Another blind man entered our lives; for better or worse!

Chapter 19

The only bucket he had kicked was the one Esther had foolishly left out. He had stumbled as he felt his way, with a shilling for the meter in the cubby hole beneath the stairs. On his trousers (thinning then at the knees) he picked up ribbons of mouldy wallpaper that Esther had stripped off their sitting room walls several evenings before in an effort to make their home look better. There had been something of a ceasefire in their house and the hall doorway slammed a little less, and his Bakelite radio, stored on a shelf above his head, a few decibels lower as he sat with his Braille books of particular knowledge opened on his knee, his hands flitting left to right with intermittent breaks for mugs of tea proffered by May.
The purpose of this break in his routine was to second-guess the type of questions he might face when he went to London and the ‘This Morning’ on the light wave which they all listened to whilst and then heading off for school.

A candy floss of memories of local buses, a fifteen-minute walk down a pretty, leafy road, a train then a taxi, a newspaper vendor on the frosty pavement, coughing and sniffling as he tried to sing and banging his boots on the pavement. He smiled at them, and didn’t try to sell them a newspaper as they headed for the revolving doors at Broadcasting House. A world within a world of elegance and suits, with a receptionist connecting and disconnecting spaghetti of switchboard leads from row upon row of clicking dolls-eyes on his switchboard. Into an escalator, then a soundproof recording room with a headset firm to his silver-Grey wavy hair and her in an external office watching this apparently innocuous figure. Initially he tackled with ease the volley of questions until he froze and was beaten by a deputy headmaster from Leicester, leaving him furious about that injustice, he proclaimed later as they sat on a park bench nearby eating fish and chips out of yesterday’s news on Profumo.
Again he declared,

“My mind just froze. I knew that question really. My fingers weren’t quite quick enough on the button, that was all!” bewailed Blank, grasping his new dog’s harness, her bright eyes looking back, soft paws at St Pancras platform three, steam creating a magic that wasn’t really there. Then down beside the long corridors and compartments where feet and bags and suitcases stowed above dark figures with broadsheets or popular papers of the day, desperately trying not to look at the three of them as Esther’s thin fingers pulled back the sliding door and they went to their scratchy seats, with the desiccated sick on the floor and posters in the compartment showing happy nuclear families complete with a bright coloured ball that hung in the air like a pink moon inviting a trip to Southend. Esther still held onto memories of a happier time when life could be easily understood.

He talked with her, loudly saying how he remembered when he sat in a carriage just like the one they were in then, and met the hangman Pierre point and how you would never know what sort of job he did, then all the newspapers and the books went down on fidgety knees.
Esther left him and his dog at the entrance to the Working Man's Club, which had been a mainstay for their town when used for the purpose intended. Minutes later, she was home and her mum turned off the Archers and Phil and Peggy at the Bull.
“At least we know what to expect” she said as she reached, moments later, for the loose tea tin in the larder and the Co-op bottle of milk on the lower shelf; near their motley assortment of cracked dinner plates. Esther drew out the small chair from the Formica table and sat down, as her mum began to share a normal story.

“God Esther, you would have laughed today if you had been here to see the pack-man at this very door, trying to sell me unbreakable plates. He suggested I throw one on the floor and try to break it. I did as he suggested and threw it. It shattered into pieces. He said how it had never happened before!”
Whatever went wrong with their lives, their step-father always had a solution and that came in the form of absolution every Sunday morning. Yet it wasn’t all doom and humiliation for their extended family, was it?

“Why should your mum have anything from the farm now, or in the future? It’s my husband up early at the crack of dawn to feed the animals. I know your mum can't do that. But of course there’s your stepfather to look after you all now!
“Anyway, drink up your orange dear, or you’ll miss that bus at the Mill and your mum will worry where you are!”
Esther left her aunt’s house deflated, but saying again how unfair it was that her mum was in shoes with cardboard that let in rain and she had never had a new coat, but instead stuff from sales or things that her aunt passed on in her kindness.
“Oh, Esther, you’re a child, how can you understand? There is so much you don’t know”.
She had looked right back into her auntie’s eyes as she handed her a glass of water.
“I know that it’s not fair, or Mum’s fault that she is blind or we so poor; she would be working all hours on the farm if she could”.

Her aunt’s searched for the bus timetable; wanting her to return home safely.
Later that day Esther played street games of ‘one potato, two potato, three’ with her friends.
Both their parents were lovely hardworking folk who toiled in the nearby shoe factory. They stopped playing for a while as Bob, the key-keeper of a nearby factory, popped round to remind them all what time the club coach would be collecting them from outside the Working Man's Club the next day; for their annual trip to the seaside. Esther’s younger brother wasn’t fit to go as he hadn’t quite recovered from falling out of their uncle’s apple tree after he had been caught scrumping.