Memories are made of this

Running faster
“Do hurry up, you kids”, barked her grandfather, who she hardly knew “I need to get this pig van back to the farm quickly Errol is waiting there now. He’ll need the van to take some pigs to Borough Market tomorrow. I’ll need to empty this van in double-quick time if those bloody pigs are to be slaughtered, and we need to have money in the bank for the next month!”

He prized the battered rear van doors with a screwdriver and the scared kids almost fell out onto the litter-strewn street. He still had thoughts of resentment but now wasn’t the best time to speak so he just stretched from his long journey.

A toddler sat perched on the pavement in front of their new neighbours bay-windowed home eating a sandwich. A crowd of children and a thin man with a pipe peered through the fluttering nets and a rinsed-out milk bottle spun in the strong winds.

Esther’s grandfather thrust his podgy hands (finger nails still stuffed with yesterday’s manure) taking out a key from his pocket -quickly realizing that it wasn’t the key he needed. That was his own key to his own front door where his wife would be watching television.
“Bugger me. Damned if I know where that key has gone”.
Now, tired and also irritated after his long journey, he snapped at Esther who stood there in front of him in the tunnel that separated one terraced house from another.

“If you want the toilet, lass, it’s there the first red door with the big bolt!”
So Esther flew there to the stained pan just in time and slammed the door that groaned, and then with no light switch – or none that she could find. Then, wondering if a mouse or a spider might be lurking there or a rat’s head appear from the bowl and.... Then moments later and so much more comfortable she was out onto the rough gravely path and looking down the garden to a shadow that might be a mangle, and a bike without a saddle.
Esther was stunned with what she saw and afraid as she followed her mum and brothers into the kitchen. They climbed the eighteen narrow stairs to their beds. Perhaps, though, when the light came in the morning things might be so much brighter.
“Can you sleep?” she later murmured as she lay on her make-shift mattress trying to snuggle beneath old coats and again wondering about spiders and things that crawled and bit. Her brothers did not answer, and nor did her mum. “They must be asleep” she thought, pulling her best winter red woolly coat, with a black velvet collar, up higher and tucking her goose-bumped legs beneath the snagged hem and loose threads catching in her unwashed toes.

The next morning they walked past the stained ceramic sink, an old gas boiler, a wooden draining board and high shelves running around the kitchen. The brick walls were painted green and the floor was red quarry tiled. They would have to get used to an outside toilet, but at least they had a home didn’t they? Around the world and in their country, there were people without shelter or bed to sleep on. In fact, Esther’s own great-grandmother would never have known the luxury of sanitation, or the comfort of a bathroom, or central heating, so it was not really something so terrible to cope with.

Now, when there garden fence was blown down in the storms, there was no-one to put it back up. When she stopped doing homework there was no daddy to tell her off and then hug her later. That Christmas, he wasn’t there to hide gifts round the house, to put up the tree or play ‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’ on his accordion or to tickle her toes in bed. Her chamber pot cold below her single bed in that tiny room with mullioned windows overlooking terraced houses all around in a Persil-box shape, frozen washing hung on washing lines and a dog tethered on a chain barked to be let in away from its cold ground.