short story

 Aunt Ada was an epileptic. She had worked at a stocking factory since she was fourteen but at seventeen she began to have 'fits’. Her work mates petitioned the boss to sack her. He was reluctant to do this for she was the best stocking mender he had, however he had to yield in the end.

I never knew my Grandfather for he was killed on active service sometime after the Armistice. I recall my father saying the family had expected him home on leave when the telegram came. That was long before I was born.

Why had I left Sidney to come to this cold wet inhospital country? What did I hope to find? The solicitor who represented my parents was dead and the firm after charging an exorbitant amount for a search of their records, could only tell me what I already knew, that my parents had taken me over from a Ms Hariette Powell, also known as Raddish. The last available census revealed no family of that name with or without a daughter.

I realised that as I studied the birth certificates. It was fate, inexorable, unchangeable. But for Father I might have had only occasional lapses, followed the pattern of the maternal line.

Mother was the seventh child of a long line of seventh children. That in itself was ominous enough but worse was to come.

She shuddered. This was the room where it happened…

She had felt the heat. The walls closing in on her. She was suffocating. Why had she returned and how?

Miss Trimble was watching from her bedroom window again. God he hated the old bat with her corrugated iron perm and thick glasses always peering behind her net curtains. He loathed her nasal query.

"Mrs Scot still away?"