Memories are made of this

The Wedding
Within six weeks Joe had handed in his council house keys to Durham council, packed in his basket makers rep job for the local blind, and visited his wife’s grave to leave some roses…at least that is what he had said to Esther’s mum in his last Braille letter.
Not the accepted way to go to your mum's wedding...sitting on the top deck of a green united counties bus.
"Good idea, Mark. Let’s get off here and go down the mill to paddle. They won’t miss us. Don’t want to go anyway. He has nothing to do with us, do him Es!”
Twenty or so minutes later, though, they were all legging it down East Field Road past all the private houses with drives, and trees laden with pink blossom, their petals falling from crimson branches.
"Come on, ogles!”
Of course neither brother could ever realize how hurtful words like that were then, and after all weren't they used to name calling themselves, and bullies who fed from the weak?
Breathless and scared, they pushed really hard against the heavy oak Roman Catholic Church door and quietly went and stood right at the back, as their new stepfather and mother walked back down the aisle. The organist played. The bells pealed. But there were few guests, and no photos, so back home again on the united counties bus that twisted and turned along the country roads.
"It's been so kind of you all to do this for us...and me your new neighbor to.”
Her neighbors husband, Mick, moved slowly around their front room handing out egg and cress sandwiches and broken biscuits from the factory where he worked as a foreman. Laura then continued her thanks as she sat on a wooden chair in her front room, hardly believing what she had gone and done, as she drank from her mug of tea and felt a shudder run through her spine.
"We all hope you and Joe are really happy together with these lovely kids of yours.” Iris, another neighbor, glanced doubtfully across at Laura’s kids standing forlorn and ill at ease, with no real grasp as to how life was to change. Then the same plump lady with tight curly brown hair and fag in her nicotine fingers touched her breasts which were leaking needing to feed her new born son. And then she had vanished out of her back door, lifting her bosoms and scratching beneath her arm-pits and pulling her knickers away from where they had stuck.
Laura's parents had avoided the reception, as they had her first wedding, without excuse, but she now had a partner for the lonely and the difficult times to help her with her children as they grew and then challenged her as children always seemed to. Once outside in their long grey flat street she waved, whilst readjusting her dress. In the distance was Wink, just returning from The Prince of Wales, having just finished his job down at Stanton Mines. He waved back at her now with nap-sack on his shoulders, wobbling upon his Rudge-cycle just past Banks Park where only days earlier a May Queen from Esther’s new class had been crowned. He was one of the many brave men who had returned to Stanton after the war, and rarely spoke about how he had been a Rear Gunner, and that was true about many folk in their little town with sad memories they kept tucked inside their own heads. Life could never be plain sailing for anyone now could it!