Faith - Lesley Pearse [12]
But once she’d put the chicken in to roast, she caressed Laura’s face tenderly. ‘You’re a good kid,’ she said. ‘I wish I didn’t have to lean on you so much, you are far too young.’
Those words of praise, and the delight on Ivy and Meggie’s faces as they tucked into the roast chicken later, made Laura’s mind up for her. She would become their provider.
Her teachers had always said that she was bright and quick; by the time she was six she could read anything and do quite hard sums. She sailed through the eleven-plus, and if it hadn’t been for the difficulties of doing her homework, she knew she’d be top of the class. She loved doing problems in maths, and it struck her that thieving without getting caught was like a problem too – all she had to do was think it through before she acted.
She’d read somewhere that it was greed that caught most thieves out, so she resolved she would never allow herself to take anything her family didn’t really need. On the way home from school and on Saturdays, she studied shops and familiarized herself with the people who worked in them, and exactly where everything was kept.
Her school raincoat was a gift to a thief. With it over her arm she could easily conceal a packet of soap powder, a toilet roll or a packet of biscuits beneath it. Every day she went home with something they needed, and the only irritation was that she couldn’t get cheese, bacon or meat because such things were behind the counter.
Soon she had progressed to stealing clothes for the little ones and stockings and underwear for her mother, often taking the tube up to Kensington High Street or Oxford Street where there was a better selection of goods. She took pride in selecting good-quality items and felt very adult because she was taking care of her family.
‘You mustn’t do it any more,’ her mother would say each time she came home with something, but she was just as quick to point out what else they needed and Laura got the message that her mother depended on her.
By the time Bill had been in prison for a year, things had improved a little. June got a job cleaning offices two evenings a week, and along with the Assistance money and the goods Laura brought home they no longer went hungry and the little ones looked healthy and neatly dressed.
Once a month her mother went to visit Bill in Wormwood Scrubs, and though she was usually weepy when she came home, it seemed to Laura that apart from visiting days, she was far happier than she’d been for a long time. She often came out with Laura and the little ones to the park during the summer holidays, and at home she made more of an effort to clean and tidy.
‘I hope you’ll have the sense to find yourself a husband who has a trade,’ she said one day when they had just finished spring-cleaning the kitchen. ‘My mother always said Bill was a bad ’un and he’d come to a sticky end, but I didn’t believe her.’
‘Did he have a job in those days?’ Laura asked.
‘Not what you’d call a proper one, but it was during the war and lots of the men like him who’d been turned down by the Army filled in here and there. I met him in the munitions factory where I worked and thought he was God’s Gift.’
Laura smiled. ‘But if he was God’s Gift, why did the Army turn him down?’
‘Because he had flat feet. Not that it stopped him dancing and carousing, or climbing into people’s houses. The Army might have made something of him it they’d taken him; as it was, the blackout gave him opportunities to get up to all sorts without being caught. He got to thinking work was a mug’s game.’
‘But you loved him, didn’t you?’ Laura asked. She was becoming very interested in love and romance, fired still further by going to the pictures once a week. Several of the girls at school had boyfriends, but Laura felt no boy would ever like her because she was so plain and skinny.
‘Yeah, I loved him all right,’ June replied, blowing smoke rings up to the ceiling. ‘Worshipped the ground he walked on. But if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have married him.’
‘But you can’t help it if you fall