At half past ten her brothers returned, but they went straight to their room without speaking to her. Laura got into bed with her sisters soon after and was dozing off when she heard her parents come home. She knew they were tipsy because they were laughing, and her last thought before she dropped off to sleep was to hope Dad had had a win on the horses and they’d all get some kind of treat tomorrow.
A splintering sound, quickly followed by her mother’s scream, woke her later. For a moment she thought it was a burglar, but when she heard her father swear and make a dash down the passage to the kitchen and the back door, she realized it had to be the police.
All at once there was angry shouting from both front and back doors. Ivy and Meggie woke up and their alarmed cries added to the tumult. Clearly her father had been caught, for there were thuds and scuffles as the police hauled him back up the passage past her bedroom door.
‘What are they doing to Daddy?’ Meggie asked, clinging to Laura in alarm.
‘It’s only his friends having a drink with him,’ Laura lied.
The police often came here for her father, but they had never broken in like this before, or come at night. In fact when she was little she thought they really were her dad’s friends because they just sat and talked to him. Even on the occasions when they took him away in a police car, it had never been frightening, and mostly Dad was back within a few hours, making jokes about it.
But it was really scary now. She could hear furniture being overturned; Mum was crying and Dad was bawling and swearing. Then she heard one of the police shout at her father to tell them where the gun was or he’d rip the flat apart.
Terrified, Laura grabbed her little sisters tightly and pulled the covers over their heads. But heavy boots tramped down the passage again, this time into her brothers’ room, and judging by the sounds from there, they were ransacking it.
‘I don’t know where it came from,’ she heard Mark shout a few minutes later. ‘It ain’t nothin’ to do with me.’
Laura assumed that meant the police had found a gun in their room, and clutched her little sisters even tighter into her arms. Freddy was bawling his head off in the front room, her mother was shouting abuse at the police, and again and again she heard scuffling as if her father was trying to fight them.
Suddenly the light in her room snapped on. ‘Come on out, girls,’ a big policeman with a red face said as he pulled the covers off them. ‘We need to search in here too.’
With Ivy in her arms and Meggie clinging around her waist, Laura watched helplessly as the two policemen pulled the mattress up and looked under the bed, dragging out old toys, colouring books and bits of rubbish. They knocked over Ivy’s potty as they were doing it, and the pee ran all across the lino.
What’s this?’ one of the policemen said, pulling out a shoe box tied up with string.
‘I don’t know,’ Laura said truthfully, for she hadn’t seen it before.
The man cut the string with a pocket knife and opened it, and to Laura’s shock it was full of banknotes.
She gasped, for she’d never seen so much money in her life. A ten pound note was a rare sight to her, but this was bundles of tens and twenties, and as the box was stuffed with them, there had to be hundreds of pounds.
‘Who put this here?’ the red-faced man asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ Laura said again, and suddenly she felt as though she was going to be sick. ‘I didn’t know it was there.’
‘Don’t you lie to me,’ he said, coming right up to her and bending so he could look straight into her eyes. ‘How old are you?’
‘Twelve and three-quarters,’ she replied.
‘That’s old enough to know what’s right and wrong,’ he said. ‘Tell me when your dad put it here.’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t see him put it there.’ She began to cry then. ‘It could have been there for weeks. That’s all old stuff under there.’
The policeman ordered her back into the bed and left the room with the box in his hands, and suddenly the commotion and angry raised voices subsided. Laura couldn’t hear what was being said because Freddy was crying so loudly, but she thought she heard her mother pleading with the police. Unable to bear it any longer, she got out of bed, just in time to see her father, Mark and Paul all being led out of the front door in handcuffs.
‘You can’t take the boys,’ her mother sobbed. ‘They’re only kids – look how frightened they are!’
Laura had never seen the boys look afraid of anything before, but they certainly were now; their faces were like chalk, and they were trembling. But the older plain-clothes man showed no sympathy. ‘In a reform school they might get straightened out,’ he said to June. ‘Now, get back to that baby and stop him bawling before he wakes the whole neighbourhood up.’
There were six policemen in all: three led their prisoners up the basement steps and the last three followed laden with boxes and a long object covered by a sack.
Laura could hardly believe what the police had done to the front room: furniture turned over, the mattress on the floor, drawers hanging open, cushions off the chairs. She picked Freddy up to comfort him and Meggie and Ivy came sidling in, both crying hard.
June had her old checked coat over her nightie, and her eye makeup was smeared down her cheeks. ‘Bill promised me he was going straight,’ she sobbed. ‘Haven’t I had enough grief over the years?’
‘What did they say Mark and Paul had done? Why did they have a gun?’ Laura asked. ‘Did they go out robbing with Dad?’
‘It weren’t them that had the gun, that was Bill. Looks like the little buggers had been thievin’ on their own,’ June wailed. ‘They had heaps of cigarettes in their room and never even gave me a couple of packets.’
That went some way to explain why her brothers had been so furtive when they came home earlier. But Laura was shocked that her mother was more upset that the boys hadn’t shared their spoils with her than by their becoming thieves too. ‘There was an awful lot of money in that box under our bed,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Did you know it was there?’
‘Do you think we’d have had egg and chips for our tea if I’d known there was money around?’ her mother wailed indignantly. ‘I’ll swing for that man! Fancy him not hiding it somewhere safe, and leaving the shotgun under our bed! What if the little ones had found it? The police said Bill robbed a post office. I just don’t know him any more!’
Laura had heard her mother claim she didn’t know Bill any more dozens of times in the past. The implication was that he’d once been very different to the man who only came home to sleep and took little interest in his family. But Laura had no recollection of him ever being any different. Even before the last three children were born, when she could remember going to the fair, to a circus or out for a day at the seaside with her mother, Mark and Paul, her father had never been with them. Sometimes she would look at the wedding photograph on the mantelpiece and try to equate that handsome, dark-haired man with the wide smile with the sullen, overweight man who bellowed at them to be quiet when he was in bed. He never ate with the family – his meals were kept hot over a saucepan of boiling water till he came home to eat them. When he spoke it was usually to bark out an order for one of them to get something for him, and on the rare occasions he stayed in for an evening it was clear by his morose manner that he didn’t want to be there. In truth Laura couldn’t once remember him asking how she was getting on at school, picking up Freddy or talking to Meggie and Ivy.
Laura made up her parents’ bed again and Ivy and Meggie climbed into it. Freddy calmed down after a nappy change and another bottle of milk and fell back asleep. Laura wanted to get into the bed too, but she felt unable to do so while her mother was white and tense, chain-smoking as she paced up and down the room.
‘They said the boys were seen tonight robbing the newsagent,’ she spat out. ‘I couldn’t even trust the buggers to stay in with you and the little ones for one night. As if it isn’t bad enough having my old
man in the nick all the time, without the boys following him! How are we supposed to manage now? All I’ve got is a couple of quid.’
‘We’ll be all right, Mum,’ Laura said in an effort to reassure her. ‘We’ll go down the Assistance office on Monday, and maybe I can get a paper round.’
Going down to the National Assistance office had been a regular feature throughout Laura’s childhood because they had to go there every time her father went to prison. She often wondered why he kept on thieving when he always got caught.
‘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 away from me.’
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 in love,’ Laura said, for this was the message she’d got from so many romantic films.
‘Love ain’t like what you see at the pictures,’ June said sagely. ‘It’s not all pretty and sweet. It’s more like a kind of madness that takes over your brain. You don’t see what the bloke really is. All you can think about is him kissing you and holding you. But that don’t last, let me tell you. If you’re lucky, when that wears off you’re left with a decent bloke who’ll take care of you, but if you aren’t, then you’ll regret the day you ever set eyes on him.’
‘But you and Dad were happy together!’ Laura exclaimed indignantly. She might not actually remember Bill being very happy and joyful with his children, but he had seemed happy enough with June when they came home from the pub together.
‘How could anyone be happy living like this?’ June gestured at her surroundings with her cigarette. ‘He never saw this as being anything more than a kind of dosshouse to fall into when he’d had a skinful of beer. He never valued me.’
Laura was shocked by that. ‘Surely he does!’
‘Oh, he does now he’s in the nick,’ June spat out. ‘He tells me that he adores me and you kids, that he’s sorry and it will all be different when he comes out. But words are cheap, he’s said all that before, and I was stupid enough to believe him. I’ll be forty-two when he comes out this time, a middle-aged woman who’s spent her life in a slum, no holidays, no nice things, and precious few good memories. And he expects me to wait for him!’
It was in November, thirteen months after her father had been arrested, that Laura found out her mother wasn’t waiting for Bill. June had been doing her two nights a week cleaning for months, but then she upped it to three in September. About the same time she began having her hair done at the hairdresser’s, bought herself some new clothes, and put makeup on every time she went out.
Faith Page 3