Michele Gorman - The Second Chance Café in Carlton Square

Doreen is one of Auntie Rose’s lifelong best friends. She smokes like a wet log fire and there are questions over exactly what happened when her husband disappeared back in the eighties, but beneath her over-tanned cleavage and lumpy wrap dresses there beats the heart of an angel. Just don’t cross her or try cheating at cribbage.

There used to be four of them, till my gran died eight or nine years ago. She was Auntie Rose’s sister. Now it’s Auntie Rose, Doreen and June, whose husband hasn’t disappeared, so she mostly does her visiting with everyone in the evenings at the pub.

Both twins scramble off Dad’s lap to see what Doreen’s got to offer. Oscar doesn’t come empty-handed, though. Shyly, he holds his stuffed duck out for Doreen’s inspection.

‘He’s just like you, Emma,’ Auntie Rose says.

‘Not Grace too?’ I say, though I’m just fishing for compliments. Greedy me, wanting credit for all the best traits of my children. But Grace has Daniel’s outgoing nature.

‘Nah, she’s a tearaway like your mother. It skipped a generation.’

Mum ignores my questioning smile. I love when Auntie Rose lets slip about Mum’s younger days. When I was a child it gave me useful ammunition against her rules. Now I’m just curious to know more about my parents.

Auntie Rose gathers Grace up onto her ample lap while Doreen settles next to her with Oscar, and Dad tries not to look too jealous that they’ve got his grandchildren. ‘Off you go now,’ Auntie Rose says to Mum and me. ‘That café ain’t opening itself. We’ll look after the wee ones.’

‘Okay, but we’ll be back at lunchtime,’ I say as Mum hands me a bag full of paint stripper and brushes. ‘I’ve got my phone if you need me. Mum does too.’

Mum manages to get me into the car after I kiss my babies about a hundred times and remind everyone about the nappies, bottles, extra clothes, extra nappies and the bottles again.

‘It’s only for a few hours, Emma,’ Mum reminds me on the short drive back to Carlton Square.

‘You were probably just as bad when you had to leave me.’

‘I couldn’t get away fast enough,’ she says, smirking into the windscreen.

‘Liar. I remember Gran telling you off for being a hover mother.’ My gran was cut from the same no-nonsense cloth as Auntie Rose and my mum.

‘Oh, she was a great one for repeating whatever she read in the Daily Mail ,’ Mum says, still smiling.

‘The skip’s arrived,’ she notes as she carefully manoeuvres the car into the free spot just behind it. ‘Let’s take up those carpets before we do the furniture.’

The café isn’t much of a café yet, but it’s perfect in my imagination. In reality it’s still just the old pub that sits across the square from our house. It did have a brief life as a café before I took it over, but the owners never really got rid of its pubness. That’s a blessing and a curse.

The waft of stale beer hits me as usual when I unlock the double doors at the front, though it looks better than it smells. There’s a big wraparound bar at the back and shiny cream and green tiles running waist-high along all the walls. It’s even got two of those old gold-lettered mirrored advertisements for whisky set into the walls at the side of the bar. When we first came to see inside, Mum climbed up the ladder to inspect the ceiling. It’s pressed tin, though like the rest of the place, stained by about a hundred years of tobacco smoke.

She throws a pair of work gloves and a face mask at me. ‘Put your back into it. Start in a corner where it’s easier to get it up.’

That’s easy for her to say when she’s got muscles on top of muscles from all her cleaning jobs. She can even lift Dad when she needs to. Luckily that’s not too often these days.

The carpet pulls away – in some places in shreds – setting loose a cloud of God-knows-what into the air. ‘Open the windows, Mum!’ I shout through the mask.

When the dust settles, there’s no beautifully preserved Victorian parquet floor underneath. This isn’t one of those BBC makeover programmes where gorgeous George Clarke congratulates us on our period features.

The floor is made up of rough old unfinished planks.

‘That’s even uglier than the carpet,’ I tell Mum when she comes over for a look. ‘We can’t afford a whole new floor.’ Even if we had the extra money, there’s no way I’d hand that capital improvement to the council, who owns the lease.

‘Let’s have a think about this,’ she says, leading me to one of the booths by the open window where, hopefully, the slight breeze is clearing away whatever was in that carpet.

The booths are as knackered as the rest of the pub, but at least they’re wooden so they won’t need re-covering. Unlike all the chairs piled in a heap upstairs. I don’t even like to think about what’s stained their fabric seats over the decades.

Suddenly Mum reaches into my hair. ‘Hold still, you’ve got something– It’s a bit of… I don’t know what it is.’ Then she squints at my head. ‘Is that a grey hair?’

My hand flies to my head. ‘NO! It can’t be.’ I’m only twenty-seven.

‘It’s only because your hair is so dark that I noticed it. I started getting them at your age. Don’t worry, it’s only one…’ She reaches for my head again. ‘Or two. ’Ere, I’ll get them.’

‘Ow, don’t pull them out! You’ll make more.’

‘That’s an old wives’ tale. Let me just get–’

‘Get off me!’

As I twist my head away from my mother’s snatching fingers, I look out the window and straight into two strange faces. They look about as old as God and his secretary and as surprised to see us as I am to see them.

‘Oh! Excuse us,’ says the man. ‘We thought we saw someone inside…’ He grasps the woman’s hand. ‘We’re terribly sorry to disturb you.’

‘No, no, don’t be sorry,’ calls my mum through the window. ‘We’re renovating the pub.’

The man hesitates. ‘It’s been decades since we’ve been inside.’

‘It smells like it,’ I murmur, then realise how rude that sounds. ‘Since it’s been open, I mean.’

‘Would you like to come in?’ Mum asks. ‘You’re very welcome.’

‘We shouldn’t bother you,’ says the woman, but I can see that she’s dying for a snoop.

‘It’s no bother, really, come in. Just a sec, I’ll open the door.’

They’re even older than they looked outside, but they come nimbly through the door like they own the place. They’re both wearing long dark wool coats against the February cold snap.

‘I always hated that carpet,’ says the woman, seeing the pile I’ve made in the corner. ‘It stank to high heaven. But then so did a lot of the men who drank ’ere.’

‘Present company excepted.’ The man removes his flat cap and bows, showing me the top of his balding, age-spotted head. ‘Carl Brumfeld. Pleased to meet you. And this ’ere’s Elsie.’

Their accents are as local to East London as my family’s is. After I make introductions, Elsie asks, ‘Are you the new landlord?’ Her face is nearly unlined, but her hair is snowy white, spun into an intricate sort of beehive on top of her head. Auntie Rose would say she’d look younger with it coloured, but she says that about everyone because she does hair.

‘It’s going to be a café,’ Mum tells them. As she relays this, her pride even tops her bragging about me going to Uni. And that was monumental.

‘Oh,’ they chorus. ‘That’s a shame,’ Carl says. ‘We were hoping to get the old place back. This is where we met, you see.’

‘When was that?’ I ask. Just after the dawn of time, I’m guessing.

‘Nineteen forty-one,’ says Elsie. ‘We were children during the war. We used to sit together in that booth right there.’