Missing Buildings
Jude Brigley 

            They had closed the Windsor Café in Swansea. She couldn’t shed a tear for it. In its latter days it was not what it had been. It had become just another greasy fish and chip bar with laminate tables and the modern choices of saveloys or curry sauce.
 
            If she could take you back to her childhood. The Windsor was not just a fish and chip shop; it was a restaurant emporium. The tables had white cloths and heavy, silver cutlery laid out as if for a feast. There were waitresses, dressed like lady’s maids with black dresses and white frilly aprons, who took the order on neatly printed notepads which came to the table at the end of the meal on a little silver platter.
 
            It had been a holiday treat to go out for food at all. For a fortnight a year, the whole family, including grandparents, packed up and headed for the coast. No hotels for them, but rooms in someone’s house where the family bought the food, and the landlady cooked it. Then probably, just once they would all pull up a chair at the Windsor and be served battered fish, steak and kidney pies, or slices of ham, served with deliciously crisp chipped potatoes on fancy dishes as if they were emperors. Tea came in silver-coloured teapots, and bread and butter was piled high.
 
            To a child, the Windsor was a special place where children were expected to sit thoughtfully in their seats and listened to the chatter of adults while being served like a character in a novel. At that time, it had hardly changed from when her mother was a girl. Even then it had seemed to come from a more elegant time.
 
             In the evenings after supper, the whole family would walk near the sea and stop at the ice-cream parlour where an oval glass window kept its eye on the bay, and where they sat on pale green cane chairs like a scene from the Raj. Here, they ate ice-cream domed and trinkled with raspberry sauce from silver dishes, or drank hot chocolate out of glass cups sitting in handled silver baskets. It felt like luxury. 
 
            And sometimes at the side of the building, while waiting for a bus to the beach, they could peer into the youthful coffee bar with its record covers bedecking the walls of Bill Haley or Pat Boone. Music streamed out, from the juke box, onto the sunny street whenever the door was shoved open: Someday I’m going to write the story of my life.
 
            But now, the palace of pleasure has been bulldozed, its smiling windows just empty gaps in the street.
 
            The soup that was dripped on the smart woman’s suit in The Windsor, or the cone dropped on her father’s new Hawaiian shirt, as a child leaned over the wall too far, were once big talking-points, but now just stories in the head, advancing no narrative, but still mementoes of the past which in the end had no further witnesses.
 
          She thought of this under Spanish sun, having access to waitress service and bowls of ice-cream whenever she chose, but those things were routine and could never match the past she kept in her head. In the end it was not the buildings, or the food, it was her grandfather demanding even more bread and butter, having eaten all of theirs. It was her father encouraging them to another banana split and her grandmother’s stoical look at her brother’s tipping his drink on the crisp cloth. The buildings themselves were just the entry point to another time and place. She mourned the passing of buildings for they carried part of her in their stones.

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