Esther drove down the colliery’s corridor-like terraces. She had decided to collect Aunt Betty first. That way, Betty could luxuriate the comfort of the front seat and Aunt Rose would have to relegated to the back like the family dog. It was a small conquest, but one that Esther knew her Aunt Betty would note and appreciate.
Esther’s own Phone Call of Dread had come the previous week when she had allowed herself to be bullied by Aunt Rose into visiting Aunt Dina in the countryside. Uncle Peregrine had been killed in a car crash the previous year, but Aunt Dina insisted on staying on in the old vicarage without him.
‘It’s simply madness. She needs a nice bungalow somewhere.’ Aunt Rose proclaimed down the phone. ‘I’ve arranged with your Aunt Betty for us to go for a weekend so we can check on her. You can take us. Your Uncle Duncan has gout and can’t drive.’
It was more of a summons than an invitation and had been issued with the unwavering resolution of a judge announcing a death sentence. Esther was powerless to refuse. Still, she had loved Aunt Dina and Uncle Peregrine and had spent many summer holidays with them as a child. After her mother’s death, Esther was packed off to stay with various aunts and uncles during the long school holidays while her father worked. Her brothers, who were deemed old enough to look after themselves, stayed at home. Esther was an evacuee, of sorts. Sometimes, her hosts, like Aunt Dina and Uncle Peregrine, were warm and kind and her stays were adventures into new worlds. Often her hosts were cold and disinterested, agreeing to look after Esther only out of a sense of guilt and familial obligation. Then Esther would retreat into the world of daydreams and imagination in order to survive the weeks. She bided her time. She accepted her fate without complaint or comment: the good weeks and the bad. Since her mother died she had developed a brutal fatalism. Some things you couldn’t change or fight. Sometimes you just had to let the waves take you.
As she drove to Aunt Betty’s, Esther thought about her summers at the vicarage. Aunt Dina had escaped the narrowness of life in the colliery by marrying Uncle Peregrine.
‘Dear girl, I am Uncle Peregrine NOT Uncle Perry. I was bestowed with the most brain-fuddlingly preposterous name but have resolved to wear it like a badge of honour.’
Dina and Peregrine had five children and lived in an old Georgian vicarage by the river in a lush and peaceful village. Life for Esther’s cousins had been very different to her own. They seemed to radiate confidence and good health. Their ponies and private schools gave them a robust, rosy-faced veneer that Esther knew she would never attain. They were so astonishingly grounded and hearty. Next to them she felt as thin as a silk dress. Now her cousins had grown and lived all around the world: they owned businesses, ran law firms, directed films. Esther’s brothers worked in the local car factory and she was finishing her final year reading English at university with no sense of what her place in the world would be. The difference was startling.
In Esther's memories, the vicarage rang with sounds of a plush and prosperous life in the country: a life from the pages of an Enid Blyton book, or Robert Louis Stephenson poem. It was a life in sharp contrast to the dour aridity of her own childhood. Years later, certain sounds had the power to instantly transport her back to the house so perfectly square and symmetrical it looked as if it had been crayoned by a child. First, there was the gratifying crunch of wheels on gravel as Uncle Peregrine steered his car round the long, curved driveway. There was the sound of Uncle Peregrine’s voice, polished and deep and sonorous; he was constantly singing, telling stories or reciting poems and ditties. Memories of Uncle Peregrine would be roused during Sunday night BBC adaptations of Dickens or Austen. He was there in the portly, ruddy faced squire or jovial clergyman. He boomed like a kindly foghorn, and his voice, its hubris and its certainty, became a great comfort to Esther. The sound that moved Esther the most though, was the call of wood pigeons. Esther’s home in the village was open to the elements, surrounded by wind-ravaged fields and tangled hedgerows. The vicarage was hidden, tucked up and protected by its blanket of woodland. Esther would listen to the wood pigeons’ song while she lay dreaming on velvet lawns under trees that gusted like sailing ships. There was something so elegiac, and so English about the call of a wood pigeon on a summer’s afternoon. It spoke of a decadent idleness: the possibility of a dream fulfilled.
At the end of the great, rolling lawns stood one of Esther’s favourite places at the vicarage: Peregrine’s beloved greenhouse. Dina cannot have failed to notice that it was bigger than the tiny terrace she grew up in. The greenhouse had a flaking green wooden frame decorated with curlicues and turrets. Esther would be sent inside to pick tomatoes and cucumbers for supper. She loved the greenhouse, the loamy smell of soil and the pepperiness of tomatoes. Norman and Fig, the family’s plump ginger cats, spent most of their days in the greenhouse, snoozing round and pumpkin-like in terracotta pots. There were shelves of dusty boxes full of seeds and thick glass bottles with labels so faded they were unreadable. On rainy days, Esther loved to take a book to the steamy greenhouse and curl into one of the painted wicker armchairs while the rain bounced off the glass like pearls from a snapped necklace.
Aunt Dina was a funny, madcap woman. There was something natural and unaffected about her. She was happy to spend her days in her husband’s old clothes, belted baggy tweeds and oversized shirts and frayed cardigans. Her haphazard appearance infuriated her sister, Rose.
‘All that money and she goes about like she’s cleaning out a chicken coop. I don’t understand it!’ Her whimsical lack of vanity was refreshing to Esther. With her tangled hair and paint-splattered plimsolls, Aunt Dina seemed like the chicest person Esther had ever met. Dina loved to paint. She used the vicarage dining room as her studio, ripping up the carpet and donating the silk curtains and mahogany table and chairs to the Salvation Army. ‘We eat in the kitchen anyway. It’s far cosier that way.’ As far as Rose was concerned this was further evidence of Dina’s unbridled lunacy. For Esther though, the studio was another jewel of the vicarage. She loved the way the liquid green light flooded the white room through huge sash windows and how the stripped wooden floor felt cool and smooth under her bare feet. The room was heady and resinous with the smell of oil paint and turpentine. The walls were covered with Dina’s enormous canvasses of bold, blowsy flowers. The room had the cool serenity of a place of worship, a place of sanctuary. The rolling lawns, the greenhouse, the studio: they suggested wealth and good-fortune. But more than that, they represented space and peace and the assurance of a rightful place in the world.
Esther had not been back to the vicarage in years. If Aunt Dina wanted to stay in her home, in the place she belonged, why shouldn’t she? Esther suspected that Rose was relishing an opportunity to bully and harangue and have her say. Rose, despite her ‘frailties’ had the tenacity of a terrier with a rat between its jaws. At least this time, Dina would not be facing her alone, she had Esther and Aunt Betty for emotional support.
Esther turned her ancient Ford Fiesta into the area of the colliery known simply as East. Here the terraces were not named but numbered. She was headed for Seventh Street, where Aunt Betty would undoubtedly be waiting, smart as a soldier outside her front door. The streets were narrow. When these houses were built, cars were a luxury for the well-to-do. They weren’t needed anyway; the colliery was designed to be a thriving, self-sufficient community. Though, three years after the closure of the pit, signs of neglect and decay were starting to materialise. It was hard not to notice the increasing number of windowless houses and the boarded-up shops on the main street that jarred like missing teeth in a once lovely smile. There was a tangible sense of a community sleepwalking, of hope and pride eroded.
Esther searched the signs for Twelfth Street. It had been her father’s childhood home, the place he grew up with Arthur, Rose and Dina. The colliery breathed softly, with the stillness of a mid-week morning. Esther had only passed three people on her journey: two dog walkers and an elderly lady laden with Co Op shopping bags. When she got to Twelfth Street though, it seemed to hum with activity. Esther was intrigued. She pulled the car into the side of the road and looked up the long, narrow street. At the very top, she saw a police car parked, its blue lights flashing. Around the car, people were gathered in small, whispering groups. One woman seemed to be crying inconsolably, waving her hands in the direction of one of the houses. The scene made Esther think of the secrets and scandals of a school playground: the gossipy cliques huddling and muttering, the solitary awkward observers dawdling at the margins, the flocks of gawkers who would descend like birds of prey to pick at someone’s misfortune or humiliation. It was a darkly unsettling scene somehow, but Esther didn’t have time to waste. Aunt Betty would be waiting.
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