Memories are made of this

Where was her dad’s family?
“You’ll need to change trains at Leicester, mind! It’s platform 2 - over the bridge. If you hurry you’ll catch the 9.45, it left Bedford ten minutes ago! That’s it. Put your ticket in your pocket, son!”
Did she really look like a boy? At thirteen and five months and bean stick thin and with little money to purchase a bra there was no point…
At Leicester Station, and the sheer indignity of Stanton’s Clerk still ringing in her ears, she hastily grabbed reams of Izal toilet tissue. She stuffed two handfuls into her liberty bodice, which produced two irregular molehills; hills that were subsequently flattened as she fastened her duffle coat. Then she flew for her connecting train to Coventry Station.
If her Nan didn’t write back then she needed to know why. What might she have done to offend her? She was smart enough to know her Nan could never change things back home, and she wouldn’t want her or anyone to get hurt. The only person who could ever change Joe was Joe, and there seemed to be no chance of that now, with the water cut off through his drinking disease. Anyway, were they not lucky enough to still be alive? Only a few days earlier her brother Mark had got up to go to the outside toilet when he had found smoke seeping out of Joe’s chair, and he had doused it with water whilst Joe had remained slouched there still.
Out in Coventry city, she felt more scared and so alone. All she could remember was Witan-St Austell’s Road was where her Nana once lived with her two daughters Lizzie and Joan. One of the positives of being a child of blind parents was she was independent and willing, at times, to take chances. Anyway, hadn’t her dad always said how she had a tongue in her head, and so if she was lost then all she had to do was ask a policeman. In a way, she carried so many of his memories around with her, rather like he was guiding her though she now couldn’t see him. Maybe she could hear him!
So it was that she felt a mixture of fear and elation as she walked along St Austell’s Road. As it was Saturday morning, many bedroom curtains were shutting out the April sunshine as the city traffic hummed by, and a green bus splashed her socks with syrupy mud that trickled warmly down her shins. Taking in a deep breath, she opened the same gate her dad must have opened so many times before as he tapped around in the dark with his white stick.
Esther tapped the front door.
No response.
She tapped a little harder, but still no response. A lady from next door to her left pushed her head through her opened doorway with a cigarette hanging from her bright red lips and her blue plastic spiky rollers peeping through her paisley turban-like hat. She continued to beat her coconut mat against her council house wall and finally sliding it with aplomb back into her hallway as a sleek black cat, with a fraying green collar, and a ringing bell in an instant shot past her slipperier feet whilst knocking un-rinsed glass milk bottles in all directions.
“Bloody cat,” she snarled. She changed her tone aware that Esther was still standing there wondering what she should do now.
“Can I help you love? She is on the buses; saw her dashing through this gate well over an hour since.”
“Oh,” said Esther, feeling puzzled.
“Won’t be back till four, the blighter…over at her boyfriend’s house in the city-she says for a curry and an early night!” The neighbor smiled, but Esther missed the innuendo. “I came to see my Nana; it’s been the first time I have been on my own since my daddy died!” Mrs. Nesbitt reached over the low wall where children had scrawled with bright chalks, almost tripping over a pair of roller skates. She touched Esther gently on the shoulders.
“I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but your Nana died very soon after moving into those high rise flats over there.” She pointed in the direction of the outskirts of the city.
“If you’re her grand-daughter I am quite surprised you didn’t know that!” She looked at her quizzically.
Esther thanked the neighbor for her kindness, whilst pulling the izal toilet tissue from beneath her liberty bodice and gently wiped her tears away.
The neighbor didn’t know where either Lizzie or Joan lived, but she thought Lizzie had moved to Scotland somewhere.
That was it. There was no more need to write further letters to her nana. It would have been of some comfort if she could have found where she had been buried and how sad that she hadn’t been able to go to her funeral either. How harsh and cruel life sometimes seemed.
Later, streams of light shone down as Esther stood in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and she thought of those losses so bigger than hers. She caught the train home again late in the afternoon to more of the same with the smallest of hopes that Joe might be whipped away in a cloud and then left there forever. Now she would never know why her Nana hadn’t ever replied to her letters, and she read the last one she had written, but for some reason never posted, as she sat in her bedroom later.