HAT & MOLLY
Molly had just graduated and was looking for a place to live, in different circumstances she’d have retrieved more than the hard hat from her grandparents’ house. The rest of the family, her mother, aunt and Uncle Toby were less sentimental. Molly’s mother, Christina, was 11 when her father, Richard, remarried. Her new step mother had never wanted children and now she had 3. Christina’s siblings were 10 years older and already had independent lives so it was Christina who had to adapt most. The new family moved to Islington, then a working class area. Here, Richard, a barrister, would be able to offer legal help to the local community. But the neighbourhood didn’t embrace the family immediately, one morning Christina woke to find ‘you are too posh’ scrawled on the pavement outside their house. This was not how Richard, still an idealistic communist, had imagined life. He continued to support the party, even after fellow members left in protest of the murder of a Hungarian student who’d been peacefully demonstrating against the Soviet’s treatment of his country. Richard’s son, Toby, felt his father should have relinquished his membership. When he finally did, 8 years later, his old comrades viewed it merely as an act of expediency – now he could become a judge. And yet Richard saved this hat throughout his life, a symbol of victory for the common man and a ‘thank you’ from the Kentish miners suffering from lung disease for whom he’d finally won compensation. On the day of Richard’s funeral the community, once sceptical of him as a middle class interloper, turned out and lined the full length of Popham Street.
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