Lives less Ordinary

So I slipped and slithered across the lineolium floor where parcels,boxes and a heap of braille books askew on their bedroom floor. I looked out of their window and across to the copse where so much rough and tumble of our everyday life ocurred.  Bluebells, buttercups, crisp autumn leaves, muddy puddles to swoosh and jump in.  It felt the same then and yet, in spite of the gentle bumblebee hum of traffic, away down on Petersfield Avenue, not one slither of our lives could ever be the same again.

  Only hours earlier a stranger had examined and bought dad's accordian. I'd made a gap in our windolene coated sitting room window and watched the same stranger carrying dad's prized possesion down the close. His typewriter though, aso a 21st birthday present, still sloped against the bedroom wall. Although the bed had been cleared of floral tributes, their were still dried petals and furled leaves beneath the bed.

    My paternal Nan, whom I'd never see again, had returned to her young daughters, in Coventry. I picked up the bag carrying my father's pyjamas and things he'd no longer need and felt tears trickling away from my chin and onto my neck. Crying, as I then did, wasn't something I was used to. It wasn't a quiet cry, as my mum had cried, but choked, desperate and long.

 I was not aware of my parents fight to be together. Not aware of how mum must have already struggled to rear us kids, without the immediate help of either set of parents, or of the extended family. In spite of that they had managed so well. In fact only a year or so earlier a reporter and photographer, from the Daily Mirror, had spent the day at our house. A women had interviewed mum and asked how she and dad were managing to rear sighted children so well. I wasn't aware, of course, about the body of this story until much later.

   So it was that all our toys had been packed into cardboard boxes, along side pots and pans and furniture and into our maternal grandfather's well scrubbed pig van. Myself and my brothers sitting on a metal garden seat, brought from grandad's home, slithered as he drove slowly down the close and away from our happy lives. How could any of us be aware of what was to follow and how our lives were to change.