Faith Read Online Free PDF

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