Memories are made of this

Chapter 2
Slamming the Door
Breathlessly having run the length of the road, where she had played as a child on her tricycle and walked with her head full of fantasies regarding a normal life as a young woman, Laura felt in her bag for her keys. She stepped into the tiny hallway, where a coconut mat made by the workshop for the blind people in Northampton, lay. She slipped slightly upon the red smooth hallway tiles, shutting the door swiftly behind her. She dropped her coarse cloth bag onto the floor before reaching to hang up her coat, not quite knowing what to expect from her dad. Opening their sitting room door, her father was, as usual, in full flow, whilst outside mounting disjointed voices soared and snarled the peacefulness in her ordinary street.
“Hark at them there fools outside, wasting their lives down at the pub, when they could do a damned site more with their lives,” he ranted. “Trapped in a pub or bloody shoe factory doesn’t amount to an ill of beans as far as I can make out. I always wanted more for you, our Laura, and not your preposterous talk of
Getting wed your Ma’s just told me about. It’s obvious that you haven’t talked this barmy idea through – two blind folks talking of marriage, I have never heard the like!” Unable to contain her anger one moment longer, Laura up-ended her piano stool where she was now standing.
“Was it love that sent me for half my life-time to a boarding school in Birmingham? And is this love that rules me now dad?” Moving uncomfortably, and heavily, in his arm-chair, reaching to turn up the wireless, he growled.
“Your mother and I acted as we did because we loved you, and to give you the best start in life!”
His sanctimonious attitude was almost too much for Laura to bear. How she wished he might take responsibilities for his mistakes, but few in the family ever spoke about them. A stroke of luck on a pools-win a few years earlier had allowed him to hand in his resignation to a National Parcel delivery firm where he had worked as a lorry driver, after being de-mobbed and then to invest in a farm with his winnings.
“It’s not very sensible.” That was one of his well-stocked phrases. “It’s almost criminal that you should think of falling in love, never mind marriage, or cruelly thinking of kids our Laura.” He could have little idea how much she hated him at that moment. What right did he have to think she shouldn’t have dreams or thoughts of marriage and a family just like everyone else in her town? In the past, men hadn’t got close to Laura, and proximity had made her feel uncomfortable, yet now it wasn’t fear she felt, but an unquenchable rage and a deep biting sadness.
Recalling wistfully the first time she had introduced James to her father, and her fears that he might never ever be accepted, simply because he was blind too. However determined his plan to drive James away might be Laura was adamant that her father wouldn’t win again, but she had never stood up to him before and that scared her most of all. Laura had slowly come to realize that if she was to get anywhere in life then weakness wasn’t an option. Sometimes in the dark of the night, she so wished to challenge him with the knowledge shared by her mum some years since, but where should she begin with such pain and loss that her father had, been totally responsible for?
“Anyway,” he muttered, as he gazed guiltily, she was sure, at her sightless eyes, whilst she stood quietly by the cracked hearth. “Don’t you think that this is all rather sudden, as well as being bloody foolish and ill-thought out?
Ah well, this won’t buy the baby a new dress, or pay the old women her three pence,” he muttered, as he crunched through yet another peppermint stripe, dropping the wrapper into a tin mug of cold tea.
Whilst her dad was as bright as the cloudiest of days, Laura’s mum always tried to satisfy him but even the strength of his tea failed to please. If she had once held dreams they had long since floated away; always lived by someone else.
“It never helps to get carried away, our Laura, and you know we will always look after you whilst we can!”
Her beloved mum, stretched across her dining room table, bought some years earlier from a local auction house. Tuesdays was always her time for studiously cutting up squares of old newspaper for their outside lavatory.
“There’s always summit, John,” muttered her mother, as she furiously slashed with her scissors at yesterday’s news. Dejectedly, but still standing beneath the naked light-bulb, Laura reached out to touch the steadily growing heap of newspapers upon the oil cloth covered table and wondered about such pointless frugality. Everything in their house was making do and mend, so when the casement cord in their bay window snapped then her father simply hammered the window tight shut. Laura had found it hard to believe that once her mum had been a little girl in that same town, but knew she had been born in a terraced house four doors down from the wet fish shop and opposite the Allen Road working men’s club, which Laura’s father regarded with disdain, preferring his drink in the privacy of his home he claimed.
His attention was suddenly interrupted by solid heavy banging at their front door. It wasn’t the chap who lived a few doors down for he would just walk in their back door and sit down at their piano, play roll out the barrel and maybe sing, before saying ‘thank you’ and getting up and strolling home again, with a smile on his face, but loneliness in his heart.
It was the same chap’s wife who had caused a commotion by trapping her rather large left bosom in the rollers of her wringer on wash-day Monday, and Laura’s mum who, having heard the cries of distress, rushed to her aid.
“Don’t bloody folk know when to stop hammering and intruding on our home lives.
I’ll speak with you later, our Laura. It’s no use turning on those damn water-works!”
Moments later, the draught of the cold night air slammed the hall doorway shut, and the street once more at peace.
Her father dropped the coins for a tray of cracked farm-eggs he had just sold onto the dresser he had brought back in his lorry after a mysterious over-night stay in Birmingham. Those secret visits had caused such pain. Laura was only able to share this sad secret with her delightful auntie who had recently bought a little cottage for £250 pounds down at The Village Green.
During the war, whilst Laura was away at boarding school, her auntie had worked as a Capstan Lathe operator, she wrote and told how she made screws and nuts for planes and guns, instead of working as a clicker in a shoe factory situated twenty minutes walk away at the other end of their pretty little town.
How Laura had longed to have her lovely long letters read to her by anyone who might be in her dormitory with sufficient sight.
Stanton had, in fact, made its contribution to the war effort with most of its eligible men torn from their assured but stark lives in dimly lit, leather hide filled shoe-factories or toiling the sodden or sun-baked land that wrapped their town, whilst their womenfolk tried to fill the gap. There was also the man who, with fine skills that folk never wanted to try, being as he made the finest of oak coffins and the smartest of fittings, with one it was said he kept under his bed for his own needs much later he hoped.
Laura’s mother scuttled back and forth, carrying supper plates and slamming them with such force into the shallow sink.
“Bloody man; can he never get up from his back-side.”
Laura had over heard from her auntie how her mum was still pretty, with brown hair and blue eyes like hers had once been; and with a lovely and kind nature to! She idolized her mum, and would never forget how she had cared for her, even if she had over-protected her as a child. It wasn’t hard to realize why her mum had long since stopped loving her father, and why they never ceased to agree, yet oddly they were still bonded together like the strongest glue.
However foolhardy it might seem to the townsfolk, Laura didn’t care about anything but her escape. In the morning it would be all over and she on a bus to London, where James would be waiting for her beneath the clock. Remembering as she sat on her single iron framed bed drinking her last mug of strong bitter cocoa that evening, James’ last words.
“Everyone will come to their senses eventually, darling. When they see how happy we are, they will let us go. I know my folks will be fine, but it's yours especially, your dad who needs to be a bit less pig-headed, I would say. It’s about time he realized that all I want is to take care of you, but running away seems like the only option left for us now. “So it was that early the next morning, Laura shivered in the cold biting wind. She heard a very familiar voice.” If you so much as step one foot onto that there bloody coach, then you needn’t bother coming home again….it was her dad….and he meant it!