Memories are made of this.... where it all started.

Our story should perhaps start here!

Laura drew her collar up against the cold, sensing the wind shifting slightly to the East.
“Stand clear, the train approaching platform 2 is a through train. Please stand clear.” The tannoy had a slight echo.
She lifted her head, listening to the remaining resonance; soon submerged by the murmur of other waiting passengers. To her left was the scrape of a boot on the platform, and a barked laugh. From far away she heard a car horn sound. How far was the road she wondered? She half turned, to hear more clearly, but then swung to the front again as she felt a slight touch on her shoulder. She recognized the voice of the kind young guard.
“You’ll be OK now, love. Here comes your friend, and what a lovely looking guide dog she has!” He tentatively reached out and gingerly placed Laura’s hand on her friend’s shoulder. She drew closer then felt the steam on her shins. The icy cold on her face.
“Thank you for your help, guard, but we will be fine now, won’t we Celia? After all, you are more used to this station than me I guess!”
A momentary silence followed whilst Celia took up the dog’s harness again, tussling with her sale bag bargains, her pet becoming, once again, her guide.
“You’re not kidding!”
There followed a walk of winding stops and starts in New Street as they encountered irregular pavements as well as various potholes. Laura heard and imagined pushchairs and prams, with vigilant or sleeping faces beneath well pulled up cellular blankets. Cycles with lights dimmed, heads erect, whilst Laura’s collapsible cane swept wide to the left and the right. Briefly, later, Laura touching Celia and gripping the back of her duffle coat hood, as they entered the pub where Celia announced.
“This is the place where I really first got myself sloshed!”
“Trust you, but I’m not a bit surprised to hear that. I guess your parents weren’t too pleased with you, and good job your guide dog wasn’t in the same condition!”
Giggling quietly, shoulder to shoulder, they sat at an oval, highly polished, table where stained table mats of the world they never saw stuck in juices. Moments later returning to their seats, jostling with elbows, heads bent low to do up shoe-laces. Some of the crowd they moved through, as they carried their slopping drinks, insensitively stopping to whisper and stare.
Oddly, they sensed this unthinking intrusion was happening. They hated people looking at them, or worse, feeling sorry, just wanting to be the same as everyone else. Maybe, because they were separated from their contemporaries at such a young age, there would be mistrust and doubt.
"Tricia really has opened up my world. She is fantastic and so obedient when working, but slightly tempted by cats. Come to think of it, one ran out in front of me when I was on the way to the cane workshop a couple of days ago.
I can sort you out can’t I sweetheart!” Celia bent slightly in the draughty pub to stroke her dog’s soft, warm coat. Laura smiled as the biggest sneeze broke the silence.
"If you blow your nose anymore, you'll make it bleed Celia!”
"I know. I couldn't eat that much at Christmas. You must surely remember how I always loved my food. What the heck are you laughing at now Laura?”
“How do you know I am laughing?”
"I can feel it,” said Celia, giggling.
“If you don’t watch out, you’ll be in trouble yourself, and I will have the same problem too. It's good to laugh though, and you don’t know how much I need some happiness just now. It’s great to chat to someone I can trust, like you!”
Neither viewed their blindness as a personal tragedy, yet they wished society’s view of disability wasn’t quite so entrenched. Laura, for instance, was grateful for her white cane, but still wished people would just appreciate she was just like them wanted love, as they did.

“We must have been eleven….do you remember Laura?”
Laura laughed, gently kicking Celia’s ankles with her sensible heeled shoes, as they sat there in the now quieting pub. Stupefied customers began to drift home into the cold thick smog of the city outside.
“Remember what Celia? You’re always going on off into your own little world, and I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about!”
“Sorry Laura, I am a chatterbox sometimes! I was just thinking back to when we went to
Secondary School aged eleven. We both panicked when we forgot our way to the science classroom. All the flipping narrow hallways felt the same, and our sticks provided precious little as to where the hell in the school we were. Two frightened blind kids, miles away from home, wandering aimlessly with our efforts at re-orientation, becoming less systematic by the minute. Near to tears, some smug soul came up from out of nowhere. What made those struggles so much more difficult was that she had been watching all along. I hope that made her feel really good!”
“There’s precious little we can do about that now,” said Laura, “but just hope things get better over time. Let’s not forget, that’s where we gained our independence, as well as our everyday living skills, and where might we be without them; certainly not sitting here now!”
“I know mate, but I just don’t think that the staff acknowledged just how bloody scared we all really were back then!”
It seemed, as they sat there, that some of the pain they felt was still rooted in their frustrations with how their
world viewed blind people like them. Perhaps neither at such early stages in their lives could appreciate how important eye-to-eye contact in relationships was to the sighted world! Also how insecure folk might feel; having scant opportunity to mix with disabled people. At least as they sat together, they were not alone.
There then followed a long and uncomfortable silence, shattered when the raucous barmaid with a runny nose (they had overheard somehow state) dropped a pint glass on the sawdust floor.
It was at his point that Laura broke news which she had been dying so long to share; a decision which would surely change her world!
“You know I'm eloping? But please god, don’t say to anyone just yet, not even your mum and dad. What time are they expecting us to be back did you say?”
What could Celia do to stop her from making what she firmly believed to be the biggest mistake of her life? However could blind people marry? And she felt as shocked as her parents would be when she told them her secret later that weekend!