Memories are made of this

Catching up
Esther stirred in her mum’s battered old rocking chair from which, after so many years, she still felt unable to be parted. Settling herself down at their pine family kitchen table, she began reading her deceased mother’s sad letter once more.

To my very dear children,
This is to say goodbye, and to thank you all for having me as your mum. You have made my life sparkle and burst with fun and brought me such joy, I want you to know that I love you all, and it’s been great to have you as my very own family.
I am crying as I type this letter, as I do not want to leave you all. But when I am dead, I do not want you to go around with long faces. Get on with your living whilst still remembering all the special times we have shared together, and I ask you try to let those sad times go. We all knew love with your own father didn’t we?
I do not know what else to say but just to thank you for opening up my world to see where darkness might forever have been.
Still the search
Over in the corner, the central heating clicked on. Behind her on the dining room wall of their snug home, the radiator gurgled and spluttered into action again. November would always remain the saddest of months, no matter how hard she tried to coast through with a smile on her face. Holding and touching softly with her right hand that crumpled and tear-stained typed letter, she wondered how her mum had managed to remain sane, pleasant and loving through so many difficulties. The day was darkening, and Esther checked her watch. Well, it was nearly five o’clock. Wrapping her cardigan around her she rose to switch on the light; drawing the heavy curtains. Her mother had actually been thrilled at the thought of November and celebrating the bangs and fizzes with those whom she called her little ones who dashed around her shouting,
“Nana, look!” whilst they whirled sparklers in front of her glass eyes. Esther felt restless; Arthur wouldn’t be back for another hour at least.
She checked the casserole in the slow cooker, glad for the gentle heat that greeted her and breathed in the smell of gently cooking lamb before replacing the earthenware lid. Yes, that would be nice and tender Arthur always appreciated traditional food, rather than her experimental stuff, which usually ended up in the bin, their kids eating fish fingers instead.
“Tea, that’s what I need”. always being what her mum had whispered as she shut herself away with her tea and sadness. The two little words ‘if only’ had dogged Esther throughout those years as she repeatedly whispered to herself
“Mum, how could you survive all that for us?”
The electric kettle was soon delivering a jet of steam before switching itself off. She reached down a mug from the cupboard Arthur had painstakingly made, but used an Earl Grey tea bag, with a just a dab of milk. It was strange how habits were passed down from generation to generation! She reflected and wondered how things might have been if her own dad hadn’t died as he had when she and her brothers were just small children, expecting his love to go on forever. At the thought of her own parents, she returned to the table. It was the anniversary of her lovely mum’s death. A box from their attic instead of an album opened in front of her, and for that, too, she was sad. Silly, really, to be so upset for, after all, how could cherished blind parents be expected to take photos or have any real value for such mementos?
Sitting down at the old scarred pine table she traced her mother’s typing with her forefinger whilst studying the battered photo again. In a flash she was transported back to the day that photograph had been taken, excitedly rushing home from Mead School, aware that she needed to keep clean instead of shinning up the trees; going straight home with her younger brother whom she’d met as usual outside Meads Infant school gates. There she was in the photograph standing cross-legged and wearing a green gingham dress in between her two brothers. Both boys in short corduroy trousers and sleeveless jumpers, their hands pushed into their pockets, probably oblivious why their pictures were being taken at all.
Esther had remembered what her mum had told her whilst she had been feeling her way round their kitchen and listening for the click of her own kettle as she had made their breakfast that cold fifties morning; with the threat of a nuclear war not so far from most peoples minds back then. Esther, for her part, could have no real idea what a nuclear war meant only that it made her mum cry whenever it was spoken about on the wireless in their living room.

Always so quietly proud of her mum, who was as loving and caring as any sighted parent might have been. In fact, it was essential that their parents did a first-rate job of parenting, otherwise their hard-fought-for little family at risk of being taken away and put into care at the whim of a social worker.
Their mum had written to the Daily Mirror all those years ago because she’d heard a report in another local paper about blind parents having their children torn from their care. Her mum had been so sad and wanted to do something to protest. Getting the national papers to visit and see for themselves how disability could, in part, be beaten was her brave gesture then. She had always been one for writing letters. The desperate irony was that the darkness that crashed through their lives for over twenty years was not her blindness but the cruel man that hung like a spectre in their squalid lives for more years than she wished to admit. Unable to continue delving further into her parents defiant past she shut the box for a while. There was sadness there, felt Esther, at the lost picture of her dad taken all those years ago, exacerbated by the fact it was the only photograph that she was aware existed of her and her own family. She had made many fruitless visits to Colindale Newspaper archives as well as Kew Records. Perhaps searching, dredging and filtering the past would put a full stop to the pain of the now and the cruel evil that had at low times bound frayed memories from moving on.
In her hands again was the only photo she owned of her mum with blind friends at a boarding school in Birmingham which she had been forced to attend for most of her formative years. There were exam papers in the box as well as hers and her three brothers’ birth certificates, but nothing at all relating to her own father. It was almost as if he had never existed and that was something Esther so wanted to correct. She hadn’t been able to answer her adult children’s curiosity about what exactly had been the matter with her father’s eyes.
In fact it was just after Christmas of 2007, as Esther was contemplating what she should do with an unwanted pair of gigantic knickers that she could now have fitted into twice, and a dress she would have needed to be shoe-horned out of, that her son approached her as she worked in her private space, writing her true story down.
“I’m sorry to ask this of you, Mum, but the hospital specialist at the maternity wing has asked about disabilities in either family, and I wasn’t sure why my Granddad had lost his sight or anything really, but I know how hard you have been trying to find his family and God knows how much you have paid in stamps”.
She yearned to know what her dad looked like as a little boy, certificates he might have won or even skeletons in the cupboard. She stood quickly, feeling a cramp in her calves and walked over to hug her son but, seeing him draw back at the sign of her affection, she held her hands beside her and sighed.
“All I know for certain, James is that the Nesbitt family came from the north of England somewhere”. That was another reason she needed to discover as much she could about her now long-since deceased dad and his family, not only for herself, but her son James and his pregnant girlfriend as well.
“Going now, muttered James waving back at her briefly from the top of their stairs before heading off to the pub. At that comment she smiled as she remembered that was what her dad used to say to her mum before making a bee-line for what he called ‘a swift half’. He, though, was just happy. One of the biggest mysteries, that even Esther was unable to comprehend, was how she had gone on to take care of her stepfather as she had. She turned, hearing Arthur’s car door slam, his quick footsteps as he strode along the back of the house. She was already smiling when he lifted the latch on the kitchen door and swept in, bringing the cold air with him. He latched it shut again. A quick stamp of his winkle-picker shoes on the coarse mat, and then he strode straight to her, bending to kiss her upturned face.
“You’re lovely and warm”.
“And you are bloody cold!”
He laughed, dragging off his scarf and coat; slinging it on the back of a reconditioned chair. His grey hair needed to be re-arranged to cover his pink scalp. Not exactly a man who had missed his vocation as a model. The only models he aspired to were of the metal variety. Esther sometimes wondered, if he had to make a choice, whether he would chose her rather than the Cortina with a pink roof' that of course people could spot from miles around. They could certainly not travel in incognito. She watched as he made his way to the kettle.
Moments later yelling to him, as he began to make his way down the garden to get some needed tools from his sturdy self-built shed, whose ordered and precise contents mirrored his needs in so many other ways. His tea was Tetley’s. Still she couldn’t quite understand how he could drink tea so strong that it might be mistaken for his recycled engine oil that he could stand his teaspoon up in and coat his robust stomach for ever more with.
“Can’t stand the flowery stuff!” he always joked; nor for it to look like washing-up water either!
With mug now half-empty she turned again to the box and the search. The scant things she already knew and could tell her son were that her father James Nesbitt was born in 1926 at Sunderland and his own mum Elizabeth in 1900. It might be difficult for people to understand the desperate need to have an identity and some knowledge of her earlier roots. As the years had flown there existed the constant feeling that out there was another part of her lost identity which, in fact, was why she would spend six years writing a local history book to celebrate the millennium year in Finedon. It had seemed a good idea at the time to record the lives of those with whom she had grown up, especially as she had got nowhere, then, with finding her own paternal roots. Of equal importance, however, was that burning desire to have just one photograph of her dad to grasp; for that would mean more than words might say.
Strange, being older, that desire had not dissipated but grown like a giant snowball. The millennium year had somehow fanned that dream along.