Memories are made of this
By Esther
- 1418 reads
Although the years had now turned her from child to young woman she still thought of her dad as well as her lost family.
If she could have ripped Joe up from his chair and then like a good fairy blown him with star-dust to a world far away then she would have. Perhaps then he could stop in his beer stained, chair he could circle the world and think about what he had done.
The man of the house! She could only hope that this man of the house wasn't, to some degree, replicated in houses up and down the land.
The river of Stanton flowed on as people got on with their living and dreaming. She hoped, quite badly, she wouldn't become like him and live a angry as well as lonely life like him.
Fear needed to be rubbed away, with the rubber that sat on her desk at The Employment Exchange, so then the love could come in which would open her heart as well as her mind.
She couldn't see then though a growing spirit as well as a light in her soul; that would aid her to take flight with her wings and start her living and forgiving to.
Nine months later, Arthur drove very early in the morning with his arm out of the Cortina car window to wave with assurance and relief to Mick their milk-man, driving back now in his lighter electric milk float with bottles ready for re-washing, and the depot in sight. Ahead of him, on loco hill, was a tramp pushing his life in a muddy old trolley and soaked to the skin as he battled the strong winds. Then later, down the alley that separated Laura’s house from her young neighbors who had just knocked the last piece of wood into a child’s playhouse at the bottom of their garden.
He tapped with respect, but brimming with pride still, as he walked through the kitchen and past the sudsy breakfast plates on the soft wooden draining board with her electric plastic kettle still emitting drifting steam into the cold kitchen air.
“Hi nana!” He strolled over to where Laura was sitting at the table, her hands posed upon her teacup and Desert Island Discs on the radio. It took her only a few seconds to realize what he was saying, leaping up from her chair and the mug up-ended on the plastic tablecloth with the dregs of tea dripping onto the worn corded carpet. Spinning, stretching up, and hugging him as she might have one of her sons.
“Is everything fine? Is it a girl, did you say? What does the baby weigh, and how long was the labor, and did she need stitches, and what time was she born?” Laura just could not stop talking and there were tears in her eyes as she thought of new life with joy and fear in equal measure.
Then she thought of the goodness of life, as she had done that previous night tossing and turning with more than discomfort, as Joe lay snoring and she shifted slightly again in order to miss touching his warm body that still stunk of stale tobacco and Guinness. Sitting together round the table, drinking cheap wine from rinsed out mugs, Laura said.
“When I had Esther, you know, I had to stay in for over a fortnight in order to learn how to care for her all over again as when I had Michael.” She stopped talking. Arthur didn’t say, but Esther had told him how her mum and dad had fought so to keep their first child, and how they had never forgotten and always battled to have him home with them and that it wasn’t really ever their fault. How she had regretted later the need for Esther to run before she could walk, and talk before she could babble, and always be there at the tape like a race, always frightened that others like health visitors and doctors would see her as failing.
It was best to live in the moment though, and take all you could from life. Arthur a man who did not unduly protest when Esther his young wife set aside some money to buy good quality furniture for her mum and also carpets with the help of her brothers. How moved she had felt seeing her mum nursing her new grand-daughter. Talking to her constantly and making up stories. Bathing her proudly and carefully checking the temperature of the water. As cozy as could be upon her lap as she listened to woman’s hour whilst Joe was usually sleeping off drink upstairs in his bedroom.
Sometimes though, they would go for a walk down to Station Road and then on past the old cemetery, the mill and down to the farm where horses were kept, and which they would later feed carrots in the warmer months. Frequently puzzled as to why her mum had married him and why she did not leave him, yet in those days where would she have gone? So it was that that life continued always with her doing her best to please him, whilst he did his best to spread fear and doubt.
Laura would speak about the future and her dreams and what she would do when she was at last free. It was always assumed that, as he was sixteen years older, he would go first and that in a way is what she and they had hung onto. Later Joe meanwhile had started to show some kindness to Kate, giving her a small amount of pocket money and singing her nursery rhymes.
Yet with Esther’s and Arthur’s own little family, she could offer her very best self and let go each evening, and it would be they who would worry as to whether she should lay on her side or her back, or if she was too hot or too cold as the child rearing cycles moved on, and health visitors there to support them. So those fun times did follow with Katie down at Banks Park, then later still in the sandpit at Wick Steeds with bucket in hands, and then rides on the train that ran round the park and close to the main road. Later still, trips to Skegness and rides on the donkey with bells that rattled on golden sands with the sea miles away and unable to hear the lapping waters. At home there would be numbers and colors, and then the humpty dumpy club and play-school, where she would scream blue murder until her mum was out of sight, and then happily ride the wooden bike, at least that was what a young mum present would tell her.
Then she would visit her nana whose face lit up. She would help her with cooking. It was such a special time for her, with flour, egg-shells, and milky puddles on the floor, all creating havoc and chaos in her little kitchen and some happiness at last in a corner of their beaten and tortuous home. Her nana laughing out loud as her Hoover twin tub rattled and banged so loud it could be heard in the street. As Laura tried to stop it walking across the tiled floor, little Catherine laughed out loud and fell off of her chair. Laura now at the sink with sudsy water on the floor with water everywhere else but in the machine rushed to her aid whilst Joe remained in the front room with his radio afternoon play now on but just switching it louder as his hearing and patience increasingly failed.
“It has been so many years since I have seen you so happy mum!” They walked out of Mona’s cake shop with butterfly cakes and marzipan slices in a white paper bag that was bound to be eaten before they reached Stanton cricket ground.
“Yes,” she replied, taking Esther’s arm as they pushed together the push-chair, “it’s grand being free and out with you, walking in the sunshine like this, but I know I will pay for it when I get back to Joe though, I have left him his tea in the larder and sliced it just as he likes. I hope your dad can see how happy you are, and know that our fight way back then was not in vain when we all lost him as we did!” Together they strolled past Stanton old cemetery opposite the church, where not long since Esther had married Arthur, and where in a few weeks time they would be returning for the christening of Catherine.
They walked up the Lane and past Stanton Hall, where years before the Free French had marched. Perhaps they might even be following De Gaulle’s footsteps and he too might have seen the canopy of fields, of russets and gold and green. Might he too have seen the windmill, or heard the Rise Valley stream trickling by? Nasal Drake had long since rested his weary bones for the last time, and the sewerage farm now just a farmer’s field. Esther leant into the push-chair and wiped the decadent evidence of cream away.
Her first Christmas’s with her own little family was very special, despite the doubts and pain that clung like tarmac on a white wool carpet however hard she tried to scrub the stain or whatever professional help she sought. Always there existed the need to love and be loved and to find an identity that seemed forever just out of reach, but could almost be touched. To a degree, her small baby gave her something to share, although in her simple pain she didn’t realize that at the time. Nappies that grew on the line, Napisan in buckets that Arthur sluiced.
S. M .A. milk as well as rainbow, playschool or Peter with his magic torch on the television. Constantly searching for lost mittens, shoes and spellings in tins and wondering what to put into their packed lunch boxes, or more importantly leave out. When to talk about the birds and the bees, or why Santa never came down the chimney, or why theirs was the brightest old car in the street. Why their daddy, who loved them, wouldn’t go anywhere on bank holiday because he hated queuing.
Instead they walked down the mill and ate early morning picnic breakfasts with friends, whilst the Ise River bubbled under the stone bridge over yesterday’s rubble, tin cans and supermarket trolleys, carrier bags wondering how they got there with the shops several miles away in the next town. Then having eaten and played, they returned up Harrowden Road, and then Station Road with its gable cottage, windmill and gated private sweeping lane.
Years before, carriages, well groomed horses, maids with small bags containing precious family bibles, and the village doctor, called for tea and sat on manicured lawns where well turned out, tutored children who would inherit it all might play. Looking as lovely then in their springtime with trees magically bidding new life as the undertaker visited elsewhere and the grounds man working hard in their prized cricket ground where, then as now, the tap of willow on ball that spun into the dense undergrowth of yesterdays. St Mary’s parish church bells whispered then in the wind, yesterday’s people lay still in the oldest cemetery nearby with headstones barely decipherable with weeds spreading and choking the shattered ghost town and spent dreams of those who, not so long since, had walked and laughed and loved in the town of Stanton.
She, Catherine and Arthur, were heading off to Morecambe where Arthur’s brother then lived and worked with their toddler’s pushchair and enough clothes for a week when Esther noticed tears in Arthur’s eyes on learning that his beloved idol Elvis had been found dead, or so the radio had just said.
Then with life’s pages turning in quick succession there was the queens silver jubilee and bunting in 1977, as well as jelly and sandwiches at the water tower, street parties and firework displays with dots and dashes and fizzes that filled the sky and Catherine Wheels spinning so fast and sparklers around and around and up and down in little gloved fingers and bright muddy faces aglow with wonderment. Later, trips to school where parents slipped into an invisible social strata and went or didn’t go to Tupperware parties or book parties, beetle drives, quizzes or parent teachers evening, or bingo or put on or didn’t their best clothes to see their child’s class teacher and wondered whether they were talking about the same child who they said was the perfect pupil and had not been the slightest trouble at all. The same child that, only the day before, had tried to strangle his young sister on the stairs with a kettle flex.
- Log in to post comments
Comments
Another one of these
- Log in to post comments
A fine read, Esther. Surely
- Log in to post comments
Hi Esther, I very much
- Log in to post comments