Memories are made of this

A new beginning
Nine months later, Arthur drove early in the morning with one arm hanging out of his treasured Cortina window. He waved with relief to Mick their milkman, returning with a lighter electric milk float with bottles ready for re-washing, and the dairy depot in sight. Ahead of him, on Loco Hill, was a tramp pushing his life in a muddy old trolley, soaked to the skin as he battled the strong winds.
Moments later Arthur strode down the alley that separated Laura’s house from that of her young neighbours, who had recently knocked the last piece of wood into a child’s playhouse at the bottom of their garden.
He rapped the door and then walked over to where Laura was sitting at the kitchen table, teacup close to her lips as he spoke the words,
“Hello Nan!”
She switched off ‘Desert Island Discs’ (playing quietly in the background), her face no longer flat and sad, somewhat animated and alive as she leaped from her chair, dropping her cup. It took her only a few seconds to realize what he was saying. Dregs of tea from the up-ended cup dripped onto the worn corded carpet, she stretched to hug the excited figure who leaned down to take her in his arms. Is everything fine? Is it a girl, did you say? What does the baby weigh, and how long was the labour? Did she need stitches? What time was she born?”
Laura couldn’t stop talking and he noticed tears in her eyes as she thought of new life.
Sitting round the table, drinking cheap wine from rinsed-out chipped cups, Laura said-
“When I had Esther, you know, I had to stay in for over a fortnight in order to learn how to care for her all over again, as when I had Michael…” She stopped talking. Arthur didn’t say, but Esther had already told him how her mum and dad had fought to keep their first child and how they had never forgotten and always battled to have him home with them and that it wasn’t really ever their fault that it failed to happen.

So they all tried to live in the moment. The past and present seeming to converge as their small family grew.
Arthur didn't protested when money was set aside to buy furniture and carpets for her mum. Esther felt bewitched as she watched her lovely mum delighting and yes escaping to into the world of her grand-daughter, making up stories as she went. Esther always had faith in her mum, wanting her to be part of Esther's new world and free from pressures at home.

They would walk down Station Road, passing the cemetery, then the mill, before going onto the stables where together they would mull about the world as it was then. Esther wasn't quite so puzzled why her mum had married Joe or why she didn't leave him, yet, in those days, where would she have gone? So it was that life continued with her always doing her best to please him, whilst he did his best to spread fear and doubt.
Laura would speak about the future and her dreams and what she would do when she was free at last. It was always assumed that, as he was sixteen years older, he would go first and that, in a way, is what they had all hung onto. Joe, meanwhile, had started to show some kindness to Catherine giving her a small amount of pocket money and singing her nursery rhymes. A very different man from the one Esther had known from her own childhood; always something of a puzzle as well as an obvious relief.
Esther and Arthur’s own little family provided her with the opportunity to be immersed in another quieter world. No recriminations, challenges or demands, just the chance to be. It would be they who would worry whether their babies should lay on their side or their backs, or worry if they were too hot, as the child-rearing cycles moved on and health visitors there to support them all. The most difficult times were dealing with asthma and the most frightening after James was rushed into hospital with pneumonia and Esther had slept by his bed, frightened to keep her eyes closed for more than minutes at a time until his breathing eased.

Fun times followed through the passing years with Catherine down at Banks Park. Later still, in the sandpit at Wicksteeds, with bucket in hands, and then rides on the train that ran round the park and close to the main road. Trips to Skegness and rides on the donkey on golden sands with the sea miles away from them, it seemed then.
At home there would be numbers and colours, as well as the Humpty Dumpty Club and playschool, where Catherine would scream until her mum was out of sight, and then happily ride the wooden bike, at least that was what a volunteer nursery worker had said to Esther when she returned to collect her little daughter at lunchtime from the Town Hall playgroup.
Then, as her shadow grew, she'd rush,spindly legs,flowing dark trestles of curls, and visit her Nana. Her face alight as she slipped into her grand-daughters world of fun, mess and cracked sticky egg shells and Catherine helped with exuberance unmeasured in her little kitchen. Her silly scatty nanny laughing as her Hoover twin-tub rattled and banged so loud it could be heard in the street. Joe remained in the front room with his afternoon radio play still on, just switching it louder as his hearing and patience increasingly failed.

“It has been so many years since I have seen you so happy, Mum!”
They had just walked out of Mona’s cake shop with a white paper bag of butterfly cakes and marzipan slices that were bound to be eaten before they reached Finedon cricket ground, only half a mile away.
“Yes,” Laura replied, taking Esther’s arm as together they pushed the chair, “it’s grand being free and out with you, walking in the sunshine like this, but I know I will pay for it when I get back to Joe though, I have left him his tea in the larder and sliced it just as he likes. I hope your dad can see how happy you are, and know that our fight way back then was not in vain, when we all lost him as we did!”
Together they strolled past Finedon old cemetery opposite St Mary’s Church, where not long since Esther had married Arthur, and where in a few weeks’ time they would be returning for the christening of their third child, Caroline.
They walked up the lane and past Finedon Hall, where years before the Free French had marched. Perhaps they might even be following DE Gazelle's footsteps and he too might have seen the canopy of fields, of russet and gold and green. Might he too have seen the windmill, or heard the Ise Valley stream trickling by? Nasal had long since rested his weary bones and the sewerage farm was now a farmer’s field. Esther leaned into the push-chair and wiped the decadent evidence of cream away.
Her Christmases with her own little family always special, despite the doubts and pain that clung like tarmac on a white wool carpet, however hard she tried to scrub the stain or whatever professional help she sought. Always there existed the need to love and be loved and to find an identity that seemed forever just out of reach. To a degree, her family gave her something to share, although in her simple pain, didn’t realize that at the time. Nappies that grew on the line, Napisan in buckets that Arthur sluiced SMA milk as well as ‘Rainbow’, ‘Playschool’ or ‘Peter with his Magic Torch’ on the television. Constantly searching for lost mittens and shoes and wondering what to put into their packed-lunch boxes or, more importantly, what to leave out. When to talk about the birds and the bees, or why Santa never came down the chimney, or why theirs was the brightest old car in the street. Why their Daddy, who loved them, wouldn’t go anywhere on Bank Holiday – because he hated queuing. Instead they walked down to the mill and ate early morning picnic breakfasts with friends, whilst the Ise River bubbled under the stone bridge over yesterday’s rubble, tin cans, supermarket trolleys and carrier bags, wondering how they got there with the shops several miles away in the next town. Then, having eaten and played, they returned up Harrowden Road, and then Station Road with its gable cottage, windmill and sweeping, gated, private lane.
Years before, carriages, well groomed horses, maids (with small bags containing precious family bibles), and the village doctor, called for tea and sat on manicured lawns where well turned-out, tutored children (who would inherit it all) might play. Looking as lovely then in their springtime, with trees magically bidding new life, as the undertaker visited elsewhere and the grounds-man worked hard in their prized cricket ground where, then as now, the tap of willow on ball that spun into the dense undergrowth of yesterdays.
St Mary’s parish church bells whispered then in the wind, yesterday’s people lay still in the oldest cemetery nearby with headstones barely decipherable, weeds spreading and choking the shattered ghost town and spent dreams of those who, not so long since, had walked and laughed and loved in the town of Finedon.

Elvis
Heading off to Crewe where Arthur’s brother worked, with pushchair and enough clothes for a week all packed into every available space in their blue Anglia. Esther noticed tears in Arthur’s eyes. His beloved idol, Elvis, had been found dead; the radio had just said.
Then, with life’s pages turning in quick succession, there was the Queen’s silver jubilee and bunting in 1977, as well as jelly and sandwiches at the water tower, street parties and firework displays with dots and dashes and fizzes that filled the sky. Sparklers in little gloved fingers and bright muddy faces aglow with wonderment.
Later, trips to school, where parents slipped into invisible social strata; and went, or didn’t go, to Tupperware parties or book parties, beetle drives, quizzes or parent–teacher’s evenings, or bingo. Put on, or decided not to put on, their best clothes to see their child’s class teacher and wondered whether they were talking about the same child who, they were told, was the perfect pupil and had not been the slightest trouble at all. The same child that, only the day before, had tried to strangle his young sister on the stairs with a kettle flex.