Faith - Lesley Pearse [5]
Stuart’s family background was working-class too, and he’d have been quick to admit to any skeletons in the closet. Yet he’d been proud of his origins, and would never have resorted to glitzing it up to climb the social ladder.
There were many times in the two years they were together that she almost told him the truth. She’d known he would have understood then why she lied; indeed, he would probably have loved her even more because he’d been a compassionate man who was always on the side of the underdog. The reason she resisted the temptation was because he would have made her come clean to Jackie, and nagged her into contacting her mother. She was too much of a coward to face that.
Tears welled up in her eyes and she brushed them away impatiently. If she’d known at sixteen what future heartache she was storing up, she wouldn’t have reinvented herself. But back then it was just self-preservation, not intentional deceit.
She was twelve when it really dawned on her that everything was stacked against her. It was October 1957, one of those glorious autumn days when you notice the leaves on the trees have changed to gold, red, russet and yellow, yet the sun is warm enough to fool you into thinking it is still summer.
There were no trees in Thornfield Road, Shepherds Bush, where she lived. Even the narrow strips of soil in front of the decaying three- and four-storey houses that the residents liked to call their ‘front garden’ held nothing but overloaded dustbins, bicycles and junk. But that day Laura had taken herself off to Ravenscroft Park nearby and had marvelled at the festival of colour there, and wished she lived in one of the nice houses surrounding the park.
She went there most Saturday afternoons, but normally she took her baby brother Freddy in his pram, along with her sisters, Meggie and Ivy, to give her mother a break. But that morning Laura had taken one look at the dark, damp and chaotic basement flat they lived in, and she’d had an overwhelming need to get out and be alone in peaceful surroundings.
She was still in the park, sitting on a bench daydreaming about having a bedroom of her own, a bathroom, and never again having to wear second-hand clothes or having other girls jeering at her in school because her clothes smelled of fried food and mildew, when she suddenly became aware it was late afternoon. The sun had turned bright orange and was sinking down behind the trees, making long shadows, and all at once she was chilly in her cotton dress.
She walked home reluctantly, aware her mother would be furious she’d stayed out all day, and as she turned the corner into Thornfield Road, she saw Janice Potts and Margaret Jones from school, sitting on the wall outside her house.
Her stomach turned over in fright because they’d been bullying her since the start of the new term in September. She knew they had come to pick a fight with her, because, like most of the girls at the grammar school in Holland Park, they lived well away from dingy Shepherds Bush, and had no reason to pass through her street.
Right since her first day at grammar school Laura had felt like an impostor because almost everyone else was posh and glossy. The other girls had tennis and ballet lessons, their fathers had cars and wore suits, and she was absolutely certain no one else had a second-hand uniform or took a bath in the public ones. It didn’t help that she was so skinny and plain – every time she looked in a mirror she winced at her plaited hair which never looked sleek because it was so dull and wispy.
All through her first year there she was aware the other girls whispered about her behind her back, they hid her books and never let her join in any of their games in the playground. But since she’d moved up to the second year, it had become far worse.
On the first day back at school in September, Brenda Marsh had said she didn’t want to sit next to a ‘guttersnipe’. Someone else asked if she got her blazer from the rag-and-bone man. From then on it seemed as if the whole class