Faith - Lesley Pearse [11]
‘I can’t take no more,’ her mother sobbed. ‘Six kids, a crummy flat, never a holiday or a day out at the seaside. Now I’ve got to go cap in hand to that lot down at the Assistance, and they never give me enough to live on. It’s too much to bear.’
Over the following months Laura came to agree with her mother that it was too much for anyone to bear. Not only had Mark and Paul robbed the newsagent’s, but the police had found various other goods in their room which had come from burglaries in private houses. The magistrate said they needed a sharp shock to teach them a lesson and gave them two years in borstal.
Her father, along with another man, was found guilty of armed robbery at a post office in Uxbridge, and they both received ten-year prison sentences. It was said that the only reason they didn’t get eighteen years apiece was because the gun had the firing pin missing and couldn’t have been used. But as her mother pointed out at the time, ten or eighteen years made little difference to her; she was still left with four children to feed and clothe and she didn’t think she could survive another winter in the damp, cold flat.
It was the bleakest time Laura had ever known. It had been bad enough at school before, but once the cases were reported in the newspapers the jeering and nastiness got a hundred times worse. Someone made a poster which said ‘Stinky Wilmslow’s father’s a robber’, and stuck it on the wall in the cloakroom.
Not one person showed a shred of sympathy for her. Her headmistress kept picking on her because she didn’t have the correct uniform and didn’t always do her homework. But how could she do her homework when her mother was constantly moaning about something, Freddy screaming and Ivy and Meggie begging her to play with them? There wasn’t any money to buy the right uniform, she had to make do with whatever her mother found at a jumble sale, and she was often hungry because the Assistance money ran out too quickly.
Life had always been feast or famine for the Wilmslows. One day her father would come in with joints of meat, bags of fruit and even cigarettes to last her mother a month. At those times they went down to the market and bought new clothes and they could have an ice cream every time the van came by. But then there would be long periods when they lived on Spam or egg and chips, and when their shoes got holes in the soles, June cut up cardboard to put inside them. But there had never been such a prolonged, relentless time of hardship as there was now. It cost two shillings to wash and dry their clothes at the public baths, and if her mother decided it had to be done, then there was no money left for the electric meter and they had to go to bed when it was dark.
It was hunger that finally drove Laura to theft. She had never thought it was wicked to steal, only stupid because she’d grown up with her father constantly being caught and punished for it. But on an icy cold Saturday morning soon after her thirteenth birthday in January, when she knew there was nothing but bread and marge at home for their dinner, she decided she had to provide some food for the family.
Outside the butcher’s shop in Goldhawk Road there was always a table with raw chickens wrapped in cellophane and boxes of eggs on it. She’d watched women pick them up before going into the shop to pay for them countless times. The blind outside the shop had a flap hanging down on the side next to the newsagent’s. All she had to do was stand and read the postcards advertising items for sale long enough to make sure no one was looking, then put her hand under the flap, grab a chicken, hide it under her coat and walk away.
No one saw her, it was the easiest thing she’d ever done, and as she walked home she didn’t feel ashamed or even guilty, just happy.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ her mother said, but she was already taking off the cellophane bag and getting out a roasting tray from the cupboard, ‘I don’t want another of my kids snatched