Memories are made of this

How could she leave her?
“And so, have I been misguided, Esther? You and Arthur are no longer leaving?”
“No Mum, there will be many more holidays like this, miles away from Finedon, but let’s not think about that just now!”
Her kids were hanging upside down on a climbing frame in the mid-morning sunshine at the Norfolk cottage they had rented for the week that July of 1982. Esther returned to sit on the rug near her mum, who must have been worrying so.
“I didn’t want to leave you anyway, and I think you know that, but Arthur just told me, when he rang, that the deal has fallen through with the firm in Canada, and he’s going it alone and becoming self-employed but still working at people’s businesses, and hopefully not at home – which might have driven us both nuts!”
Laura continued to sip from her, by-now, cold tea, and to conceal the fear she'd felt at the thought of losing contact with them all. It was incredible where the last five years had gone.
Laura had always loved Esther and her brothers deeply. Her own mother and father had lived so close in the same street when she had returned from Essex all those years ago, and they had done as much as they could. True, as adults Esther and her brothers had fought to themselves they were neither as stupid nor useless as their stepfather had ingrained like sticky rock at the sea-side that stuck everywhere.
“All I want is to be a good mother”. Esther would often say. Somehow Esther’s own children had broken through that sadness; she had learned to play beside them and forget, for a while, about the man who still had some control over her mum.

Having heard a bump from the front bedroom above them, Esther tore up the steep stairs and then moments later, re-emerged carrying baby Caroline wriggling with her terry nappy now upon the floor, and Laura laughing once more.
“Come to Nana, my cherub, and let your Nanny sort this out, we all knew the idea of you staying put in a bath for a bed was not one of the best, but needs must when we arrived so late last night. Mummy will sort that out with the landlord today, won’t you, sweetheart?”
Esther appeared with a clean nappy and Johnson’s talc and Vaseline, gently taking Caroline and laying her, kicking, on a mat whilst they all caught up with pure happiness.
“Of course you can go to the sea, Catherine, but let’s hope for a quieter day than yesterday when you fought with James at the crazy golf and tore out his hair in handfuls”.
“It’s not fair, Mummy. I only did that because he bit me when we were down on the sand, and you were talking to Nana. It’s just not…”
Esther wanted to share all the love that shone out from each of her children and sprinkle this lightness for her mum to feel, knowing full well just how quickly happiness could end, as it had done such a long time ago.

It was some months later, whilst Esther was going with her mum to a reading competition for the blind in Manchester, and sitting on the train, that she first noticed how loose her mum’s clothes were hanging, but she let the thought go. How proud she seemed of her handbag, purchased with the rewards of her earlier ‘divvy day’. Though she took one of the main prizes at the competition, there was something about her that was quite different- she didn't seem to have her usual energy and zest for life.

Ticking the administration details at the bottom of her mum’s prescription, collected moments earlier from the local doctors, Esther handed it over to an assistant she hadn’t seen before. Perhaps Diane was on holiday, Esther thought. She sat with foreboding. The shop bell rang. Esther’s eyes fell on the cenotaph opposite the shop door and she thought of earlier losses for their town. Then in, with a whirl and a flurry, came Mona from the cake shop, pushing open the chemist’s black part-glazed door, she walked across the crowded shop and sat down. In that moment, Esther recalled her kindness and how Mona had often warmed her spirit as well as her faith in mankind. She remembered how she never failed to hand her a cake from her shop-window, where birthday cakes of cars and teddies shared the space with off-cuts of the most delicious wedding cakes; though that only in the summertime when the world around about her felt nicer. So, having left her local evening paper which was the last on her round, she would stuff her face with her edible gift and make her way home to what was, very often, neither sweetness nor light! Still little more than a child herself, she was trying to make sense of a very murky world. A world she shared quietly with her brothers and mum and no-one else seemed to care then!
Esther was no longer a child, but Mona still had her smile, it was just that her hair was a little greyer and thinner.
“Hello Esther. Is your little family well? Catherine, the biggest, must be almost six now, being born only weeks before our little grandson I believe!”
She continued as she sat there with Esther, allowing her words to flow as from a tap on full lock.
“A picture I thought your little ’un was, as she trotted round the playground with her Easter bonnet on that she clung to, the poor little soul, as the winds ripped round the playground till the ET photographer got his best shot”.
Esther smiled as she thought; remembering with clarity how she had torn up newspapers, glued and stapled, doing her best to create a hat that would stand up to scrutiny when other parents watched their offspring in procession in the blustery playground the following day. It was one in the morning when she knew she could do no more with the creation that sat in the half-light on her kitchen table. There was washing up still to be done that she had hidden in a brewer’s plastic vat with the lid firmly hiding its contents.
“Poor little child!” Hopefully oblivious to the unfortunate creation that should have been an Easter bonnet she hung onto, slithering and dipping like an injured bird in a tree. Many gathered round to view the collective efforts of parents who had used every talent and skill they possessed doing their best to avoid embarrassment for the following weeks. Esther hadn’t managed that very well, she was certain of that!
Workers from the boot and shoe company nearby stood with squeegee noses close to the windows. There was their charge-hand down there waving across the playground with a fag in her hand, free for a while. Knowing, as she watched her little grandson, that when he grew, there would be no factories left to produce crafted shoes. Folk shifting from leg to leg in the playground with denims and trainers made by those in distant lands for pence – which was most could afford in Finedon.

“Laura Jones?”
The white-coated assistant, with glasses swinging on a thin cord, smiled and handed over a white paper bag to Esther, apologizing for the long wait.
She carried the antibiotic, which would cure her Mum’s ills – she hoped – back through their pretty town and past the school where her oldest child was. She pushed her buggy hard, Caroline now asleep, her sandal feet dangling, nose peeping above the blanket, sucking her fingers, golden hair held in her other hand. Later, with doubt in her mind, forcing a lighter voice, Esther handed over the bag to her mum, who sat in her rocking chair near the cracked window. Then Joe shouted from upstairs for yet another mug of tea.
“I will sort him out, Mum. You take care of yourself, and take this first tablet, and I’ll get you some water. Did you sleep well?”
She realized as she said it that, of course, she hadn’t, but then she couldn’t take the silly words back, could she? Esther handed her a glass of water. Then climbed the stairs, opening the door where Joe sat with a grey silk tea-stained scarf around his throat. On the chair, painted blue with runs that had set in the spells, was a single dairy cream pot which was now his frothing spittoon as well as his ashtray and several drying out tea-bags. His dog lay at the foot of the bed, a thin green sheet touching her nose. She looked up at Esther and their eyes met.
“Oh, it’s just you! Where is your f…in’ Mum? I’ve been sat here hammering a good five minutes for my tea in the cold, whilst she sits down and wastes her time with you!”
Esther took his mug from him and looked at his glass eye that sat upwards in a saucer next to his false teeth, and his face looked craggy and old as his bony ankle poked out from the sheets – and she felt like cutting his head off!
There was rarely any sign of tears her crying being done at night-time, no doubt beneath her sheets, but this time her left eye socket was very red and bright as she continued to cough in the casualty department of their local hospital.
Esther and Andrew had earlier exchanged glances and simultaneously questioned the throat specialist when anger and shock could be contained no longer.

“If you really think we are taking her home to die – she can barely swallow her drink now – then you’re sorely mistaken. She has the same rights as everyone else, disabled or otherwise!”
That had been yesterday. Esther and her brother had borrowed a chair to push their mum, she too weak to travel the short distance from the main entrance to the X-ray department.
A nurse had taken her into a cubicle and, a short time later, returned to them when they were told quietly to take her home to die. The specialist may have said that the prognosis was poor, and that he did not think she would be able to cope with the operation, or the tubes and recovery afterward s, due to her blindness, but surely she should have an equal chance? How dare he, or anyone else, think that they wouldn’t fight for their mum? Of course she would struggle with the wires and tubes that wove and protruded from and intruded into her now frail body, but she would manage, just as others did. She was glad her youngest brother was strong and had been there for them all.
It was the night preceding the major operation that Esther, whilst looked for her mum’s admittance letter, which she came across that last typed letter to them all. Then Joe’s voice broke through and she put the letter down on the chipped Formica table in the kitchen.

“Stay where you are, Mum, and rest. I will do his tea and cut his sandwiches. You need to take care of yourself. I will just go and pack your case ready for the hospital tomorrow”.
With sharp precision she had cut his ham sandwiches into four whilst wishing his mustard was as toxic as arsenic.
“Here is your tea, Joe, right on the middle of your little plastic table near your slippers. I’ll pop this Braille Radio Times of yours right next to your shoes for a while”.
In that moment as she looked at him she hated him. With the words of the specialist still ringing in her ears, the lark that was her mum might soon be set free – but not in the way she had always imagined.
A major operation was carried out, which to take over thirteen hours and her ribs broken the growth removed – if they could – there was a one-in-ten chance of success. Each time the phone rang they convinced it was with news no-one wanted to hear.
She did make it; though for the next six weeks it was touch-and-go. Joe owed her love more than ever and, to be truthful, he had tried but wasn’t this rather too late in her days? –And his too, come to that!

Sorrow
Then they went, fourteen months later, distraught, and unable to believe they would never see her again, behind her small coffin with Esther whispering,
“Death’s not the end, and her spirit lives on, that is just her shell in there”.
Ahead walked her stepfather and stepbrother, and she felt a shiver run through her and then more memories spun and hurt her so much that she absent-mindedly cut her palm where her fingernails had been.
She remembered her love and determination and the battles that had been, and wondered about life and death, and where her dad might be; then of the kindness of the hospice staff, and the gentle way they lifted her mum’s frail body and listened to her fears, there to comfort them after her last breath had gone. Esther had left the room with the little door still opening onto the courtyard, where squirrels leaped and played as she could do nothing more than cry.
Joe had said later,
“She can’t be dead. I saw her earlier, f…in’ yesterday!”
She had said with tears in her eyes, as he sat there alone at the helm of his house,
“If you don’t believe me, then why not ring the hospice? And why should I lie to you?”
Tired, she had turned and left him there beside his ticking Braille clock, sleeping beer mug and her mum’s worn moccasin slippers beside her rocking chair, now still. Her forever-sleeping mum’s coat hung near her in the hall on a little peg, treasured vinyl handbag on the chair, and the last handkerchief she had used still screwed tight in her pocket.
Him saying,
“No I don’t want anything to eat. I’m not f...in’ stupid, and I can get my own food when I want!”
She had turned her back and walked away from him into the kitchen where her mum’s life had been. The radio was off, the tap with the washer that still needed replacing still dripped and a dried out tea-bag lay on the draining board. Esther wondered how or why she should care for him. He, though, continued to drink, but it would be his home-help who would, on week-days, drag her mum’s shopping trolley home as the bottles of beer clinked and rattled one against another. Right through all this she had broken her own promise that she wouldn’t, in a million years, look after a man who had been so desperately cruel to them all, and how could anyone ever expect her to?