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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