Storyteller - Colin & Anne Brookfield (ebook and pdf reader .txt) 📗

sandwich. “Are we to expect an announcement soon? Is there to be an engagement ring in the offing or did blue eyes give you the elbow?”

“Quite finished have we Alf?” retorted Janet. “As a matter of fact, Stan and I seem to be suffering from double delusions. He saw the girl, and in the same chair I saw a strange little old lady. So there you are, you’re up to speed Alf.”

“I don’t know how you two manage all this, but I’ve got a gut feeling we’re going to hear more about this matter, so I’ve jotted my phone number down in case we don’t meet again. Call me if something follows through on this story.”

On reaching home, they didn’t mention the peculiar happenings to their parents or friends; it didn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out the sort of jibes that would inevitably follow and there were of course, more important matters to be dealt with.

Their grandmother had offered to pay for a holiday for both of them to New Zealand, and to take something to her daughter, their Aunt Alice in Auckland. Their suitcases had already been half packed for several days; it had been one of the reasons Janet hadn’t previously wanted to partner Stan to the dance.

“I’m much too busy doing other things,” she had protested at the time.

“Tickets, documents and money are in an envelope on top of your cases,” they heard their mother shout from another room, “Write our surname SWIFT on the case labels, and don’t forget some comfortable shoes for walking.”

The household was up with the lark the following morning, rushing around and getting in each other’s way. Nobody could get any peace, even at breakfast.

“Of course,” remarked their father as they tried to eat, “When I was young, London Airport wasn’t posh like it is now. Hounslow Heath Airport, as I called it, was just a bunch of old army Nissan huts scattered about. There was a run down scrap yard on the left of the main entrance as you drove in off the Bath Road – much more efficient though in those days before the modern rot set in.”

A distinctive groan echoed around the table; their mother’s eyes rolled upwards and she swayed in a pretend swoon. That broke the ice and everyone fell about laughing.

“I haven’t quite finished,” their father chipped in, “because, I was talking about matters to do with aircraft. I just thought you’d like to know that your mother’s grandmother, Molly, was mixed up in that sort of thing in the old pioneering days – you know – at the very beginning of the wood and canvas flying machines. She was quite a success from all accounts. They used to call her ‘Molly the Lark’, because she also had a beautiful voice, but much preferred the air to having her feet on the ground. She should have given it all up before she was eighty, but of course, she didn’t and it finally killed her. The newspapers in 1933 headlined it as, ‘The wings of the Lark are lost, its voice no longer heard’. It was disclosed later at the investigation, that it was a structural fault in the aircraft, that had caused the fatal crash.”

This brought a hush to the table.

‘Poor Molly’ and ‘how terrible’ seemed to be on everybody’s lips at the same time.

“Why have we never heard of this before?” enquired Janet.

“Come on you two,” reminded their mother, “the taxi will be here in a minute. Don’t forget to call at my mother’s house on the way to the airport, she has something to give your Aunt Alice when you get to New Zealand, and make sure you pay your way, my sister is not wealthy. Another thing, your father and I are still not happy saying our goodbyes from home and not the airport. I can’t understand why you young people are frightened to be seen with ‘mummy and daddy’ at the airport in front of your friends.”

As the taxi driver pulled up outside the address they gave him, he asked them to ‘make it quick’ because they were short of time. It took a couple of minutes before their grandmother opened the front door to them.

“Hi Gran!” they chortled together. “Must rush, the taxi’s waiting and we believe you have something for us to give to Aunt Alice in Auckland.”

Within a few minutes they were climbing into the taxi again.

“Bye Gran! Catch up with you when we return from our holiday,” and they went off with a last wave from the taxi window.

There were a few grumbles at the airport from Janet.

“A gentleman would carry the heaviest case,” she moaned.

“I told you not to put so much junk in it, so it’s your problem.” replied Stan, which was not the answer she’d hoped for.

When they eventually located the Departures desk, they found some seats and had to wait a while for Check-in to open.

Sometime later, as Stan and Janet’s parents were having lunch at a nearby restaurant, they overheard voices from a nearby table.

“How awful!” one voice was heard to say, “that plane crash today with all those poor people going on holiday to New Zealand.”

Mr. Swift placed his hand on his wife’s arm; his face was deathly white as he rose to his feet and helped his wife to the door. They would never know how they managed the short distance to their house, but the lights were on, and should not have been. Mr Swift fumbled for ages with the keys. At last, the key found the right place and the door swung open.

A second later he fell to the floor, having tripped over two cases. Janet rushed out of the lounge towards the front door to find out what the noise was. She was just in time to catch her wavering mother. Stan helped his father to his feet then it all went quiet, as they held on to one another. Eventually they made their way into the lounge, but something was very wrong. They had expected their parents to be very annoyed with them for not taking the flight; instead, their emotional state was saying something entirely different.

It wasn’t until their father put the wireless on, that they discovered that the aircraft they were supposed to be on had crashed on take-off to Rome, the first leg of the journey. Janet and Stan fell into one another’s arms and she wept.

“We never knew that it had crashed,” stammered Stan as he sat his sister down. “We have so much to tell you.”

“It’s rather a long and incredible story, so I’ll make some tea and we can explain everything.” added Janet, gaining her composure.

Their parents were rather confused as Stan and Janet’s story opened up with the strange blue-eyed girl, and the funny old lady at the Palais.

“What on earth has this got to do with this horrible air crash?” uttered her exasperated mother.

“It’s all part of what’s happened,” Janet stressed, “it all started there, and it finished as we were waiting to go through Check-in.”

Then Stan related the whole story of how he saw, and was besotted with the beautiful girl at the Hammersmith Palais, and how Janet had seen an old lady sitting in the same seat that he was looking at. By now their parents were looking even more perplexed. He finished the tale up to where he and Janet were at the airport.

“You remember Grandma’s present that we collected to give to your sister in New Zealand?” said Stan, “Well, whilst we were waiting for Check-in to open, we looked inside the open envelope containing the present, because as I suspected, it was a few very old pictures. We were totally stunned by what we were looking at.” He stopped because Janet had burst into tears.

“Thank you Grandma Molly, thank you,” she spluttered.

Two sepia hand-coloured pictures fell on the carpet, the right way up. One was of a beautiful black-haired, blue-eyed girl, and the other, of a funny little old lady. Then with hands clasped to the sides of her face, Janet again spluttered, “It’s Molly when she was young – and – when she was old.”

Stan looked towards his father.

“You told us at breakfast how Great Grandmother Molly had died. You said a ‘structural fault’ was given as the cause. Well it all added up for us at the airport. We could see she had been warning us about something, so we walked away and came home.

A stunned silence said all there was to be said, whilst it sank in for all of them.

Several weeks later, Alf, who had served them with tea at his mobile refreshment place, was brought up to date with everything that had happened.

“What a story to tell my customers. I’ll have to start an entertainment charge.”

A small entry in the paper a few months later, reported that the crashed flight to New Zealand, had been due to a ‘structural fault’.

Santa Claus is coming to Town

Fred had worked for a record company pressing vinyls, but the company moved on to more modern technology and had closed. He had worked for them for so many years that we even called our dog ‘Nipper’ from the little Jack Russell that looks down the large horn on the phonograph, although it was hard to imagine our large Bull Mastiff in that picture.

There was no golden handshake for my husband and for three months he had been out of work, so with Christmas coming, it was going to be difficult. Our two children were getting excited, totally unaware of the problems that lay ahead for us, but I had promised to take them to see Santa Claus.

Fred had looked for work, and he finally managed to obtain some on a temporary basis with a local departmental store as Father Christmas, for the month before they closed for the holiday period. The outfit they gave him was – to say the least – a bit tatty but, it was a job that would take us through the Christmas period.

I decided not to take the children to the store in which their father was working, in case they recognised him even under the horrible old beard they had supplied. So on Christmas Eve, I took them on the London tube to see the lights, thinking it might cheer me up as well. I had already bought some small gifts for them so I didn’t need to do any of that in town.

We managed to get round the market section at Covent Garden to get all the vegetables we needed for Christmas Day, and stayed awhile listening to the budding opera buskers, whilst having some lunch of sandwiches and tea. It was a lovely atmosphere with buskers of all kinds milling around, and living statues that only moved when you popped a few pennies in their hats.

After we left Covent Garden, we went for a walk round one of the little garden squares which are scattered around London. Their main purpose is for the residents of those areas, but some are open to the public. It was in one of these gardens we spotted a Santa Claus sitting on one of the garden benches around a