Memories are made of this

Why?
Her grandpa would rarely visit their house of hell, as he was hard at work on the farm from dawn to dusk in winter, and in summer he would hire his expensive combine harvester to the farms close by. Esther would watch sadly from time to time as he poured corn into troughs of the hens that were cruelly stuffed with warm body touching warm body into wire cages. Not once seeing daylight until, their starry-eyes stayed blindly open and their necks wrung, he carried their still warm bodies across his wide shoulders like a stole, and just like the woman in the film brief encounters proudly wore her stole. Esther felt sick to her ankle socks as she stood there amidst their cries that echoed in that huge metal shed with a thick carpet of sawdust covering her ankle socks. They at that time, seeming far more trapped and cruelly treated than she might ever have been. Earlier that particular morning, she had been with her grandfather to his sister who lived in an Alms House in the main street in Mead Hurst, and was told by her grandfather that the strange looking thing she had carried into her scullery at the back of her cottage was a metal warming pan. This auntie walked with a stoop and carried a crooked stick, and was always advising Esther to count her blessings and to never ask for a piece of well-risen, freshly baked sponge, as she noticed Esther’s eyes bulging again.
She remembered, but of course didn’t say, how her Nan said she thought her grandfather’s sister believed sun shone from his arse! Esther wouldn’t know about that would she?
“Well I never did!” exclaimed her grandfather, in mock surprise, as he listened to his sister, who was proudly explaining how she had just bartered some of his hen eggs down at the local corner store, so could she have some of his eggs for free did he think?
Later, there on the farm, she saw such eggs, some destined for breakfast tables at the Savoy Hotel or for omelets at the Cozy Corner Café in their neighboring town. How Esther hated what she saw and wondered then, as she stood there, just why her grandfather didn’t see that to.
One of the laborers who toiled the acres of land they owned was quite a character with a rosy plump face, a wide moustache where earlier breakfast nestled and such lovely kindly blue eyes and his collarless shirt shifting up his oily dark back as he leant over the sty to check on the latest of piglets snorting and snuffling blindly at their mothers milky damp sweet nipples resting and drooping there. He would chew tobacco all day and talk of his love for folk music and tripe, which always made her shudder.
How could anyone manage to eat such slimy disgusting stuff and feel it slither down their throats like gutted eels? He would talk about how boys in the next town years since would make a lantern with a Swede with a lighted candle inside at Halloween, and make slits for its eyes, nose and mouth, and say how they blackened their faces and cheeks as they visited door to door.
“Tinker, tailor, ploughboy, only once a year, please give us an h’apenny you good old dear. If you haven’t got an h’apenny a farthing will do and if you haven’t a farthing-then God bless you.”
Esther thought, as she listened, how they would all be laughed out of town if they sang something like that, if they tried to deliver that little ditty now. Beyond the rolling, spreading fields, some old tin sheds stood and each of these buildings housed old threshing tackle as well as the steam plough and the cultivators. A saying she often heard then, was how neither wise men nor fools could work without tools!
When her grandfather did deign to visit them it wasn’t sadly to see how he might help his struggling blind daughter by perhaps bringing the shelves in her kitchen a little lower so that she didn’t have to reach up so far on her wobbly kitchen chair, or to help her to unclog the sink. Instead his visit was purely to ensure Esther had been doing the house-work. He had been kindly giving her half a crown each Saturday since she had been about eleven. Somehow, thereafter, homework became a poor second.
Meanwhile, all around her, The Beatles and Rolling Stones were belting out through open windows or Dickson of Dock Green with his ‘Good Morning All’ as he stood with his tilted helmet outside of Scotland Yard. Often, the trapped family failed to see a programme right through, as Joe would constantly turn off the television in an inebriated rage. And for a long time nobody dared to challenge him, but Esther was storing that up for later. So really, there was very little point in trying to put many coins in their coin operated television, as he, in his mindless inebriated fury, would order them to turn the television off. Otherwise he would hurl his pint mug through the screen. With countless window panes smashed, and over time boarded up, they all knew just how capable he was of carrying such threats out. With several of his mugs flying like flying saucers over their mum’s vinyl tablecloth, but at least they could see to duck whilst their mum could never do that. Yet as Esther grew older she was unable to control her anger, resentment and sheer desperation, as well as revulsion, as Bernadine’s lead smashed through the air almost daily when all her misdemeanor might have been was to move slightly in the corner where he kept her pinned in close to his brown brogue polished shoes, his beer bottles and pint glass as well as his Braille radio times and much later his talking book!
She didn’t know how she was to do it, but one day she would question this brutality and ask those that funded their guide dogs why more wasn’t done to protect them. It was surely true what was said, that bad things happened if good people did nothing to stop them, and so that would be her challenge and mission in the future. She would never turn her back and do nothing at all, but she would have to wait to grow up before she could do anything like that.
All of these things compounded daily as she heard her stepfathers footsteps as he walked over the cinder path, facing onto their narrow back garden, dragging his constantly faithful guide dog with him like a beaten toy with no feelings at all. Not once did she show her teeth as he beat her on their cinder path.
How Esther wanted him dead and that was not a good thing for a child to feel, as the thunder and lightning came and sheets of rain hit her window pane. After quickly pulling her shoes on, feet on cold floor, she opened the red back door and Bernadine frolicked free out in the snow drifts. A few moments later, she returned the tortured dog to the living room. Joe was still dead to the world. She quietly slipped her, with the snow-flakes melting onto her well-groomed coat, back into the corner again. He still didn’t rise from his stupor, as she clumsily and fearfully knocked his empty whisky bottle over onto the fag strewn hearth.
“I wish you wouldn’t take such risks,” said her mum, as she stood in front of a huge pan of lumpy porridge bubbling merrily on the stove.