Memories are made of this

Falling in line
Luckily Esther, unable still to weep away the pain of her father’s loss, had noticed a huge dollop of bright strawberry jam on her navy and white anorak. Good job she had spotted that soft sludgy mess before going into the school gates that clanged and banged against a yellowish stone wall, causing the lady in the adjoining mellow stone cottage to look up quite startled and drop her embroidery and needle onto her lap.
Esther had such a sweet tooth and couldn't resist earlier going into Mona's cake shop for a jam doughnut again, now with sugar on her fingers and in her hair to verify this. How it would have been delightful to stay in that old shop with its big till and row upon row of cakes and buns, rather than at a school that sounded little better than hell.
Then she was there and away from her dreams and terrors into the school-yard where Miss B looked every bit as stern and scary and in her hand was a long cane that swung beside her pretty dress ominously.
That morning she had stood like a cardboard cutout in lines out in the tarmac playground. A hand bell rang and then Esther reluctantly falling onto the end of the sorry straggly long line, as girls using strange sounding words, like peps, pop, chops, gal, wunt, dunt, shent, kent and such like, went into their respective classes. She sat wedged behind one of the long wooden desks each with an inkpot. Taking up her pen with a sharp nib she had began to write her name in clumsy, frightened, child-like scrawl on her first blue exercise spelling book. Discovering how she had a particular skill of covering most of her school work as well as her surroundings with smatterings of inky fingerprints.
The school mistress walked slowly and menacingly forward and back, finally sat on a wooden dais where she asserted her authority absolutely. A good ten minutes of that morning was spent learning her tables by rote. It was of no surprise to realize why most girls were petrified of this particular teacher, or why there were so many reluctant pupils in her class. One only had to take one long look at her vision to realize that this vision created fear that spilt very easily away from the class and her secure helm where she strutted or sat in all her fat and low cut dresses, year in year out.
"It's her. Look it’s her. That strange girl I was saying about just saying about, what a scared cat.”
“I hit her real hard with a bloody stick that I had just got from the pits. Stupid idiot just told me to hit her again, something about the bible and turning the other cheek, so I thwacked her harder, and do you know silly cow did nothing back? Just ran home to her ma to tell on me, I expect, and her with her dad dead.”

Their mum’s first pen-friend
Some months later, as spring flowers bent in the breeze, Esther’s youngest brother dragged his shabby plaster covered knee over the playground gravel. Esther’s swing soared higher, the wind making her ears tingle as she hung so tightly to the rusty chain that it hurt. “I can see the water tower and the tennis courts and a weetabix lorry.”
"I didn’t like the look of him not a bit like our daddy. Bad tempered bloke never spoke to us did he, or smiled and always wanting us to run errands for him, or play in the street for fresh air he said...”
"But!”
"But what sis...split. Tell us?”
"I don't know if I should say. It’s a secret. Mum told me when you were out playing!”
"Come on sis,” shouted Andrew, as he leapt fearlessly from the still spinning round-about, almost falling on the gravel as he leapt and standing wobbly and proud.
"Belt up you two and let me tell you. Or perhaps you don't want to know? Anyway,” Esther continued, mummy told me as we sat listening to the afternoon play. She said that the posh man didn't much like kids and in fact he hated them so we would have to go to boarding school miles and miles away from home. She said she wasn't having that though. She told him to take his posh car and chauffeur and not come back this way again."

It was after the long summer school holidays and they were all back at the Victorian Railway Station. The children’s newly widowed, blind mum, unaware of freshly painted white emulsion walls, hurriedly done in preparation for a dignitaries visit the following day so the local newspapers had widely proclaimed. A tramp withdrew from a metal grimy sticky bin, a tea stained newspaper whilst plastic flower baskets swung at varying intervals along the platform. Esther’s younger brothers, both twirling bags of marbles and laughing.
"Oh...why do we have to meet this man mum?”
“You don't have to worry, Esther. He does sound lovely in his Braille letters, and he is always saying how he loves kids and that he is really looking forward to meeting you all,” whispered Laura their now lonely and sad mum.
"Joe you mean?”
“Yes, Joe!”
“We are all fine on our own and we have some nice relatives to help us and I wish Nana Coventry would write back to us.” Esther’s eyes then scanned the platform, as feet and bags swung out into the cold air and the exiting, exhilarating steam. Esther spotted Joe and his guide dog striding towards them. Instantaneously she felt sick.
"There he is!" shouted Andrew. “I can see him, and look at his big guide dog. You didn't say he was old though did you mummy?”
"Ssh, don't be rude, Mark. Try to be quiet for once, and just stay quiet when he is close, and then I can say hello. You two boys try to be good for mummy and maybe you can stop up later tonight!”
Suddenly Laura spoke with urgency, hearing her children’s footsteps approaching the platforms edge. “Keep away from the railway line and get closer to the wall. However many more times do I have to tell you how dangerous that is?”
Laura then shivered with fear and doubts as she stretched out her left arm into the cloud like cold drizzle and damp air. “Of course he's not like your daddy, Esther, but daddy is dead and we have to try to go on don't we?”
“Hello Joe,” said their mother, as she reached out and found the strangers hand. She faltered and then spoke in the vague direction of his cold face and dripping nostrils. “I have been looking forward to meeting you. I think I know so much about you from your lovely long Braille letters. You must be tired after that long journey of yours from Durham though?” Stooping slightly, he pecked her on her pale cheeks and they began to walk back along the busy platform, whilst Esther and her brothers lagged behind the man with the guide dog. Tugging fearfully at the choker of his Alsatian guide dog, which choked whilst he bellowed so full of anger and contempt, it didn't seem quite right. After all, their daddy hadn't been dead more than eighteen months and then she thought how she hadn't been back to the cemetery in Essex since he was buried.
But it was a very long way to go wasn’t it? Then her mum dropped her arm from where it had been just linked through his and snapped. “I told you not to bring that ball, you two. It’s just not safe in this busy place, and you are not in the close now. Where is it and give it to me now?” Then Esther’s brothers pleaded to keep the ball as they bent in the gutter.
“Do as your mother tells you lads. Anyway, better still give the damn ball to me right this minute!” The stranger, with loose fitting teeth and liquorices stick wrists, held out his small nicotine hand and in that very moment Esther noted how his voice had changed.
Obediently, and shocked, they handed over the ball and he hurled it over some sharp green painted railings and it landed in yard where a man was loading sacks of coal into his truck. He looked across at them all, but said nothing. Somehow Esther noticed how vigorously the man with the flat cap and black donkey jacket was shaking his head. The church clock was just striking nine as they returned back up the hill and Valentine’s only material shop on the edge of the town was just opening up. An assistant was tugging out a huge roll of bright red material from the double fronted window display.
“He’s a nice man," whispered her brother as his fingers undid a cellophane wrapper from boiled sweets brought moments before from confectioners. Esther stood there with them at the bus stop on Welling borough Road. Did he really think buying her a bag of jelly babies would make her like him?
She hoped so desperately that the week-end would pass quickly and he then back on the train with his return ticket to Durham forever. The Nesbitt family, however, soon discovered that dreams didn’t always become a reality. At the end of the week it wasn’t that way at all.
Laura felt like she was grasping stone.
No warmth there. And she felt his saliva run from her cheeks onto her slim neck and she felt sick. Perhaps love would grow, given time. Laura did hope so, as she whispered the evening after as they sat on the vinyl settee.
“I think it’s a most wonderful idea for us to get married, and doesn’t it make sense with us being lonely people and all!” In reality she felt as cold as stone and sick to her stomach, but it did seem a way out, and he was someone who might help her with the burdens of life, and maybe take away some of the loneliness she felt day in day out.