The Kindness of a Stranger...

  A visit to the seaside should have been fun, a treat, a good day out. But not in January. The weather was freezing. Three-day-old snow lay around in grubby heaps, and a thin layer of ice coated just about everything else.Why her mother had found it necessary to visit Brighton, some fifty miles from their home in London was a mystery. She obviously had her reasons, but it would have been more than the child’s life was worth to ask.Try as she might, she hadn’t been able to discern any clues either. Whenever her mother did something odd, there were usually at least two good reasons for doing it. A man, or money, often both.
They left the train station and started walking. Neither of them was suitably dressed, and the child was so cold it was all she could do to stop her teeth from chattering, as she instinctively knew her mother wouldn’t like it.They kept walking, and the child looked up at her mother. She looked determined, her face deadly serious. How did she know where to go? They had never been there before and she didn’t appear to have a map or directions of any kind.Any normal child could have asked, and any normal mother would have said. But that wasn’t who they were. She had learned never to ask questions, or even look at her mother with a question on her face.Most of the time, she hated her mother. A lot of the time, she thought her mother hated her too. She either didn’t know how to be a mother, or didn’t care enough.

The child’s feet were soaking wet. The colder she got, the more they hurt. Holding back the tears was proving to be difficult and she tried to disguise it with a tissue, but her mother probably knew.She was trying to concentrate on the shiny metal tracks that ran down the middle of the road when something like a train appeared. Her mother grabbed her arm and pulled her onto it. She found out later it was a tram. Like a bus, but confined to the metals rails.The child was grateful to sit down and rest her painful feet, but this only seemed to make them hurt even more. The tears flooded down her face, accompanied by the pitiful sounds she couldn’t prevent escaping from her lips.Just when she thought her mother would kill her where she sat for showing her up, the man sitting opposite them gestured towards the child’s feet and looked at the mother.

She nodded, probably wondering what he wanted to do. He gently undid the child’s sandals and peeled off the wet socks. Then he took both of her feet between his large warm hands. The heat made the pain increase but thankfully not for long. He didn’t talk, just smiled kindly at her.
She never discovered why they went to Brighton that day and didn’t remember going home. She was only six years old and it is probably just as well that much of her childhood had faded into the mist. But that man’s kindness would stay with her as a rare shining memory. She just wished she had thanked him…