Memories are made of these

Why?
Her grandfather rarely visited his daughter and when he did it wasn’t, sadly, to see how he might help by perhaps bringing the shelves a little lower so that his daughter didn’t have to reach on her wobbly kitchen chair; or offer to help unclog the sink or boot their stepfather out. He did ask if they were alright but didn’t, for some reason, know how to kiss or hug any of them – not ever!
Summertime he would hire his expensive combine harvester to nearby farms. Esther would watch sadly from time to time as he poured corn into troughs of the hens that were cruelly stuffed, warm body touching warm body, into wire cages. Not once seeing daylight until, their starry eyes blindly open and their necks wrung, he carried their still-warm bodies across his wide shoulders like a stole, and just like the woman in the film ‘Brief Encounter’ proudly wore hers. Esther felt sick as she stood there amidst their cries echoing in that huge metal shed with a thick carpet of sawdust covering her ankle socks. They, at that time, seeming far more trapped and cruelly treated than she might ever have been.
Earlier that particular morning, she had been with her grandfather to visit his sister who lived in an Alms House in the main street in Mead-hurst, and was told by her grandfather that the strange-looking thing she had carried into her scullery at the back of her cottage was a metal warming pan. This auntie walked with a stoop and carried a crooked stick, and was always advising Esther to count her blessings and to never ask for a piece of well risen, freshly baked sponge, as she noticed Esther’s eyes bulging again.
She remembered, but of course didn’t say, how her Nan said she thought her grandfather’s sister believed the sun shone from his arse! Esther wouldn’t know about that, would she?
“Well I never did!” exclaimed her grandfather, in mock surprise, as he listened to his sister, who was proudly explaining how she had just bartered some of her hens’ eggs down at the local corner store, so could she have some of his eggs for free, did he think?
Later, there on the farm, she saw such eggs, some destined for breakfast tables at the Savoy Hotel or for omelettes at the Cozy Corner Café in the next town. How Esther hated what she saw and wondered then, as she stood there, just why her grandfather didn’t see that too.
One of the labourers who toiled the acres of land they owned was quite a character with a rosy, plump face, a wide moustache (where breakfast still nestled). A kindly man with blue eyes whose collarless shirt shifted up his oily, dark back as he leaned over the sty to check on the latest of piglets, snorting and snuffling blindly at their mother’s milky, damp, sweet nipples resting and drooping there. He would chew tobacco all day and talk of his love for folk music and tripe – which always made her shudder. How could anyone manage to eat such slimy disgusting stuff and feel it slither down their throats like gutted eels? He would talk about how boys in the next town, years since, would make a lantern from a pumpkin with a lighted candle inside at Halloween, and make slits for its eyes, nose and mouth, and say how they blackened their faces and cheeks as they visited door to door.
“Tinker, tailor, ploughboy, only once a year, please give us a ha’penny you good old dear. If you haven’t got a ha’penny a farthing will do and if you haven’t a farthing – then God bless you!”
Esther thought, as she listened, how they would all be laughed out of town if they sang something like that, if they tried to deliver that little ditty now. Beyond the rolling, spreading fields, stood tin sheds housing old threshing tackle as well as a steam plough and cultivators and, close-by, several nanny goats. A saying she often heard then, was how neither wise men nor fools could work without tools!

Meanwhile, all around her, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were belting out through open windows or Dixon of Dock Green with his “Evenin’ all!” as he stood with his pointed helmet outside Dock Green nick. Often, the trapped family failed to see a programme right through, as Joe would constantly turn off the television in an inebriated rage. For a long time nobody dared to challenge him, but Esther was storing that up for later. Really, there was very little point in trying to put many coins in their coin-operated television, as he, in his mindless drunken fury, would order them to switch off the television. Otherwise he would hurl his pint mug through the screen. With countless window panes smashed and, over time, boarded-up, they all knew just how capable he was of carrying out such threats. With several of his mugs flying like flying saucers over the vinyl tablecloth, at least they could see to duck whilst their mum could never do that. Yet, as Esther grew older, she was unable to control her anger, resentment and sheer desperation, as well as revulsion, as Bernadine’s lead smashed through the air almost daily when all she might have done was to move slightly in the corner where he kept her pinned-in close to his brown brogue polished shoes, his beer bottles and pint glass as well as his Braille Radio Times. She didn’t know how she was to do it, but one day she would question this brutality and ask those that funded the guide dogs why more hadn’t been done to protect them. It was surely true what was said, that bad things happened if good people did nothing to stop them. She would never turn her back and do nothing at all, but she needed to grow up before she could do anything like that.
All of these things compounded daily as she heard her stepfather’s footsteps as he walked over the cinder path, facing onto their narrow back garden, dragging his constantly faithful guide dog with him like a beaten toy with no feelings at all. Not once did she show her teeth as he beat her on their cinder path. How Esther wanted him dead – that was not a good thing for a child to feel – as the thunder and lightning came and sheets of rain hit her window pane. After quickly pulling her shoes on, feet on cold floor, she opened the red back door and Bernadine frolicked free out in the snow drifts. A few moments later, she returned the tortured dog to the living room. Joe was still dead to the world. She quietly slipped her back into the corner again. He still didn’t rise from his stupor, as she clumsily and fearfully knocked his empty whiskey bottle, which she had already diluted, over the others stacked close to the hearth and his rolled-up Braille Radio Times and stacked-up cigarette ends in his tin ashtray, wonky and bent. Some dandelions stood in a milk bottle in the centre of their table, trying to make their own world normal.