Memories are made of this

When the Queen visited
Esther excitedly took her mum’s arm.
“Hurry up, Mum...or we will miss her!”
They walked regally arm-in-arm through the crowds now forming. Then to Tower Close and down to the traffic lights at the bottom of the A6 hill, which was where the Queen’s car was (the designated route) for her to pass through on her way to Rushden, where she would be opening a hall, and then on to a banquet.
“Can you see her now?”
“No, Mum, not yet....but wait, in the distance I see a motorbike, police bikes and then great posh and shiny cars and them with the Union Jacks at the front. Yes it’s her, it’s the Queen ...and she’s waving, Mum, and she smiled at us...now she’s gone...up the hill...she looks older than I thought, and smaller too, with hair as grey as yours, Mum!”

“Why do you stop with him, Mum?” she asked suddenly, “You don’t have to. We are all bigger now and we will help you. He’s getting worse, you know. Is this what you want for the rest of your life? Joe will run you into the ground if you let him”.
“Where will I go if I leave him and I have nothing; and, don’t forget, he is a Catholic? So I will never be free, will I? At least we can get out for walks now and days in London. You remember the reading competition that I won only weeks ago, and a cup too!”
“Of course I remember, Mum, but how can you concentrate to read when he yells and screams and slams the door as he does? We can’t watch any programme on the television. If it’s not the coins running out in the meter, it’s him switching the thing off for something we are supposed to have done”.
“It might not be his fault. You know he was sent away to boarding school for the blind when he was only small, and the nuns there weren’t always very kind. Having his eye ripped out by a stone thrown by a kid, when he was ten, must have been awful then you remember how I told you a while ago how the other eye became infected, so both eyes had to be removed”.
Laura tried to justify his badness whilst cling onto her earlier memories she had of him, when he wrote her those beautiful love-letters in Braille, her so alone and depressed, still, from the loss of James.
Esther chose not to say, but thought how her own dad had lost his sight and the battles he’d faced, but that hadn’t turned him bad and into someone full of hatred.
“Shall we get some coconut mushrooms from Curtain’s before we go home, Mum, do you think?”
Laura did a swift mental calculation and realized that there would not be enough money to pay for sweets as well as beer for Joe, so they passed by the sweet shop without stopping, her saying “I must get back to sort his tea out I am twenty minutes late already!

Fifteen minutes later, she carried her little red book, first into Jones’ General Store where she placed in her tartan trolley, the beer bottles that rattled much louder than the loudest alarm clock, then across to Underwood’s for her fresh vegetables for that day.

Out of that same door walked a man who stepped aside as he saw her approaching the threshold whilst hurriedly pushing the adapted cycle which he used to sharpen knives in the area. Esther couldn’t remember him ever knocking their door, although gypsies called from time to time selling pegs or, in springtime, flowers from local hedges.
Someone who did make frequent visits in their street was the pack-man who rapidly helped most to get people into debt and then hammered furiously on a few of the same doors to get his hard-earned money and higher interest back in a money bag secured around his waist.

Surely they would both have preferred going home to any other house in that sixties street than number 47; where years of misery and control seemed to stick to the walls.