Faith Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    Laura was glad to see her mother looking better, and it was