Diary Entry:
Thursday, April 12th
Rain lashed against the grimy windows of our terraced house in Brimstone, a mill town clinging to the outskirts of Manchester. The 1960s had forged a path for industry, yet places like this remained trapped in monochrome sameness. Father worked at the mill, his back as hunched as the iron frame of the factory. We were the sort of family the neighbors described in whispers—tightfisted, silent, proper. To them, we were outsiders. To me, we were a cage.
My father, Peter Ellis, was no ordinary man. Tall, gaunt, with a gauntlet of a handshake, he had the presence of a figure from a Dickens novel—only this one wore a moth-eaten overcoat and scowled perpetually. At work, he was respected for his precision; he could thread a needle blindfolded. At home? He was a miser of biblical proportions. Mother, Margaret, had once been a flour-sprinkled beauty at the town’s tea dances. Now, she moved like a ghost in frayed aprons, counting pennies in the kitchen.
Our son was… I didn’t know what he was. Steve. A boy of twelve, pale and quiet, who hid behind stacking chairs when the storm of father’s disapproval rained. I remembered the day he brought home a scrawny tabby cat, its fur bristling as it darted into the hallway. “What madness is this?” Father had barked, voice sharp as a scissors snip. “You’ll feed it on your portions?” He’d tossed the cat out like a sack of potatoes, and Steve had said nothing. Even then, I knew my boy was crumbling, a brick by brick collapse I couldn’t halt.
Each morning at six, the ritual began. Father’s jangle of keys, the creak of the locked larder (a relic from the war, etched with “Keep Britain Fed!”), and the meticulous portioning of breakfast. Two slices of toast for us, four for him. “A penny saved is earned,” he’d mutter, the old Benjamin Franklin saying that haunted our meals. Steve grew thinner, his school clothes patched with mother’s thread, his laughter a memory. The wage packets came in, no more than £40 a week, but at table, it felt like poverty.
One night, I tried to speak. “Peter, Steve’s shoes are falling apart,” I said, my voice trembling. “The children at school—”
“Silence, Margaret,” he growled, his tea spoon clinking so harshly it grazed the ceramic. “He’ll grow into them. Or learn to earn.”
There was no “or.” Steve’s childhood was a ledger of debts. When he left home at sixteen for the apprenticeship in Staley, I clung to the hope he’d escape. But years later, my letters found him still—hoarding tuppences, frowning at cinema tickets, and viewing love with the same suspicion as a bar of imported chocolate.
Last month, my daughter-in-law, Claire, left. The final argument was over curtains. “We’re young,” she’d said, her voice breaking. “Why live like paupers in a box room? You’re your father’s shadow, Steve.” The door slammed with the crispity of a shilling dropped on stone. Now my grandson, Thomas, sends me letters from his dorm—meant to be cheery, but laced with the same frugality. “I’ve saved £10 for you and Grandpa,” he wrote. “For emergencies.”
I sit here, the rain ceaseless, and wonder if I am to blame. When Steve was a boy, I begged for change, not for myself but for him. Now it’s too late. The Ellis name still means thrift, but I fear it also means loneliness. I should have fought harder. I should have loved more. But love, perhaps, is the final thing you cannot save.
