Memories are made of this

The Past
It was amazing. A phone call that came right out of the blue and Esther hadn’t time to draw breath or put her shopping bag down. There Arthur was in the hall as the front door slammed itself shut.
“Lizzie phoned.”
She had never seen a reaction like this in a long time.
He led her into the kitchen and switched on the main light. “Sit down and I will make you a cup of tea.”
“I didn’t think that Lizzie’s baby was due just yet!”
Arthur shook his head and rolled his eyes whilst he pushed aside his Saxon History book which also rested on the worktop.
“No. not that Lizzie you donut, your aunt Lizzie, you know, one of your dad’s sisters that you have been trying to locate since I have known you and god knows how many stamps and envelopes.” He couldn’t keep still. “She was on the phone for almost an hour earlier and was really exited.” Esther then learnt how her best friend had happened to have seen the letter she had sent to the Coventry paper ages since.
He stretched over the work-top to click on the kettle and hauled the nearest two mugs with chips on the lips down (they had run out of Earl Grey Tea). She felt so exited and confused after all the years of searching could this be true and the connection she had been searching for now in sight.
She did as he suggested and sat down. The kettle began to boil. They both laughed at a frog, which must have hopped in from the patio through the open French window, whilst Maize exhibited her usual exuberance jumping up and down like a thousand champagne bubbles as the frog leapt out of the door again. Now wasn’t a good time to tell Arthur how she had just had to pay for a taxi from her place of work (she had been on a late shift working in a house with young people with learning difficulties) their car had been stolen whilst parked outside on the drive and thieves had managed to get through the sun-roof. It would soon be burnt out like the others, no doubt. There were no words to sum up how she felt as some weeks later she and her aunt Lizzie met on a platform at Coventry station where Esther’s dad must have used all those years ago.
It was a very wonderful but private time, with so many gaps from both sides filled in as well as tragedy on both sides to. Esther also learnt that her other Aunt Joan worked as a Casting Director for the BBC and lived In London somewhere. She learnt how the sad and frustrated letters she had written whilst still only a child had never reached her Nana and wondered why that might have been yet that didn’t matter now. Some weeks later she and her family as well as her brother Andrew and his wife met Lizzie Ian and Joan at a pretty pub quite close by and it was there that those ties, that were snapped into two, were then somehow brought together again. Esther now having a picture of her mum and dad on their wedding day, her father’s bible and his typewriter that one day sometime later Joan had carried from her car. The first thing Esther did was to take off the cover of the typewriter, put in a sheet of clean white paper and type ‘HELLO DAD’, and there were tears that she didn’t show in this time of happiness.