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, and poor 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 to have money in the bank for the next month!” However what he omitted to say, as he prized with a screwdriver the battered rear van doors and the scared kids almost fell out onto the litter strewn street, was how he wished his daughter had been a son and then so much more useful. He was also resentful, to exploding point, how his daughter, who had run away, and now come back and unspoken asked for his help, and he wishing to say’ clear off’ but of course not daring to do so!
A toddler happily eating his squelching strawberry sandwich that slowly dripped onto his chubby knees, seemed precariously perched on the kerb close to their new next door neighbors bay windowed home, where a crowd of small children and a thin man with a pipe were peering carefully through the white fluttering nets, and a rinsed out milk bottle span in the strong winds. Thrusting his podgy hands with finger nails still stuffed with yesterday’s manure he took out a large silver key from his donkey jacket pocket, quickly realizing that this wasn’t the key he really needed. That was his own key to his own front door where his wife and Michael 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, dark and cold that separated one terrace house from another. “If you want the toilet Lass; its there; the first red door and it’s the one 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 one 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 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.
Then into the kitchen they all stumbled into an equally broken home, all stunned with what they saw and afraid of what might follow, but no-one really saying, just thinking as they climbed the eighteen narrow stairs to their beds. Perhaps, though, when the light came in the morning things might be so much brighter, for after all couldn’t a tramp also dream!
“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 wooly coat with a black velvet collar, up higher and tucking her goose bump legs beneath the snagged hem and loose threads catching in her unwashed toes.
In the 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 if looked at in a more detached way.
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 and mullioned windows very small overlooking terrace houses all around and frozen washing hanging heavy and phantom like on washing lines. And a dog tethered on a chain barking to be let in away from its cold ground, and yesterday’s cold ashes near to the coal bunker dead and done.

Moving towards hell
In earlier days, the village of Stanton extended further west towards Queens Cross. It had then been approached by a road past the Bell Inn, reputed to be the oldest established house in the country, and then onto the long meadow, which was now a sewerage farm where dear Nasal Drake still worked. Many of the old houses had been demolished, but in the valley of the village crumbling and leaning stonework and lose wires still stood and interiors of houses exposed where life and death had once been the meat of life, but all Esther could see was rubble and mess around her. The Town Crier, Dingy Underwood, had long since ceased doing his job of ringing loud his hand bell, which sat on a shelf now in his grandson’s grocery shop. Now he held onto memories of how, in the distant past, he proclaimed the news of birth, deaths and marriages which was something that the Telegraph local paper had done for years now.
In the past the doctor, vicar and business people, were all members of the council and so it was they who had run the everyday life of their town. Now though, things were very different, as folk got on with their lives. The school that Esther reluctantly was heading for had been established as a girls charity school in about 1714 where the poor girls, destined mainly as waiting/serving staff, were clothed and educated by Sir Gilbert Dolben, the lord of a nearby manor where grand lawns and a tennis court swept close to the river Ise where canal boats now dreamily drifted in the summer-time. Then, having moved through the main streets of the village, she cut through a back-way and passed the wheel-wrights property, Nightingale cottage and in the square the Temperance Hall whilst at the top of Laws Lane the War Memorial stood where so many towns folk had lost their lives, or so Esther had been told by her auntie with a nose for keeping abreast of the times, as well as rightly holding onto their past. Her feet lightly touched the pavement as she dashed by the co-op grocery dept then on the corner near the Conservative club a builder and over across the green a shoe factory where an elderly man with a beard sat on a low iron-stone wall tapping the tobacco from his clay pipe into the Quaker house grounds. Then on she hurtled past the farmhouse cum-public-house, then called the Gate Inn, and along the High Street. The seemingly pretty village was surrounded by countryside that consisted of Stanton Hall with its grounds and farms as well as iron stone pits and many of the houses she passed were made of mellow iron-stone. In that long High Street were many shops and businesses such as butchers, bakers, grocers, sweet shop.

Another place
"Have a good school day,” said their new, jolly, rotund neighbor, going to visit their mum as Esther tore down the dank tunnel following her equally displaced brothers into the street.
Spotting a rag and bone man in the distance, then with further wonder, they watched a child feed his horse sugar lumps and he was off with a clip and a clop and bump and rattle as the cart drew slowly away.
“I do hope they will like their new schools. I have heard so much about them from father, but people can be wrong can't they?”
Laura heard Magi strike yet another match, and the sickly smell of tobacco increase and built in her scullery as she stood and emptied bucketfuls of neat bleach down the plug hole. Trying to mask the smell of drains, or was it sewerage? She so much wanted to do everything right, intensely aware that the authorities interfere if anything goes wrong.
There was her mother and father aggrieved and simmering down the road, but also wanting to be seen to do the right thing in their tight caring community. Them with a daughter back with her tail between her legs and shabby lost kids to care for as they had already pointed out in Esther’s hearing. Several hours later, Laura pondered, as she felt her way down the street with her counting steps, noting gaps and steps and kerbs either high or low, and moving out from prams and scooters and bins, unaware of mini-skirts or bouffant hair and too sad to care about rock and roll on the 14 inch television at her father’s house.
Laura then headed toward the village green where her favorite aunt once used to live until quite recently. As she sat restlessly on the bench, in the middle of the green, she heard a quietly spoken voice which she recognized in a moment. It was Beth Williams.
“Deep in thought, Laura, that lovely young man of yours…James wasn’t it?”
Laura nodded and replaced her handkerchief into her jacket pocket. Beth reached out and touched Laura on her hands as they rested uneasily on her lap.
“I was so very sorry to hear of your loss. Mother wrote and told me just before I had finished my nursing training in Wands worth. I wish I could help you. Please ask, as you know where I am living now. Our cottage is three doors away from where you’re lovely Aunt used to live”
Sensing Laura’s discomfort she changed the subject clumsily. “I was just thinking, before you came along, how it was only a few years ago how Stanton’s tranquility was so suddenly shattered. Our family was down the Grove you know and simply drinking a cup of tea at the table in the scullery when our older brother swore he could hear the sound of a German plane. We all darted outside of course only to discover that he was right. A German plane was indeed flying very low right alongside Stanton Hall and near our cottage in Mill Lane.
“Yes, I know,” replied Laura, grateful for something else to talk about instead of how lonely and frightened she constantly felt. “If I remember correctly, auntie spoke of that in one of her letters. I can’t imagine how terrifying that must have been for you all.”
“Yes, Laura we had not the time to think or truly realize our fear till later. We just rushed out into the open fields. Then, as we lay there, it seemed just like the plane was heading right towards our cottage. But then, as it was flying overhead two Spitfires shot up almost vertically from beyond Holly Walk I believe. I remember then how they gained height, banked as polish men from below with hack guns opened fire on the enemy aircraft. I will never forget how we saw the tail guns slump. Then the plane seemed to roll over in midair and god how thick black smoke seemed to belch out. Simultaneously the Polish troops who were billeted in our field in tents about fifty yards away opened fire. We heard the stricken Dornier 217 veer right to the right and as it did so as trailing black smoke hung right over Stanton whilst it rapidly lost height finally crashing somewhere along the main road. I will never either forget the speed of the Polish soldier’s reactions. One moment they were laying flat on their backs sun-bathing and the next they were firing like there was no tomorrow. I recall how I could see the magazines flashing in the sun-light and emptying onto the ground at tremendous speed. Our neighbor, Mrs. Green was standing there wringing her hands, for only months before her young son, Michael, had been killed at Tobruck.”
Although desperate and alone it was necessary to remember that others had suffered losses much greater than hers in the past.
Laura’s ankles later just touched the flowering pathway of May and wild flowers jutting, stretching and stroking through the lattice fence next to the Church of England School where her contemporaries had once gone whilst she had been tearfully sent away to boarding school in Birmingham, presumably for the best!
What would have happened if James hadn't died, and where would she be and how Mrs. N was her neighbor and her home help and that was something else that needed sorting soon. Then she stood and listened careful with head moving left and right and left again and her short white stick tapping and out into what sounded like a break in the traffic on the A6 where traffic hurled and thundered heading North or South. Then later on her journey hands groping and fumbling in the dark running her delicate small fingers along the railings at the Recreational Park, as a child might do, continually wondering if she had gone and done the wrong thing and trying her best not to show tears for after all wasn’t she the head of their little family now? And leaders never ever cry on the icy, glacial and frosty stage do they? Now catapulted into a world where there were no soft words or gentle encouragement or a shoulder to lean on very quietly in the bowels of Stanton where it was said people kept themselves to themselves. Her father especially never wanting to feel that Laura had got the better of him in any dispute as he certainly felt he knew the world as it was, and she plainly didn’t, so if she didn’t heed him, then whose fault would that be, and she could go to hell!