It's a risk looking for lost family

Of course it's a risk searching for lost family. Will they be suspicious of you. Will they like you or you them?
Sybil had already taken cautious steps down a path;not trodden since she was a child.

Her auntie had stood waiting for her at Coventry station. Stepping down from the train and onto the platform she felt a mix of elation,fear,curiousity and bewilderment.
Taking in a deep breath she walked toward this figure who stood there waiting for her. Sybil's memory bank flashed back to the last time. She had been a gangly,nervous and quiet child,dependent on her blind daddy whose footsteps she trusted.Her eyes must have been useful to keep them both safe but he was always in control.

The auntie who stood there, wearing flat slip-on-shoes,was pulling up the collar of her pastel mac. A pensioner with a cloth bag,warm smile and drawing on a cigarette.They embraced on the platform and then went for sandwiches at Marks & Sparks in the town centre. Perhaps she was going to weigh her up before deciding if it would be safe to take her home. Sybil understood this and was anxious herself. She must have passed the test as, having sipped on her tea and Sybil her cream scone they were on their way again.

Her aunt pointed out Lady Godiva as they walked to the bus stop;whilst bendy bus's snaked their way round them-getting very close to the kerb and so to them. There was a man at their bus stop who looked as if he should be tucked up safe in bed somewhere to sleep off whatever was afflicting him.
"Don't go too close, whispered her auntie as she lit another fag,you need to watch where you put your feet a bit more!
Her toes just missed the vomit/carrot/potatoes and tomatoes that stuck to the floor.

"Your Nana would have been so proud to see you here with me now.....perhaps she can!
Sybil saw the veins on her hands tinged blue and raised as her left hand grasped her bus pass.

Then she had later sat next to this women who didn't know her or lifes little incidental and monumental happenings as life had been breathed out over the decades.She had given her tea in best china cups, not mugs with chips in, biscuits that weren't broken.
Her uncle had greeted her kindly but was someone with few words; listening seemed to be his thing.

It was odd sitting in a front room she had never been in before,sitting on a sofa she'd never sat on before and talking to her auntie she had searched. For almost as long she had searched for her Nana. It was hard to absorb what the neighbour had said as she tapped on her Nanna's front door. She had been about fourteen and somehow managed to find her way alone to where her Nanny lived.

The last time she had seen her was the September morning of 1959 when, as she sat on her single bed, her Nanna told, with very red eyes, how Sybil's father had died in the night. He was thirty five and had only been ill in hospital for two weeks.
From that day onwards she didn't hear or see her Nana again; in spite of a wave of inky,child scribble requests to hear back from her...but there was no response. Nothing.

Her aunt had given her a photograph of her mum and dad on their wedding day; when they had been forced to elope. It was a sad but also defiant photograph of the two of them standing together on the steps outside a Registry Office in London Somewhere. No flowers, even button-holes in sight and of course no family either. Disabled people were not expected to have a normal life back then. Instead to be kept like precious birds in a cage and never allowed to fly much past the front door to work and back.

She couldn't totally express the gratitude that bubbled inside her as she held this photograph. As her parents had both been blind there were no photographs of her daddy in her house as she had grown. Now she had a image and a figure to be proud of at last.