The Girl From Shepherd's Bush

By Sheila M. Barnes

During the eighteen hundreds, no less than 220 different offences were punishable by death. British law decreed that anyone living with gypsies, for a period exceeding one calendar month or a child, aged between 7 and 14 who showed signs of malice and undue cruelty, would be put to death in the name of the current sovereign and to satisfy the machinations of the law.

Today, if it is remembered at all, we think of only the most notorious murderers encountering the hangman's rope. Perhaps a small minority of the population would welcome a restoration of such an iniquitous and archaic practise and celebrate its return. Grace Thornton of Shepherd’s Bush, London W12 would not be amongst them!

Death by hanging was abolished in 1965. (Just in time to save the Moor’s Murderers!)

For Grace and her brother it was thirteen years too late.

Sheila M. Barnes lives in West Sussex but is a native of The Black Country. In this, her tenth novel, Sheila has written a powerful and moving account of one woman’s struggle to abolish the horrors of capitol punishment. A far cry from her own life where she has the pleasure of overlooking the English Channel and the beautiful South Downs.

Sheila has been engaged in stage and theatre work for many years both behind and in front of the footlights. In retirement she enjoys motoring, walking beside the sea and of course writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheila M. Barnes
• Release date: Feb 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370273201

Sheila M. Barnes

Sheila M. Barnes lives in West Sussex but is a native of The Black Country. In this, her tenth novel, Sheila has written a powerful and moving account of one woman’s struggle to abolish the horrors of capitol punishment. A far cry from her own life where she has the pleasure of overlooking the English Channel and the beautiful South Downs. Sheila has been engaged in stage and theatre work for many years both behind and in front of the footlights. In retirement she enjoys motoring, walking beside the sea and of course writing.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

5

In 1941 Donald would have been seven.

The second-world war was raging and ration books were in evidence everywhere. Naturally Dad was away fighting the good fight somewhere in Italy and Mum, Chris and I were doing our best to merely survive.

Living, as we did in West London, we got a battering from German bombs almost every night. One of my most vivid memories of childhood is grabbing Donald’s hand and rushing him to Shepherd’s Bush Underground Station which served as our communal air-raid shelter. Many of our neighbours were ‘bombed out.’ Several were killed or severely wounded but we were lucky. Lucky seems a daft word when I think of the fear and deprivation we suffered. No Sunday roasts anymore. No sweets or biscuits and long queues for cigarettes outside every tobacconist shop. But lucky in the sense that none of us were hurt and, in 1945, Dad came home all in one piece.

Ours was an end of terrace Victorian villa. To this day I remember the council confiscating the iron railing that surrounded our front garden for use in the war effort. Some women gave their wedding rings to aid the cause and we all turned our tiny gardens into miniature allotments so that we could grow our own vegetables.

As siblings we were separated by our respective ages. Chris was the eldest, I followed four year’s later and Don arrived after a gap of three years. Mum always told us how Dad had celebrated when Don was born because he had his heart set on a son and after two daughters she had dreaded presenting him with a third. Mum had been sure she was about to produce another girl but Donald surprised her and I always think it was an added tragedy that Dad had to go away and fight for his country when he could have enjoyed many happy years playing with Don. Had it been peace-time he could have done all the ‘father and son’ things that the beastly war prevented.

‘Look after your brother,’ became almost a joke in our house. I recall Chris saying that, when she died, she was going to have those four words engraved on her tombstone. No matter what we were doing or where we were going, Mum would shout those words to us. ‘Look after your brother’ rang through our house and through our consciousness like a muddy river.

You see Donald was what we used to call backward. Nowadays there would be a fancy name for whatever ailed him. I suppose he was autistic or what is now termed bi-polar but back then, in what now seems like the dark ages, he was just referred to as ‘backward.’

Unhappily there were people in our street who called him other names but those were long before the days of P.C. and laws that forbade racial or derogatory remarks. In today’s soppy climate you could probably go to prison for some of the names hurled at poor Donald.

‘Village Idiot’ and ‘Crackpot’ were two of the milder ones that come to mind but there were some really horrid ones that used to make me cry. After a couple of terms, Mum stopped sending him to school because he got bullied and, another thing, Donald was never going to be able to read or write or even add two and two together so what was the point? I suppose in these days of social services and child welfare she would have been forced to send him to a special school where he would have been labelled as suffering, ‘learning difficulties.’ Luckily, due to a shortage of people to enforce the law, Mum was never hounded to send Don anywhere. We all did everything we could to teach him anything we thought he might be likely to grasp.

Even now, when so much more is known about mental health issues, I find it difficult to explain Donald’s particular affliction. Far from being a complete moron, Donald was almost bright in his particular way. For instance he could find his way about and accomplish simple tasks about the house. As a child, he took an interest in his clothes and learnt to tie a proper knot in his little striped tie. He appeared to understand programs on our Bush wireless set (a prized possession) and run errands for Mum. So you see he was not altogether a simpleton.

Nevertheless when it came to his sitting behind a desk in a schoolroom he proved incapable of learning almost everything. Remembering to feed next door’s Ginger Tom, when our neigbours were away, or planting a row of potatoes came easily but trying to teach him to recite the A B C or write his own name proved impossible.

Another thing, and this is important, Donald knew right from wrong. Many of the boys in our street pinched whatever they could from the ill stocked shops on Shepherd’s Bush Green but you could have locked Donald in a chocolate factory and he’d never as much as pinch a coffee cream. Admittedly he told lies but they were of the sort we all called ‘romances.’ For instance he would tell us how he’d saved a drowning kid from the canal or, single handed, fought a gang of youths who were terrorising old ladies in the park. Mum used to tell Chris and I not to take any notice.

‘Poor lamb,’ she would say, ‘he knows he can’t do much so he has to do things in his head to make up for it.’

‘He told me he’d kissed that Masie Thompson in the bus shelter.’ Chris told Mum.

‘That little madam’s all of twelve and I don’t want our Donald even thinking about her never mind imagining he’s kissing her,’ said Mum.

But that was about the extent of it. We accepted Don and we loved him just as we would have done had he been ‘normal.’ I wish he had been so called normal because he’d probably still be alive today and I’d be an aunt or even a great aunt to his children. That would have been wonderful for, you see, I never married or bore a child of my own. Chris married but it didn’t last and I was too occupied with everything that happened to give marriage or even a normal life a second thought.

How could I when you think of the enormity of it all?

I think that for all of us life stopped in the July of 1954 and, to a certain extent, none of us ever recovered.

Which wasn’t surprising.

CHAPTER TWO

5

Piccadilly Circus was a sight I shall never forget.

The war was finally over and all the lights came on again. Vera Lynn sang a song about it and so did we. Singing and dancing made life seem like one great big party and everyone celebrated in an effort to make up for the six dismal years of wartime.

Best of all was the fact that Dad had come home for good.

During the war he had been back several times but his visits always provoked as much misery as they brought happiness. Seeing him again was wonderful but it was also a reminder that, within a very short space of time, he would be gone and it might be a year before we saw him again.

But in the early winter of 1945 Dad came home for good. I don’t have any difficulty in picturing him even after all these years for my house is a shrine, not only to him, but to all my family. Smiling down, from my cluttered sideboard, are at least five photos of Chris and Mum. Dad and Mum on their wedding day, Chris on hers and the five of us together.

Happy families!

Dad, at just a little over six feet, towered above most of our neighbours. These days even women average five feet eight or nine but back in the forties and fifties, the entire population seemed much shorter and smaller. Perhaps it’s our modern diet that encourages height and bulk but Dad really was a big man. Not just tall but broad and muscular. Handsome with his black hair and sparkling blue eyes he always reminded me of a storybook hero such as Dan Dare or a dashing superman from one of Donald’s comics. In unkind moments I used to wonder what he’d seen in Mum? I mean such a fine looking man marrying a woman like Mum seemed all wrong to me. Mum, at five foot nothing and vastly over-weight, was hardly a compliment to his good looks. She had mousy hair, prominent teeth and a perpetually shiny nose. It didn’t matter how much face-powder she rubbed on that large nose, it always needed more and, another thing, at only thirty she was forced to wear National Health glasses and, although you won’t remember such dinosaurs, believe me they weren’t pretty.

So my photographs show my handsome Dad towering above my plain fat Mother and Chris and I trying to emulate Princes Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose who were the darlings of those postwar days.

In the middle is my favourite picture of Donald.

At fifteen, forbidden cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, he looks cheeky and innocent. Of course smoking was all the vogue in the forties and fifties as no one had the slightest inkling of the harm it caused. Donald took to ‘Woodbines’ and ‘Gold-Leaf’ at the age of twelve and was seldom seen without his proverbial ‘fag.’ I remember Mum hiding his cigarettes and continually nagging but she never managed to ‘cure’ him and, in a strange sort of way, I’m glad that he found joy and comfort in anything even the dreaded ‘weed.’

Dad was a heavy smoker himself and Chris and I soon developed the habit but I think, in our case, it was more to do with looking grown up and sophisticated than any real driving addiction. Pleasures were limited in those mid-century days. Television was making something of an arrival but radio was still the favoured entertainment of the day. Towards the middle of the fifties the old fashioned gramophone was replaced by various versions of what we began to call ‘record players.’ Dad bought a ‘Dansette’ and we all contributed to the family record collection. People such as Frankie Lane, Patti Page and Doris Day were high on our lists of collectables but when Rock and Roll hit town we couldn’t wait to buy all the latest hits.

‘Look after your brother’ was replaced by ‘Turn that racket down.’ Poor old Mum was forced to shout it repeatedly but we were young and life was just beginning to get exciting!

Sometimes I would wonder what went on in Dad’s mind when it came to Donald? The son he had longed for and the son he eventually got must have grieved him but never did he show the slightest hint of disappointment. If anything he loved him perhaps more than he would have done had Don been ‘normal.’ Even at fifteen Donald had a habit of sucking his thumb if he was anxious or unhappy. His tantrums were unbelievable and he never seemed to grasp simple things like table manners or flushing the loo. Mum used to nag him but it made no difference, Don would give her a hug or sometimes even a swear word but he never learnt. I taught him to write his name but even that took over a month. In contrast Chris taught him to dance and memorise the words to our favourite songs both of which he picked up with ease.

As our teenage years progressed Mum and Dad started to worry about all of us. Evenings spent at home as a family became rare as we were almost all grown up and Chris especially was on the verge of marrying Stanley Whitehouse. I was working in a local factory making fake jewellery and Donald was hanging around the streets with what we then called ‘layabouts and Teddy Boys.’

After the war Dad went back to his old job with the Prudential Insurance Company where he was quickly promoted to the exalted position of Area Superintendent. Of course there was no way he could expect Donald to follow in his footsteps but he tried every possible means to find him suitable work. We all did. Even sweeping the floor in the factory where I worked proved too much for him and, after all my efforts to persuade my boss to employ him, he walked out after just five days. Chris found him a job as a window cleaner with one of her Stanley’s best friends but he was hopeless and Stan told Chris that the windows looked worse after Don’s so called cleaning than they did before he threw filthy water all over them.

So we had to accept the fact that our brother would probably never do a hand’s turn in his life. Mum made him help her about the house and Dad insisted that he work in our garden. One of my favourite pictures of Don was taken in our back yard and it shows him with one foot on a spade, both feet clad in a large Wellington Boots and the proverbial ‘fag’ hanging from the corner of his mouth.

Sometimes he would show an interest in simple books but they were always the sort that were intended for kids of six of seven. Comics he adored and, although he couldn’t read the printed words, he grabbed them off Dad every weekend when they were delivered with the papers.

His bragging or romancing, as Mum always called it, increased and tales told over the dinner table became more and more bizarre. Once he caused Dad to choke on his steak and kidney pie when he said that one of his mates had robbed the local butcher’s shop and made off with fifty quid. Another time he told us that he and a boy called Robin had climbed into a bombed out building in Wandsworth and found lots of china figurines which they’d sold down the Portobello Market for over a hundred pounds.

‘Robin who?’ stormed Dad.

‘Don’t know his other name.’

‘Then go out and find him and bring him here. When I find out what he’s called he’ll be down the police station writing it at the bottom of his confession.’

‘He’s making it up,’ Mum said. ‘Tell your Dad it’s a fairy story, Donald.’

‘It’s true,’ retorted my brother as he threw his knife and fork on the floor and would have turned the table over had not Dad been quick enough to catch his arm and march him from the room.

‘Do you think that story was true?’ Chris asked me when we were in my bedroom later that afternoon.

‘Shouldn’t think so. I mean why would hundreds of pounds of china be left in a bombed out building after all this time? The war’s been over four years now so it stands to sense people would have been in and out of wherever it is and taken any valuables long ago.’

‘I hope you’re right otherwise our dear brother will end up in Borstal or wherever they put young criminals these days.’

‘Oh, Dad’ll sort him out,’ I told Chris.

Shortly after that remembered episode Chris and Stanley Whitehouse got married. One of those rare fine days in early May when it’s warm enough to leave your coat at home and feel the warmth of the sun. As a family we went to church but not often and so the vicar of St. James at Notting Hill Gate wasn’t exactly over the moon when he was asked to perform the ceremony. I think Dad got a lecture regarding the fact that the church was not just a convenience when it came to weddings and funerals but a place where we should all worship on a regular basis. I remember Dad telling Mum he’d as good as promised full patronage to get the old boy on his side and they had both laughed.

Some few years later that church became our refuge and that same vicar listened to hundreds of our prayers.

It never does to make promises you have no intention of keeping. Fate steps in and turns the joke on you!

CHAPTER THREE

5

Stanley Whitehouse worked for a brush company as a rep. I don’t think travelling salesmen are called ‘reps’ anymore. I even wonder if such jobs still exist? A friend of mine has a daughter who works in a supermarket and she says goods are ordered automatically by computer. But back in the early-fifties ‘reps’ were thick on the ground. Travelling in allotted areas driving company cars, carrying prestigious brief cases, they pleaded for orders usually from small shopkeepers. Stanley sold every type of brush you can think of. Paint brushes, badger shaving brushes, ladies hairbrushes and yard brooms. If it had bristles Stanley Whitehouse sold it.

Stanley was a man you neither loved nor loathed. I remember wondering what Chris had seen in him. He was dumpy, shortsighted and completely lacking when it came to a sense of humour. Conversation wise, he was deadly. Once you’d extracted a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ from poor old Stan you were on your own. I used to beg Chris not to leave me alone with him for any length of time as I didn’t know what to say to him. Usually we just sat and looked at each other. He was no better with Chris, at least I never saw them chatting or laughing together but I’ll tell you a very strange thing about my sullen brother in law, he was a huge success with Donald.

Don, who never seemed interested in anyone but the occasional boys he met on street corners, took to Stan and actually managed what passed for conversations with him. Stanley would pick up one of Don’s comics and pretend to read it. At first Don would snatch it from him much as a dog would snatch a bone.

‘That’s mine,’ he would roar.

‘Only looking,’ Stan would say as he handed it back.

I think Don began to see possibilities in so much as Stan could read and appeared to have all the time in the world. Whatever went through his mind he worked out that if he joined Stan on our sofa and handed him the latest comic, Stan would read the simple stories out loud. Of course we all took turns in doing just that but usually we had other things to do and, after a few minutes, tired of reading the exploits of Korky the Cat or Dan Dare in ‘The Eagle’, we made a dash for the exit.

Mum told Stan he mustn’t feel obliged to spend so much of his time with Donald but that was only because good manners made her feel the need to relieve him of such boring duties. Deep down she was delighted that someone as solid and respectable as Stanley Whitehouse was prepared to spend an afternoon entertaining her difficult son. Dad said he didn’t know how Stan could be bothered but Chris was only too relieved that her less than charismatic husband had found ‘something to do’ when she brought him home.

Married less than six months, Chris was delighted when she discovered she was pregnant. Mum, an old fashioned family woman, was equally delighted and even Dad gave her a hug and shook Stanley’s hand. Looking back it seems to me that the whole of that summer was spent either quarrelling over the baby’s name or making plans for its nursery, its wardrobe, its gender and its arrival in general.

I was as bored as Stanley!

Chris and Mum had a special bond. I’m not saying that she and I were in any way estranged but I never aspired to her image of the ‘storybook’ mother or ‘women’s magazine’ wife. Life, where I was concerned, didn’t begin and end with a husband and two children. Cookery books and needlework bored me silly and what colour curtains to hang in ‘the lounge’ held no appeal whatsoever. Chris was into all that in a big way and as excited as a kid at Christmas when she and Stan managed to get a mortgage on a pretty house on Grange Mount.

Grange Mount was considered quite upmarket in the early fifties. Once farm land and rumoured to have been the site of a glamorous manner house, a new estate had been built on its grassy slopes.

I came across a photo of Chris’s house only last week when I was searching for items to send to our local charity shop. If I remember correctly it cost a mere two thousand pounds in 1952 and the repayments on the mortgage were seven pounds a month. What’s the betting it would fetch half a million in today’s inflated prices? Double garage, bay windows both upstairs and down, cloakroom and breakfast room as well as a spacious kitchen. The garden alone would gladden the heart of any gardener or parent of a dozen children for it was enormous. The developers who built Grange Mount estate weren’t greedy so everything about that house was spacious and well thought out.

Chris spent her entire life cleaning and polishing. Door handles and bath taps were tended as if shaped from solid gold. Sparkling brass and shining floors complimented the fashionable furniture bought on hire purchase from one of the big shops in the West End. She and Mum happily spent entire mornings admiring copper-bottomed saucepans and wiping paintwork on doors just in case anyone had had the nerve to leave finger-prints on the pristine woodwork.

Frankly it all bored me stiff but I loved Chris and so I went along with the general enthusiasum for both the house and the new arrival who was so soon to grace the newly furnished nursery. Poor Stan was hardly allowed to sit on the chairs and sofas that his hard earned money had provided. Shoes were left strictly on the door-mat and cigarettes prohibited in case the smoke damaged the delicate fabrics so beloved by Chris and Mum. Chris, by this time, had given up smoking as I think we were beginning to understand the dangers of nicotine especially if you were expecting.

Dad did his best to avoid invitations to dine or visit his eldest child because it meant leaving his beloved cigarettes behind or sneaking out into the garden for a quick drag. Once outside, re-acquainted with your shoes but knowing they had to be removed on returning, there was the constant fear of dropping a hint of mud onto the expensive carpets that covered the entire ground floor.

But the real threat to Chris’s palace of perfection was Donald.

With a mental age of not more than six and a penchant for jumping on the furniture, he was a nightmare. Messy with his food, liable to spill anything that was ‘spillable’ and usually grubby into the bargain, Chris began to dread him.

Because of the threat he posed to the newly acquired finery, Stan was in the habit of taking him for long walks whenever we were invited to lunch. Sometimes Dad would pretend to join them but I know for a fact that he parted from both son and son in law when they reached ‘The King’s Head’ on Mill Street.

Mum, full of excitement over Chris, the coming baby and the house nagged me to follow suit.

‘Think what a lovely life our Chris is having, Grace,’ she would tell me. ‘Now if you look around and find yourself a man who can give you a nice house and everything that goes with it, you’ll be set up for life my girl.’

‘Doesn’t appeal to me, Mum’ I always said. ‘I want to save some money and then see something of the world. Don’t want to stick around this dump for the rest of my life and I don’t want a mortgaged house and a screaming kid thank you very much.’

As it was circumstances forced me to ‘stick around’ which was doubly dreadful as there was no hiding place in Shepherd’s Bush for any member of the Thornton family.

Perhaps there would have been no hiding place anywhere in the world.

CHAPTER FOUR

5

At seventeen Donald was fully grown.

At least he never grew any taller although, on reflection, I suppose it’s possible he might have over-taken Dad’s six feet had circumstances been different. But, nevertheless, he was taller than most boys of his age, as slim as a stick and as handsome as a film star. His eyesight was flawed but whether that meant he was short sighted or long sighted, I really can’t recall. I know Mum used to trot him off to her own optician where he received an endless supply of glasses because no sooner had he taken possession of a new pair than they were either smashed or lost.

His hair was very similar to mine but it curled and grew like a weed. I used to envy him it’s silky texture and thick mass as, although we were both blonde, his thatch was much more manageable than mine. Donald had what we termed as ‘nice hands’. Long thin fingers with well shaped nails which, unfortunately due to his low mental age, were usually black. Attempting to clean them would result in screams so Chris and I left such miserable chores to Mum who also failed in the ‘manicure’ department.

Stanley, to the rescue, found a way of both cutting those talons and extracting a week’s worth of dirt from under their surface at the same time. Chris used to watch him perform minor miracles on her troublesome brother and whisper to me that she only hoped he would be as dedicated when it came to his own son.

But just like Mum, twenty five years ago, Chris didn’t produce a son. Her first-born was a daughter who she christened Kathleen Grace. Flattered that my own name was included I might add that we never called her anything but Kay. At first it was always the full version and then Dad started to call her ‘Katie’ which got shortened even further to Kate and then to ‘Kay.’

Kay’s fifty-two now and I doubt she’d turn to answer if anyone called her Kathleen. So Kay it was and she must have rated as the most treasured baby in the land. Had there been a competition my blonde haired blue-eyed niece would have forced Princess Charlotte into a very poor second place for we all simply adored her.

Everyone except Stanley that is!

Not that he actively disliked his new daughter but, being a baby, she bored him. I don’t think that was unusual given that in the early fifties men were hardly the hands on parents that they’ve since become. For instance I never recall seeing or hearing of a man changing a nappy or getting up in the middle of the night to prepare a feed. Nowadays it’s expected but certainly not when Kay was born. To this day I have a vivid memory of an instance that took place one Sunday morning when she was about four months old. We were all round at Chris’s admiring the baby