Memories are made of these

Still the search
Over in the corner, the central heating clicked on. Behind her on the dining room wall of their snug home, the radiator gurgled and spluttered into action once more. Esther felt such sadness within her. November would always remain the saddest of months, no matter how hard she tried to coast through with a smile on her face. Holding and touching softly with her right hand that crumpled and tear stained typed letter, she wondered how her mum had managed to remain sane pleasant and loving throughout the cruelty her blind second husband Joe had metered out.
Hell had hung heavily much longer than anyone could ever appreciate. The day was darkening, and Esther checked her watch. Well, it was nearly five o clock. Wrapping her cardigan around her she rose to switch on the light slowly moving to the window which overlooked their long council house garden drawing the heavy curtains to. Her mother had actually been thrilled at the thought of November and celebrating the bangs and fizz’s with whom she called her little ones who dashed around her shouting, “Nana look!” Whilst they whirled sparklers in front of her glass eyes! Esther felt restless. Arthur wouldn’t be back for another hour at least.
She checked the casserole which was in the slow cooker glad for the gentle heat that greeted her and breathed in the smell of gently cooking lamb before replacing the earthenware lid. Yes, that would be nice and tender and Arthur always appreciated traditional foods rather than her experimental stuff, which usually ended up in the bin, and their kids eating fish fingers instead. She didn’t feel a bit like eating now and she was certain he wouldn’t either. It was so difficult to understand how someone could lay dead so long and they in the rest of the street know nothing about it until the zealous reporter had called. She straightened.
“Tea, that’s what I need,” always being what her mum had whispered as she shut herself away with her tea and sadness momentarily secure in their outdated shabby kitchen with shelves out of reach high above her head and so her forever clambering and reaching for saucepans or the colander. The two little words “If Only” had dogged Esther throughout those years as she repeatedly whispered to herself “Mum, how could you?” The electric kettle was soon delivering a jet of steam before switching itself off.
She reached down a mug from the cupboard Arthur had painstakingly made but used an Earl Grey tea bag, with a just a dab of milk. It was strange how habits were passed down from generation to generation! She reflected and wondered how things might have been if her own dad hadn’t died as he had when she and her brothers small children crazily expecting his love to go on forever. At the thought of her own parents, she returned to the table. It was the anniversary of her lovely mum’s death. A box from their attic instead of an album opened in front of her and for that too she was sad. Silly really to be so upset for after all, how could cherish blind parents be expected to take photos or have any real value of such mementos?
Sitting down at the old scarred pine table she traced her mother’s typing with her forefinger whilst studying the News of the World battered photo again. In a flash she was transported back to the day that photograph had been taken, excitedly rushing home from Mead School aware that she needed to keep clean instead of shinning up the trees going straight home with her younger brothers Mark and Andrew whom she’d met as usual outside the infant school gates. There she was in the photograph standing cross legged and wearing a green gingham dress between her two brothers. Both boys in short corduroy trousers and sleeveless jumpers their hands pushed into their pockets probably oblivious as to why their pictures were being taken at all.
Esther had remembered what her mum had told her whilst she had been feeling her way round their kitchen and listening for the click of her own kettle as she had made their breakfast that cold fifties morning. Always so quietly proud of her mum, who was as loving and caring as any sighted parent might have been. In fact, it was essential that their parents did a first rate job of parenting, otherwise their hard fought for little family were at risk of being taken away and put into care at the whim of a social worker. Their mum had written to the News of the World all those years ago because she’d heard a report in another local paper about blind parents having their children torn from their care.
Her mum had been so sad and wanted to do something to protest. Getting the National papers to visit and see for themselves how disability could in part be beaten was her brave gesture then. She had always been one for writing letters. The desperate irony was that the darkness that crashed through their lives for over twenty years was not her blindness but the cruel man that hung like a specter in their squalid lives for more years than she wished to admit. Unable to continue delving further into her parents defiant past she shut the box closed for a while. There was though sadness there felt Esther as the lost picture of her dad taken all those years ago by the News of the World exacerbated by the fact it was the only photograph that she was aware existed. She had made many fruitless visits to Colindale Newspaper archives as well as Kew Records. Perhaps searching, dredging and filtering the past would put a full stop on the pain of the now and the cruel evil that had bound them like frayed memories from sometimes moving on.
In her hands again was the only photo she owned of her mum with blind friends at a boarding school in Birmingham where she had been forced to attend for most of her formative years. There were exam papers in the box as well as hers and her three brothers’ birth certificates but nothing at all relating to her own father. It was almost as if he had never existed and that was something Esther wanted so to correct. She hadn’t been able to answer her adult children what exactly had been the matter with her father’s eyes. In fact it was just after Christmas of 2007, as Esther was contemplating what she should do with an unwanted pair of gigantic knickers that she could now have fitted into twice, and a dress she would have needed to be shoe-horned out of that her son approached her as she worked in her private space writing her true story down.
“I’m sorry to ask this of you mum, but the hospital specialist at the maternity wing has asked about disabilities in either family, and I wasn’t sure why my granddad had lost his sight or anything really, but I know how hard you have been trying to find his family and god knows how much you have paid in stamps.” She yearned to know what her dad looked like as a little boy or certificates he might have won including skeletons in the cup-board. She stood quickly feeling a cramp in her calves and walked over to hug her son, but seeing him draw back at the sign of her affection she held her hands beside her and sighed. “All I know for certain James is that the Nesbitt family came from the North of England somewhere.” That was another reason she needed to discover as much she could about her now long since deceased dad and his family not only for herself but her son James and his pregnant girlfriend as well.
“Got to see a man about a dog” muttered James as he waved at her briefly before heading off to the pub, at that comment she smiled as she remembered that was what her dad used to say to her mum before making a bee line for what he called “a swift half.” He though, was just happy, unlike the man that all but crushed them after their father’s untimely death. One of the biggest mysteries, that even Esther was unable to comprehend, was how could she have gone onto take care of her stepfather as she had done, and not for one year but many. She turned, hearing Arthur’s car door slam, his quick footsteps as he strode along the back of the house. She was already smiling when he lifted the latch on the kitchen door, and swept in bringing the cold air with him. He latched it shut again. A quick stamp of his winkle-picker shoes on the coarse mat, and then he strode straight to her, bending to kiss her upturned face.
“You’re lovely and warm,” he said.
She grinned. “And you are bloody cold.”
He laughed, taking his scarf off as he turned to the door, hanging it, and his secondhand coat, on the peg on the back of the door. Droplets of mist clung to his grey hair. His suit was creased from the long drive back from Northampton, which is where his firm had their head office and where he worked as a draughtsman although now more C.A.D work which he first swore he would never do. She watched as he made his way to the kettle. ‘It’s still simmering,” moments later yelling to him as he began to make his way down the garden to get some needed tools from his self built sturdy shed that’s ordered and precision contents mirrored his needs in so many other ways. His was Tetley’s. Still she couldn’t quite understand how he could drink tea so strong that it might be mistaken as his recycled engine oil that he could stand his teaspoon up in and coat his robust stomach for ever more with.
“Can’t stand the flowery stuff.” He always joked; nor for it to look like washing up water either! With mug now half empty she turned again to the box and the search. The scant things she already knew and could tell her son were that her father James Nesbitt was born in 1926 at Sunderland and his own mum Lucy Esther in 1900. It might be difficult for people to understand the desperate need to have an identity and some knowledge of her earlier roots. As the years had flown there existed the constant feeling that out there was another part of her lost identity which in fact was why she had spent six years writing a local history book to celebrate the millennium year in Stanton. It had seemed a good idea at the time to record the lives of those she had grown up with especially as she had got nowhere then with finding her own paternal roots. Of equal importance however was that burning desire to have just one photograph of her dad to grasp for that would mean more than words might say.
Strange being older, that desire had not dissipated but grown like a giant snowball one winter after another in time to the now. The Millennium year had somehow fanned that need along and no longer would there be a shame in entering fusty records offices if you were under fifty or had ribbons in your hair. She wasn’t particularly clever or gifted, but was determined that come hell and high water she would get her true story out there somehow.