Memories are made of this

When kindness slipped away
“Hi, Esther.” It was Uncle Amos who was quick in mind, but with no dress sense at all. It was said his underpants were fixed together by safety-pins.
He was just popping his miniature dog into the basket of his Rundles bike. He loved that dog, and it went everywhere, until one day his loving daughter arranged for it to be put down whilst he was recuperating in hospital from a small stroke. Kindness could be found in unsurprising places, it always seemed to her as a child.
“I thought the Scouts were at the Town Hall tonight.” He shuffled uneasily. Whatever he did, it was always like he was hatching fresh plans, which his wife might never discover until it was too late! Esther, wanting to get the deed done, laughed nervously whilst at the same time pushing her brownie uniform and brown beret further inside her small cloth bag.
“I am not a Brownie anymore!”
“Oh,” he replied, adjusting spectacles, “you are surely not big enough for Guides just yet!”
No reply.
Sensing Esther would not be divulging anything else he bade her ‘Goodnight’, lifted his brogue shoe to the pedal, and pushed down hard. Settling his generous backside onto the less generous saddle, he was away down the hill whistling a tune about love.
As the church clock had just struck six, it figured that as a rule the High Street would be emptying now. She peered along and down to the end of Plackets Yard, half expecting to see at least one of her Aunt Rose’s strays. Most nights she could be found unwrapping wet, sticky, smelly newspaper leaving ink on her white cotton gloves. Casting on the ground a pot puree of fish heads and tails as well as other scraps she had obtained from her full larder. No cats or kittens in sight, so Esther continued reluctantly on past the Tudor Gate then Richford’s cut price shop whilst at the same time rehearsing what she might say to Brown Owl.
Moments later however her rehearsal didn’t come out just as she had planned.
“I am so sorry Miss. Mum and my stepfather has stopped me and my brother going anywhere this weekend after you told them what we had done.”
“Oh.”
Brown Owl didn’t seem surprised, as she twisted the strings on her apron and sighed.
“It wasn’t nice at all what you said Esther. In fact I was more than a little shocked. I know a lot has happened to you lately but that is no excuse for such rudeness as I encountered from both of you on Thursday night.”
Esther sensibly didn’t respond but, as already instructed by her stepfather and mum to do, handed her borrowed brownie uniform back to the ample figure that stood there in front of her on her old cottage door-step.
“Thank you, Esther.”
As Esther was struggling with her front gate with the broken catch wise brown owl closed her door and then pulled her sitting room curtains to as her ex-brownie walked anxiously and sadly away.
With no particular hurry to return home to more of the same, she decided to take the long route home and head for curtains sweet shop, where she treated herself to four ounces of coco-nut mushrooms. Her biggest mistake was not that she did anything but run when her brother shouted ‘Fat Brown Owl’ as they had been taking a short cut through the jetty at the rear of Allen Road working men’s club.
On the way home later, she spoke to kindly Kit who lived in the next street with her husband and their family. Frank was a hard working man, and a shoe maker with a workshop at the bottom of their long garden, which faced onto wide open fields, where lay glistening leaves and whispering branches. It seemed incongruous that whilst such a life as theirs was played out in dimly lit rooms lighting grimy wallpaper where cigarette smoke and blind fingerprints spread waist high, and them with no hot water for over eighteen months.
Outside these doors was a world of plenty it seemed then. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, on the cover of every newspaper Esther delivered throughout their town, or later the death of Winston Churchill and the somber pageant played out. The Tories were hated inside her own house. She couldn’t understand the poor folk on the other side of the road, who worked all the hours God sent, yet despite remaining in poverty, voted Conservative with blue posters slapped dead centre of their casement bay windows. Perhaps it gave them self-esteem, thought Esther, as she shoved their Sun newspaper through their letter-box as their mongrel dog barked from upstairs and the youngest of their five children yelled from her bed for it to ‘bloody belt up and let them get more sleep!’
It was bitterly cold, and Esther with pure enchantment with her empty newspaper bag, she walked back past Banks Park where frozen webs and candle droplets clung and covered the screen of the tennis courts. She watched and jumped in delight as her green rubber Wellingtons left the very first footsteps and imprints of the day, and in the distance the church clock struck. Out there in that ordinary world were the things that made her feel special, and although she couldn’t see him or touch him, God and goodness was out there. But yet she couldn’t understand why Uncle Joe was as he was, or why he had to live with them. For after all, they hadn’t chosen that had they? And if she could have, she would have dreamt him dead.
Esther and her mum had just arrived back to their house of shame and distress, after going to visit Bill Pool and returning with a heavy bag of shopping. Always bought on tick, and items stored away in a little red book at the back of the Co-op managers till. There he was though, still shouting obscenities that usually began with ‘f’, but this time at her youngest brother Andrew who, with tousled hair and sleep filled eyes, had omitted to close firmly the sitting room door. The day previously he had shared his warm and generous language with, “Were you born in a f….in field boy, shut that f…ink door,” when he had attempted to bring in his friend Mick, who lived in one of the cottages at the bottom of the Lane with his mother. Unsurprisingly, this friend didn’t call again. Their world of friendships had become increasingly diminished as friends tended to visit just the once whilst they became increasingly aware of the poverty they languished unbidden in.
Meanwhile, their stepfather, fuelled by state money, allowed unhindered the luxury to spend the family’s money on cigarettes and drink. Repeatedly Esther wondered, as she opened the hall door each morning and witnessed the beer bottles and spirits piled higher than the tallest bucket and spade mountain, just how her gentle mum could have married such a man. Why were they forced to live with such a hard, bitter and totally controlling man, who only left them to drink and returned broken late at night to smash their self-esteem away?
They would always be an encumbrance to his plans to drink and drink again, with one drink re-enforcing the need for the next to stultify his tormented mind and feelings and, indirectly, his step-children’s emotional growth. To cry them blind wouldn’t help, yet they did. Nor his new wife Laura wringing her hands, which she also did, and advising them to be quiet as mice, which she also did, seemed to sadly have any mark at all on his desperate insanity, and his absence of tender conscience. If only religion had been the tool to lift him out of the hole he had dragged them all into, yet a million ringing of bells, sweeping of clerics cloaks and cloying incense wasn’t sadly the sticking plaster which made things better for them all.