CHAPTER 20
I did not like begging, the demeaning reality of knocking at doors or sitting on the street asking strangers for help. Yet that is what I did when I left Ma’s house. I ran as far and as fast as I could, knowing Ma would be upset and the sergeant would mobilise all his constables to search for me. I spent a day or a week begging for food, rapping at doors, and accepting the insults or the scraps of waste with equal gratitude and humiliation.
When the policeman threatened me with the jail, I ran again. I ran until grey dawn revealed a countryside I did not know, with bare, wind-scoured hills that rose, rounded and bleak, to the silver-streak of the horizon.
Out here in this wasteland, there would be little to forage, even although I was an expert at finding food in hedgerows an
