Memories are made of this

Although our true story is set in the past there is still a future to live.
The past saw two blind people battling a system in their 1940's world which believed disability meant the need to be protected rather than being allowed to live. Our parents however wanted a better life and to live their dream of a normal life so they had no choice but to elope and marry alone without family present.
Sadly their love story fell apart when this young blind man, who I am immensely proud to say was my dad, died suddenly at the age of 37 leaving his wife (Laura in this story) to battle on.

Now we have a brighter story to tell, because of them and their bravery but first I am sorry to say there is this last sadness to share.

Seven years later
It must have been around 8 a.m. that Esther, with her rough scratchy pajamas rubbing against her stale skin, ran breathless, muttering
“He’s gone and done it again. Why can’t he leave the drink alone?”
She knew more about his addiction, rather than the spirit that inhabited his body. It would have been easy to make presumptions why he had called. With his slurred telephone voice reverberating in her ears she dashed, resentful, wondering what might be wrong now. She hoped he hadn’t set fire to his kitchen again. A night-shift Weetabix worker called from across the street,
“Morning Esther, you’re on the move early, is everything okay?”
What was she to say, and where should she begin? So she simply replied,
“Everything’s fine, thank you!”
With the neighbour she had known from childhood disappearing out of her view behind her stepfather’s tall, overgrown privet hedge, she knocked firmly on Joe’s front door.
No answer. She knocked a little louder. No reply or response, so she headed for his back door and fortunately discovered it unlocked, which was either an oversight on his part or, more likely, as a result of the beer that clung to the kitchen as well as his sitting room and the stairs she defiantly climbed. Where had her compassion gone? She pushed his bedroom door open for the millionth time. There seemed no connection between him and her as she stood there looking across and down at him in the single bed where, only years since, her mum’s frail sad body had lain and all but disintegrated, before being lovingly cared for at their local hospice. She walked across the fraying mat and spent cigarettes and Swan matches and looked down at this thin, frail and pinched man’s face and scrunched grey hair.
Kneeling, closer now, to make sense of the disjointed words, she heard him mutter her own telephone number and name and then the familiar smell of drink, so stale and sickly sweet on his breath. He was drunk yet again, so she furiously turned and left him lying there, but beneath that anger lay something she could never understand. It wasn’t and couldn’t ever be love, but as she closed the door out into the street there was something that didn’t feel right this time.
Down the narrow street, now slowly coming to life, were infants in their red and white striped Maclaren buggies being hurriedly pushed to the nearby town nursery, and their bigger sisters and brothers to infant’s school. She should be doing all that but,
“I hate him, I hate him!” were the words that relentlessly rang in her mind as she smiled and spoke to those she passed as she walked around the familiar block. Beneath these words lay another layer of more compassionate thoughts, what if he was ill, it seemed like a stroke, how he lay there, how his head flopped, something just wasn’t right.
So, about an hour later, his doctor, who she summoned, walked through the bedroom door. He was young, kind and puzzled
“You know he has had a stroke?”
She didn’t reply.
“I will call an ambulance right away. Can you wait here for that, Esther?”
She wanted to run but instead she just answered,
“Yes, of course, Dr James”.
The ambulance duly summoned, he was out of the door. Then another struggle began in her head. This was as far as she could go. It wasn’t that she didn’t try to sit beside his bed; it was that she couldn’t fish down to find any humanity or love there within her own soul. Nor could she go on pretending and sitting beside his bed to check on his breath, so instead she left him lying there alone in his bed.
She sat for an eternity, then, in his living room, now without the ticking Braille clock and the dog harness and lead, long-since used for anything, lying on the back of the shelf. At times, guilt forced her half-way up the stairs to listen. On hearing nothing, she returned to the loneliness of the front room. It was the hammering of the ambulance man on the red front door and the blue flashing light that flickered through the nets and the long thin sitting-room curtains that drew her back away from the then to the now.
The ambulance crews weren’t there with him in that room at the back of the house many minutes before she heard their heavy feet running down the stairs.
“He’s been gone a while now. How long has he been dead?”
She was numb, so unable to answer or say to them just why she hadn’t been able to sit by his bed. If anybody expected to see tears, then they couldn’t ever be seen, no-one would ever know how difficult taking care of him had been when she would have sooner had turned her back and left him there for good once her mum had died. After all, he did have a son in the north of England, didn’t he?
“I’m not going back”, she murmured, as she went, shaking, through the back door to where his body now lay. He was nothing to do with her, yet he was alone and vulnerable, and that was why she had remained all those years and it had nothing to do with love, but perhaps pity with a touch of puzzlement.
She did feel stunned, though. How could he go so quietly, and with such little fuss, in like a lion, and out like a lamb, and her unable or unwilling to shed one tear as she stood in his yesterday’s ashes and looked across at the rose bush they had planted for their mum so many seasons before, there, in that back garden, where she had sat quietly whenever she could. Then she thought,

No longer would he sit for moment of an evening in her mum’s old rocking chair in the front room with his ashtray overflowing as he continued to drink his life away, for now it was only a shell.

Her sad duty done
Their house might as well have been inhabited with little green men and a spaceship moored up near Arthur’s current hobby, a Triumph motor bike he was slowly rebuilding in his shed at the bottom of their garden. Esther had realized, years since, that there was little point in losing patience with him any more than there was point in pleading that he bought himself a suit in over twenty years. He wasn’t likely to buy one for Joe, was he?
“I don’t suppose you’ve found the right time to tell the kids about their granddad being dead yet?” he said, as he tucked into another piece of shop-bought fruit cake.
No more need for Arthur to have to carry Joe’s Sunday lunch up a ladder propped against the bedroom window when he refused to let her in. Just as there was no more use for his wheelchair as she pushed him hard up Rose Hill and past the Co-op where her mum had drawn her divvy on the steps, and she had played with her hula-hoop, or her brothers with their marbles, down on the sloping ground. It was strange how suddenly all those things had gone, just as the boot and shoe industry had gone, as well as most of the corner shops and fish shops and pubs, being left with antique shops that seemed to be everywhere then. Esther couldn’t ever sob for his passing, but still tried so hard to remember, to find goodness there for after all, no-one could be all bad, could they? It was at that point she remembered how, in those last sad weeks of her mum’s own life, he had seemed to soften, and carried his beaten and cow-towed wife throughout their house; first lifting her from her single bed with its thin worn mattress to the bathroom close-by when she was unable to stand. Then how she would share with him the Macmillan nurses, who sat overnight with her when she seemed most scared, and they talked together about a miracle and Esther had tears in her eyes as she bathed her mum’s skeletal body, as she lay there on that second-hand, or was it a third-hand, bed? Knowing that another of her dreams would remain just that she bent down and kissed her and told her how she loved her, just in case she wasn’t there to tell her that the next day. So their life and her life continued and Social Services provided his home-help, visiting him daily and carrying his food and his beer in her mum’s tartan trolley.
Then moments later, she returned from their open-plan kitchen where it had always been so much easier to keep an eye on their kids and where, in the corner seat, her mum’s shadow still rested.
“Is this stew okay for you? I hope that the dumplings are okay and not too hard for you. You know that cooking is not my forte, don’t you?”
As he tucked in, she spoke,
“I have had a word with Ted and Margaret and they say they are fine to have the kids for the funeral on Wednesday”.
“Of course they will,” he spluttered as gravy dripped back onto his deep plate, and he licked the thick gravy from around his lips, “we are so lucky to have Ted and Margaret for our neighbours, and they do more than some grandparents, don’t you think?”
Esther smiled as she watched Ted in the distance, then busy at the bottom of their garden reaching over to cut their wide, shared privet hedge with his small shears. It had, in fact, been them she went to see after her mum had died, and they had offered her tea and quietly listened as she spoke of her mum’s almost beautiful death after all the suffering she had been through. It didn’t seem right that she had lost so much.
Arthur followed her back to the kitchen with his empty plate and gently dropped it into the sink.
“I did tell the kids earlier, and they all cried, but then, less than an hour later, they were dangling from Ted’s apple tree and asking for some of Margaret’s Yorkshire pudding, shame you can’t cook like her, though, pet!”
She ignored his jibe, and he drew a deep breath and continued,
“At least now it’s all over, and I would say quite enough done down here. You’re definitely not sorting out his funeral, that’s for his own family in the north to sort out!”
Both Esther and Arthur knew then who they were talking about but neither wished to use his name. How he reminded her of…he almost was…and Esther felt sick to the depths of her stomach. Nothing else could go wrong, could it? The phone in their narrow hall-way rang.
Breathless, she managed to pick up the phone, dropping her bags on the floor. For a moment she was rooted there on the spot, but then she somehow found her voice and her first positive, real protest. No way could she allow him to be buried in the same grave as her mother, no matter what that man without a name had said to the lady at the council offices. It was now, as her mum had been unable to fight or use her bright voice any more, that she might be able to carry that force on. Anger made her knees wobble later as she walked to see her brother nearby, and then there ahead was P.C. Tiller, the village bobby, cycling home at the end of his shift. She wondered if he ever knew, as he stood at the same bar where her stepfather stood and drank through the night. Mrs Smith was there then, standing on her chair and stretching to reach the uppermost casement window of her semi-detached house, two doors away from where her stepfather had lived and died. Going through the motions bright and early the next morning, she had called at the florists on Obelisk Road and then ordered, without any fuss or thought, choosing the flowers that might be included in a simple rigid spray. If passers-by had heard of his death, none seemed to mention it but talked of the weather whilst the Avon lady, who lived in their street, spoke about how beautiful her girls were now. It would take her more than a day to realize the consequences of his death or of his inheritance he had left behind.
On the morning of the funeral there seemed to be little change in the weather as the heavy snow continued to fall in a sharp cold continuous sheet that obliterated the land of their little town. Most folk in their street hadn’t drawn their curtains back as the gravediggers began their miserable task of hacking back the frozen ground, with them taking most of the morning; at least though, it was now on the opposite side of the cemetery from where her mum had lain those last nine years. No more did they have to pretend as folk moved on with their lives, and some also wondering why a husband and wife should be buried in separate graves.

A jug fills slowly drop by drop. How true, thought Esther, as her stepfather’s small coffin was carried into the same Roman Catholic Church where he had married their mum half a lifetime ago. There were no feelings either, as they carried him out under the clear blue sky through the door that she, as a child, had pushed hard against. She had begun to realize that no-one could make her feel inferior any longer as long as she didn’t give them permission. It was also certain that only she could control her destiny and that by believing in, and acting on, her own beliefs and values she might move on and leave the pain from the past behind, where it belonged.
As fortune or misfortune had it, their old Ford, driven by Arthur, had spluttered and shuddered to a halt almost a mile away from his last resting place on Wellingborough Road as the hearse moved on without them. The last mission, and painful journey, carried out by someone else. When would she be able to go and stand there beside his covered grave and say her last farewell; perhaps not ever? Now, though, it was time for his atonement. It had little to do with three ‘Hail Mary’s’ upstairs in his bedroom every Sunday morning, as the rest of the family gathered in the living room waiting for the silence to end. Him knowing his sadness and remorse, if it existed at all, would be short-lived once his lips touched the booze and the kindly visitor went home for his roast dinner about an hour later. Only those who had lived their lives with him could know the struggles they faced as they tried to shed the pain he created and not pass it on to their own family.

Their other family, even though no relations at all, lived right next door and it seemed as if they had been there forever, as much a part of Finedon as Finedon a part of them. Ted had to take early retirement from his job in the clicking room of the local shoe factory and never seemed to complain about his health, though, in fact, there was much to complain about.
“It’s lovely to have a young family like yours”. Ted would constantly say. There was so much love in all their hearts for Ted and his lovely wife Margaret. It tended to be Ted who would babysit Caroline and James on cold or wet mornings when Esther took Catherine to nearby infant school. It would be of no surprise returning home half an hour later, to discover their front room had been transformed into an adventure playground, with sofa cushions now upended and James a cowboy, jumping up and down and Caroline in a cardboard box complete with a wooden spoon in her hand and chocolate all over her.Their homes could be accessed via a gap in the hedge, and so a constant flow of visitors crossed the long thin garden and then through the porch, which years before had housed the boiler where such laborious, tedious, but necessary, work must have gone with water and Lux flakes buckets in rows. They would enter the neatly stocked kitchen where forever the kettle boiled and cups with matching saucers and novelty teaspoons from the various bed and breakfast seaside establishments they stayed in each year. Margaret made the most wonderful pastries and goodies each Christmas, and this despite her flitting back and forth to her elderly mum who took up residence in their best room at the front of the house, and talked about her time on the buses as a conductress, and how beautiful their children were, and didn’t take after Esther at all on that score!
Ted would push James for miles in his buggy around their surrounding picturesque towns, returning later, like a child who had found his rainbow or pot of gold, with windswept grey hair and a bit more colour in his face.
James, some months later, sat in the wheelbarrow at the bottom of their garden crying when he heard of Ted’s early death, although they would never see him again he left such wonderful and happy memories behind and who could ask for more than that?

Margaret was, of course, very sad following the death of the man who had shared decades of her life; including the loss of an infant they had treasured so. She wore little make-up apart from a quick slick of red lipstick, reapplying it in shop windows or department store mirrors as Esther’s wayward kids ran through the dresses and blouses that dangled from plastic hangers, or set in motion all the toys they could reach on the shelves, pleading for those that made the most noise. They would later sit on the embankment at Bedford and feed the birds crusts left from the sandwiches they had purchased in the market, and Esther would declare her wish for one of the narrow boats silently moving by. Later they would return home on the United Counties bus, happy for the time that they had and knowing that nothing ever stayed the same forever.