart, but we have to find another way of being strong!” In that moment, when life seemed so bleak, she wondered where her love for the man who she had adored since child-hood friends at the tenements in Sunderland, had gone. Sweet memories of school summer holidays. Tender times, such as picnics on Tunstall Hill, and so their magic had span briefly until war had shattered dreams of so many into the heavy cruel skies. She had no idea just how many Christmas cards and birthday cards bulged in chaotic boxes in their attic since then. Leaping to catch a cramp in her calf, her mind carried back and she thought of her man, and the lifetime of love they had shared. Yet in that moment and that distant time she couldn't stop the storms nor quench her fears.
” You must keep your high and mighty bible preaching for your pulpit, but I want to hear none of it just now!”
There’s had been a loving home with her man a miner until injury down the mines had forced him off the pit and them with no wages for a year. The threads of their family held together by her increasing her hours as a master baker, and out of their home early morning, returning late evening, always with stories dramatic to tell in the fading firelight when their world had once sparkled so well.
Still somehow she managed to put nourishing food on the scrubbed kitchen table of their sparsely furnished black-out curtained home. There were small things though, that made her home different from the rest in the now derelict row, like lavender talcum powder in the bathroom alongside James aftershave, later his glass eye, and with pungent carbolic soap and paraffin oil in her scullery close to her fine array of inherited cooking and beating utensils, stored in a blue and yellow fading crackled glazed vase on her bleached clean draining board, where James always left his crusts, and his sisters their school socks to be bleached.
Since there was no specialist state day school for blind and partially sighted children in their area, they put every spare penny into a kitty stored on the narrow scullery window sill. Such prudent measures allowed for their bright and beloved young son to learn touch typing, and also Braille, which was so essential for his future, his parents already alert with regard to his fading sight.
Every Wednesday tea-time, having left a stew simmering in a pot, James and his mother took two bus rides to a tutor in Durham.
“I so hate going to that silly man. His breath smells of baccy, rapping me all the while on my knuckles when I go and hit the wrong key on his stuffy old type-writer. Always droning on about stuff after the war being a complete waste of time and how does he know? Anyway, typing is sissy and it's for girls. There must be something I can do on the docks!”
James grandfather had worked on the boats, but then didn’t most of the folks round there, including his fully sighted school friends?
Eve didn't know how she might respond to her son. How could he ever be expected to appreciate the awful fact that by the age of twenty, his other eye would then be diseased, which was the stark warning given to her by the doctor at Sunderland infirmary. That, of course, at the time she had felt unable to share with her young son. She wondered how he might cope with such a crushing prognosis.
How she wanted the light and brightness to continue forever for their beloved son, and for the shades and darkness only a nightmare instead of a cruel fact. In reality, she knew the only response was to face the facts as they really were in front of them, and recreate their dreams in a place where James would, she hoped, be able to manage better. It was partly for this reason that the Nesbitt family moved to Coventry, where there might be more chances for young James to lead a happy and near normal life. Perhaps his sister’s would do better too, and her man would find peace as well.
So the family with mixed emotions, forced to leave their old world and friends behind, moving to Coventry on a Sunday morning in May after saying goodbye to so much. Their furniture of various decades stashed high in a borrowed van and into a two up and two down after the van parked on a low kerb in a little terrace house at Ely Green just outside of the city centre. James had a bed-settee downstairs, which was just as well with the twisty, winding steep stairs, but still he teased his two younger sisters in their darkest hours by haunting them with ghostly voices he had heard from Tommy Handle’s wireless show his mum and dad always listened to whilst busying themselves around the house and keeping his younger sisters apart as they all tried to settle.
The years, meanwhile, proved the doctor’s words to his mother at Sunderland Infirmary were true, when his other eye deteriorated and they were forced to take him to hospital and he awake then to a continual darkness, and his engaged girlfriend at that time saying that sorry, she couldn't cope, and how he deserved so much better than she could give a blind man.
“Anyway, I am going to train as a nurse in Leicester and I think it will be all for the best!”

“Not only have I lost my bloody sight but also my girlfriend, and not to mention my job. Just on the muck heap round here with folk feeling sorry for me. Well, I won't have that!”
The Nesbitt family was one with a solid work ethic, as most people round about them in the narrow tight and crowded streets were.
After leaving school, James, despite his failing sight and before this enormous tragedy took hold, had managed to hold down work as a Rope Runner on the small gauge single track railways where trains carried defused bombs to be safely dumped after the war.
“I'm going to go to London and my mind is made up and none of you will stop me!”
So it transpired that each evening, once everyone in the house had fallen asleep, he crept out into a different and more frightening darkness and tapped his way carefully around the streets of Coventry. Gradually James expanded his journey as his bravery and knowledge of the surrounding streets, pathways, alleys and gaps in the streets enlarged. If his injuries vouched for that, it didn't matter!
He joked he was made of rubber, and he bounced, not seeing the tears in his mother’s eyes as she placed his ceramic water bottle to the middle of his iron-framed spring-sprung soft-to-sink-into mattress, where so many tears had been stoically shed by him through countless nights and days too.

Eve meanwhile, knew her husband was right, that she must let James go and find his way in his own time, and that he was no longer a child that either of them could tuck away, but a man over six foot tall with size 11 shoes and a liking for player’s cigarettes. Now that man had in a short space of time started to battle back from the loss of his sight and was ready to fight, no matter how high the waves of doubters swept over him.
Eve was up and dressed as usual by six. She had just completed the outside toilet, having scrubbed the red kitchen tiles and wooden draining board, and was deep in thought.
Bang…
"Oh my god, son I am so sorry, and how stupid of me. I should have thought to move that bucket before now. Here let me help you!”
"It's alright, ma. Please don't fuss."
His loving mother rushed towards him.
“But you’re bleeding, just look at you and your trousers. Let me at least go and fetch you a clean pair!”
He walked away from her and her old photos knowing it would take more than a clean pair of trousers to fix his sadness and loneliness. Also realizing then was the time to go, but it would have to be without goodbyes.
Surely they would eventually understand? This he desperately hoped, as he carried his brown, battered suitcase out of their front door. So it was that James entered his new set of challenges. Always holding onto an unwavering desire and dream that would carry him forward into a life where he would fight for his place in the world, and love as others loved.
He felt he had found that person in Laura. He believed that she could be his soul mate at last. So he left, sadly, his two younger sisters Joan and Liz at their new three bed roomed house in Coventry with barely little time to adjust after the loss of his sight, with a new chapter to write for all of his tomorrows.