Memories are made of this

When kindness slipped away
“Hi, Esther” It was Uncle Amos who although quick in mind had no dress-sense at all. In fact it was said his underpants were fixed together by safety-pins.
He was just popping his miniature dog into the basket of his Rundles bike. He loved that dog, and it went everywhere, until one day his loving daughter arranged for it to be put down whilst he was recuperating in hospital from a small stroke. Kindness could be found in unsurprising places, it always seemed to her as a child.
“I thought the Scouts were at the Town Hall tonight”. Amos shuffled uneasily. It was always like he was hatching fresh plans, which his wife might not discover until it was too late! Esther, wanting to get the deed done, laughed nervously whilst at the same time pushing her Brownie uniform and brown beret further inside her small cloth bag.
“I am not a Brownie anymore!”
“Oh”, he replied, adjusting spectacles, “you are surely not big enough for Guides just yet!”
No reply.
Sensing Esther would not be divulging anything else he bade her goodnight, lifted his brogue shoe to the pedal, and pushed down hard. Settling his generous backside onto the less generous saddle, he was away down the hill whistling a tune about love.
As St Mary’s church clock had just struck six, it figured that, as a rule, the High Street would be emptying now. She peered along and down to the end of Placket’s Yard, half expecting to see at least one of her Aunt Rose’s strays. Most nights she could be found unwrapping wet, fishy newspaper leaving ink on her white cotton gloves. Prolifically casting on the ground a potpourri of fish heads and tails as well as other scraps she had obtained from her full larder. No cats or kittens in sight, so Esther continued reluctantly on past the Tudor Gate then Richford’s cut-price shop whilst at the same time rehearsing what she might say to Brown Owl.
Moments later, however, her rehearsal didn’t come out just as she had planned.
“I am so sorry, Miss. Mum and my stepfather have stopped me and my brother going anywhere this weekend after you told them what we had done”.
“Oh”.
Brown Owl didn’t seem surprised, as she twisted the strings on her apron and sighed.
“It wasn’t nice at all what you said, Esther. In fact I was more than a little shocked. I know a lot has happened to you lately but that is no excuse for such rudeness as I encountered from both of you on Thursday night”.
Esther sensibly didn’t respond but, as already instructed by her stepfather and mum to do, handed her borrowed Brownie uniform back to the ample figure that stood there in front of her on her old cottage door-step.
“Thank you, Esther”.
As Esther was struggling with the front gate with the broken catch, wise Brown Owl closed her door and then pulled her sitting room curtains to as her ex-Brownie walked anxiously and sadly away. With no particular hurry to return home to more of the same, Esther decided to take the long route home and head for Curtain’s sweet shop, where she treated herself to four ounces of coconut mushrooms. Her biggest mistake had been to just run when her brother shouted “Fat Brown Owl!” as they had been taking a shortcut through the jitty at the rear of Allen Road Working Men’s Club – a second home for their Uncle Joe.
On the way home later, she spoke to kindly Kit who lived in the next street with her husband and their family. Frank was a hard-working man, and a shoemaker with a workshop at the bottom of their long garden, which faced onto wide open fields, where lay glistening leaves and whispering branches.
It seemed incongruous that such a life as theirs was played out in dimly lit rooms with grimy wallpaper, where Joe’s cigarette smoke and fingerprints spread waist high.
However outside these doors was another world. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, on the cover of every newspaper Esther delivered throughout their town.
The Tories were hated inside her own house. She couldn’t understand the poor folk on the other side of the road, who worked all the hours God sent, yet despite remaining in poverty, voted Conservative with blue posters slapped dead-centre of their casement bay windows. Perhaps it gave them self-esteem, thought Esther, as she shoved their Sun newspaper through their letter-box as their mongrel dog barked from upstairs and the youngest of their five children yelled from her bed for it to
“Bloody belt up and let us get more sleep!”
It was bitterly cold and Esther, with pure enchantment with her empty newspaper bag, walked back past Banks Park where frozen webs and candle droplets clung and covered the screen of the tennis courts. She watched and jumped in delight as her green rubber wellingtons left the very first footprints of the day, and in the distance St Mary’s Church clock struck five. Out there in that ordinary world were the things that made her feel special, and although she couldn’t see him or touch him, God and goodness was out there. Yet she couldn’t understand why Uncle Joe was as he was, or why he had to live with them. For after all, they hadn’t chosen that, had they? She often dreamed him dead. Esther and her mum had just arrived back to their house of shame and distress, after going to visit Bill Pool and returning with a heavy bag of shopping. Always bought on tick, and items recorded in a little red book at the back of the Co-op manager’s till
There was Joe shouting obscenities that usually began with ‘f’, but this time at her youngest brother Andrew who, with tousled hair and sleep-filled eyes, had omitted to close the sitting room door firmly. The day previously he had shared his warm and generous language with,
“Were you born in a f…in’ field, boy? Shut that f…in’ door!” when he had attempted to bring in his friend Mick, who lived in one of the cottages at the bottom of the lane with his mother. Unsurprisingly, this friend didn’t call again. Their world of friendships had become increasingly diminished as friends tended to visit just the once. Meanwhile, their stepfather, fuelled by state money, spent the family’s money on cigarettes and drink. Repeatedly Esther wondered, as she opened the hall door each morning and witnessed the beer and spirits bottles piled higher than the tallest bucket and spade mountain, just how her gentle mum could have married such a man. Why were they forced to live with such a hard, bitter and totally controlling man, who only left them to drink and returned broken late at night to smash their self-esteem away? They would always be an encumbrance to his plans to drink with one drink re-enforcing the need for the next to stultify his tormented mind and feelings and, indirectly, his step-children’s emotional growth. To cry them blind wouldn’t help, yet they did; nor Laura wringing her hands, and advising them to be quiet as mice seemed to sadly have any mark at all on his desperate insanity and absence of tender conscience. If only religion had been the tool to lift him out of the hole he had dragged them all into, yet a million ringing of bells, sweeping of clerics’ cloaks and cloying incense wasn’t, sadly, the sticking plaster which made things better for them all.