Memories are made of this

Eye replacement
Some weeks later, Esther and Joe were on a special mission, she noticed he had a fob Braille pocket watch, but the smaller face was silver and hung on a tiny chain inside his jacket, just as her father’s used to-do. There was a splattering of tomato ketchup on the sleeve of her white school blouse from when she had eaten fish fingers and chips at British Home Stores in Northampton town. His thin arm inside hers, bone on bone, sinew on sinew, carrying a doll he had just bought her from Woolworths, a store that never seemed to change, and to make up for a watch he had given to her for her tenth birthday and then quickly, mysteriously, taken back after a family conversation as to whether it was his to give away in the first place. Esther at the time was confused about how a gift could suddenly be taken back for what she saw as no good reason.
Woolworths pick and mix with wide, long wooden floors that reminded her in some silly way of the lines at Wellingborough railway station where her memories would forever be in the doors she touched as much as in the steam that for magical seconds hid Joe; before he stepped down onto the platform and they in blissful ignorance then waited for the life he brought them all.
The smock coated assistants, at least five years older than her, wore white peaked caps. They smiled and chatted whilst continuing to serve the anonymous faces that stared back at them. One wiped her nose on her very white shirt sleeve before drawing Esther’s chosen sweets back up and dropping where they rustled back into a white paper bag. Esther thanked her and then walked arm in arm with Joe past boyfriends who hovered like bumble bees and one ran his fingers through his bryl-creemed hair.
She counted her pennies and dropped them clinking one by one in her pocket and headed for the door with the man who wasn’t her dad.
“Don’t know how long it will take Esther, did you put that Bunty comic safely away? It should keep you busy whilst I am seeing the eye specialist at Cheney Walk. Are you sure you know where you are going?”
He didn’t see her nod, but still she did out of habit, and then answered him. “I know where it is, I was there with mum a few months ago when she had her glass eye replaced, and I know its close where the casualty department is, where I went when I broke my arm a while ago!” She knew her mum had been taken tearfully to the same hospital, having been delivered into the world with perfect sight, till man-made disease had robbed her of that perfect gift in a matter of days, in spite of the efforts to save her sight then, and the needles they inserted deep into her eyes.
Esther couldn’t quite understand her mum, who would frequently say as they walked along through the belly of their rich world, how she would much rather have been born blind than deaf. What a black world, to see but not understand muffled sounds, whispers or silence, or to hear the cry of a child, know when the phone rang, when someone said they loved you, or the break of a heavy van, but then she had lost love now and how could life ever go back to those happier times before Joe?
Together they walked like programmed tin soldiers, her guiding this man she had already learnt to hate, through the crowds and wondering as she walked towards the hospital, however it all might end. It certainly didn’t seem as if it would be a fairy story ending, but then life for anyone was hardly ever without problems to solve and people to rub shoulders with who weren’t kind at all. Into the hospital where she sat with thin legs swinging on the hard wooden chair with a silver tubular frame and rubbers on the four feet but left scuffs still as it was dragged day in and out over the smooth lino hospital waiting room floor. Her comic was opened on her knee, but somehow she couldn’t concentrate, with little room to open her paper up anyway, and hoping Uncle Joe would remain nice and content at least for the remainder of the day. So many changes that were really quite difficult to accept yet awareness also that she must do her best to please him and never ever answer him back. A nurse guided him back to his chair about twenty minutes later. Then, having shown him where the door to the men’s toilet was, they were ready to go home again, and his new false eye ordered, so he would need a new appointment, he said to the male receptionist at the desk near the flight of stairs and toilets. Then, having tucked the small white card in his pocket, it was time to go home again on the united counties bus that took its usual detour out from Derngate bus station then Abingdon Street and the park barely visible in the dark, then Ecton and stopping at Weston Favell to let a young mum with her cumbersome pushchair off, and then to Earls Barton and past the Saxon church and then the dual carriage-way.
We are not yet there Uncle Joe, she would say whilst he just nodded and whistled through his false teeth, taking out his brown comb and running it through his silver hair, which he said had changed overnight after his house had been bombed in Sunderland, and he and his last wife and adopted child had hidden in the well beneath the stairs for morning and the siren to sound, but that was so many years since and he hoped there would never be the need for another war, yet not all wars ended in bloodshed.