London Born
SIDNEY DAY
Compiled and edited by
Helen Day
Table of Contents
‘Sid…Sid!’ Me mother was calling for me. I’m not kidding you—if there was five hundred people lived in our street, there was five hundred people out on the road, all looking at me. Me mum and a policeman was standing outside our house. Next to them was Mrs Leicester from the shop down the road. I thought about running but they had already seen me.
Me mum says, ‘You’ve had a loaf out of her shop and she wants the fourpence ha’penny for it.’
‘Pay up, you saucy sod,’ says Mrs Leicester.
She had come to find me. I don’t know how she knew it was me stole the bread, but there she was outside our house. I held out tuppence ha’penny. Me mum clumped me round the ear’ole.
‘Get inside!’
The policeman come inside with us. Me mum told him she had given me some money that morning and sent me to get a loaf of bread from Leicester’s shop.
I says, ‘Mrs Leicester weren’t about so I took it.’
I had crept in, picked up a nice crusty cottage loaf and slid out. After I got it home I thought to meself, ‘That’s fourpence ha’penny I’ve saved there.’ So I went up to the faggot shop on the corner of our road and spent tuppence on faggot and pease pudding—two lots on a piece of newspaper.
‘I ought to nick you,’ the policeman says.
But he just gave me a rollicking and it all got washed over at the death. All I got was a bleeding good hiding from me mum. Then she locked me in the bedroom. I was in there for hours. It got late and I could hear them all down in the kitchen. On the