Street Kid by Judy Westwater

things Auntie Gertie had packed for me three years ago. It felt strange to see my pink dress and shoes again. I didn’t suppose they’d fit now. There was also a teddy bear I’d never seen before. It had a little card tied to it and I saw that it was from Mrs Craddock. She must have given it to Auntie Gertie to give to me, but the nuns didn’t allow any children to have their own toys so had put it away. Susie, as I christened her, was instantly my most treasured possession.
    A young woman I’d never seen before arrived to take me away. She wore a camel-coloured coat with a belt and a pair of red shoes. She must have been a social worker. We sat on the top deck of the bus. I was fidgeting and biting my lip with nerves.
    ‘Will you sit still, child!’ she said to me impatiently. I tried to stop wriggling my legs but carried on chewing my lip.
    I had no idea how far we were going or where my father and Freda lived now, but our bus journey only lasted about ten minutes. When we got off, the place looked very bleak. We set off across a bombed-out piece of land, which I later learned was called ‘the Croft’, in the direction of a row of terraced houses. The street had big cobblestones and the social worker had difficulty walking across them in her red shoes. I saw that some of the houses were missing from the row, and there were heaps of rubble which hadn’t yet been cleared up. We stopped outside a small two-up, two-down house on the end of the row with a green gas lamp outside it.
    The woman knocked on the front door. My father opened it and she pushed me in ahead of her. She was obviously impatient to get away.
    ‘Here’s your daughter, then. Let us know if you have any difficulties.’
    My father thanked her and she left. Then he turned to me. My reaction was instantaneous – a crippling fear that made my knees almost buckle under me. Nothing, I realized, had changed and, although three years had gone by, I felt no less afraid of my dad than when I was four years old. The old trauma surfaced so fast as I stood there in the hall that I shrunk away from him, filled with horror that I should be having to share a house again with this dark figure who’d inhabited my every nightmare like a malevolent ghoul.
    ‘Freda’s through there in the kitchen. Go and say hello.’
    On shaky legs I walked into the front room and put down my bag. I walked through the room feeling as if I was on my way to the gallows, such was my trepidation at meeting Freda again. She had managed to create a respectable family room, complete with Singer sewing machine and piano, but I knew that she would be just the same vicious snake as she always had been. I walked through to the back kitchen where I could hear her at work.
    Freda was washing dishes at a square, brown pot-like sink and she turned when she heard my footsteps on the flagstone floor.
    ‘So, you’re here. Grown a bit, I see,’ she eyed me critically. ‘You’d better go up and put your bag in your room.’
    Upstairs there were two more rooms. Freda led me to the one on the left, containing a single bed with an eiderdown, which was a change from my old sofa and blanketat Patricroft. There wasn’t a light in the room, just a table, on which had been put a meccano set.
    ‘You are never, ever to touch that,’ Freda told me in a harsh, emotionless voice. The toy, I knew, was the one memento she had of the son she’d deserted.
    ‘And don’t think for a moment that I want you here. You’re a lying, thieving little sneak and always will be.’

Chapter Six
    T he next morning, Freda showed me what my duties were. She took a cold and savage pleasure in pointing out every little thing that needed to be done, jabbing her bony finger at a hospital corner on her bed-clothes, or a crevice in the iron range that needed to be cleaned just so. She had her other hand on her hip and spoke to me as if I was an idiot.
    So began my new life as a seven-year-old slave in the town of Hulme.
    The