West Yorkshire. September 1992. Police report that a quarter of the prostitutes who are arrested in their vice areas are aged 16 or under. They say the figures have soared in the previous 12 months. During 1991, less than four per cent of prostitutes they dealt with were under age.
They were an odd couple. He looked about 20, she seemed a little younger but, although they were adults, they had the look of lost infants, straying together through the streets of Sheffield, clutching each other for safety, wide-eyed and aimless, drifting towards the sound of a Salvation Army band, and when one of the Salvation Army officers got them talking, he heard a story that was just as odd.
For most of her life, Natalie Pearman was a walking portrait of an ordinary girl. She lived with her four brothers and sisters and her cat called Lucy in a neat little council house on the edge of a peaceful village in Norfolk. She liked ballet and horses and watching Neighbours after tea, she was good at drawing and painting and she had the idea that when she grew up, she would like to go into the air force so that she could be independent and travel around the world.
It is quiet in the graveyard. Away to the west, all Birmingham is on its way to work, the motorways are humming, the pavements are already choked with shoppers and on the radio they are wondering about the weather, but when the big, dark hearse rolls in through the heavy iron gates of Sutton Coldfield cemetery, there is silence.
In the early hours of Monday morning, January 3, five small boys from Leeds were taken into care. They were brothers, aged between six months and six years, their mother was only 22, and they lived together in a council house which was said to be so dirty, so littered with dog mess, that police were physically sick at the smell and senior social workers compared it to a toilet.
Scenes from a city. England, the autumn of 1993.
In a McDonalds hamburger bar, two boys sit at a table. Jamie is eleven; he is small and slim with blond hair, pale blue eyes and a face with the kind of impish innocence that makes old ladies want to pat him on the head. Luke is 13, chubby with pink puppy-fat cheeks and a chunky little body whose roundness is exaggerated by the padded red anorak which he insists on wearing indoors and out, regardless of the weather.
Disconnection is a thing of the past. Ask any electricity company, and they’ll tell you that in the new world of privatised electricity, no-one has to live in the dark and cold any more. If someone has trouble with a bill, they can have a pre-payment meter. Then they just pop down to the showroom, buy a token, push it into the meter and there it is – fuel without fear of debt. Just look at the figures: June this year saw sixty percent fewer homes disconnected than June last year. It’s a thing of the past…
One day last summer, when Joey had been arrested yet again for yet another burglary, his solicitor went down to the police station to see him and he sat down opposite him in the interview room with all the graffiti on the wall, and he sighed and he asked him straight: “Joey, why do you do it?”
It was a Tuesday morning. As soon as the bus stopped in the middle of Twickenham, she hurried out along the pavement with her bag on her arm, down towards the river, to the darkness of the ladies toilet there. The shops were full of people, most of them women, just like her.
Brighton is a plump little town. In a survey last year, academics at Reading University analysed the wealth of all the major towns and cities of Europe and discovered that only 18 towns in the whole continent were richer than Brighton and that in the United Kingdom, there was none to match its wealth.
