What happens in the video
“Clear these off!” A young man in a navy polo reaches toward a pair of worn brown boots on a raised display. Red, white, and blue bunting hangs along the front, and a military helmet sits nearby.
“They’re in the right place,” an older man tells him. The younger man opens a pale cloth, and the older man points out a boot print. “Those are the footprints he came home in.”
The younger man looks from the cloth to the boots. “They haven’t even been polished.” The boots are still in place when the clip ends.
Continuation:
“The left toe used to shine,” said a woman behind them. “I did that one myself.”
The younger man turned. She had come down from the viewing platform and was leaning on the rail, looking at the boots.
“I was eight when Dad got home,” she said. “Mum had spent all morning washing the kitchen floor. First thing he did was walk straight across it in those.”
She pointed to the print. Up close, the young man could see a little triangle missing from the edge of the heel.
“My mother kept a scrap of the old floorcloth. You can tell which boot made that mark.”
He crouched beside the display. Sure enough, a corner was missing from the left heel. From where he’d been standing a minute earlier, all he’d seen was dirt.
“Did your mum mind about the floor?” he asked.
“Oh, she gave him the mop. She’d waited two years for him to come home. She could wait another five minutes for him to clean up after himself.”
The older man laughed. He had helped arrange the display, but even he hadn’t heard that part. He asked what she meant about polishing one toe.
The following morning, she explained, she’d found her father asleep in a kitchen chair. She’d crept up with a tin of polish, determined to do something nice for him. Halfway through the left boot he opened one eye and asked if she charged extra for the right. She laughed, knocked the tin over, and left a black circle on the same clean floor.
The young man set the cloth beside the boots. “Would you tell that story when people come past?”
“I’d rather you did,” she said. “I’d like to hear somebody else tell it for a change.”
A few minutes later, a boy stopped at the display and asked why one toe was darker than the other. The young man glanced toward the rail. She gave him a nod.
So he told the boy about a father asleep in a kitchen chair and a little girl kneeling at his feet with a tin of polish. He got one detail wrong. From her seat, the woman called out, “Brown polish! The circle on the floor looked black.”
He corrected himself. She settled back, smiling, and stayed to hear him tell it again.
