Gone Shopping: The Story of Shirley Pitts - Queen of Thieves

By Lorraine Gamman

Voted one of The Guardian's top 10 best crime books of all time and one of the best true crime books ever written according to Stylist

Shirley Pitts, the eldest of six children was born upside down on 24 November 1934. Her 'career' began by thieving bread off doorsteps and coal from coal carts. Her father's bungled attempts at black marketeering and her dipsomaniac mother's inadequacies made Shirley resolve not only to be a first-class thief but also the best mother her six children could wish for.

Before she died Shirley told her story to Lorraine - the story of a generous, brave and beautiful woman with a huge sense of fun and a love of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781448209712

Lorraine Gamman

Lorraine Gamman is Professor of Design, at Central Saint Martins (CSM) College of Arts and Design, University of the Arts London (UAL), where she has taught design and contextual studies since 1989. She is also currently a Visiting Professor and Research Associate at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Australia. Gamman has published widely on visual culture and design, including co-authored academic books, articles and critical reviews. She now lives in Stoke Newington with her partner and daughter.

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Preface

Exit the ‘Queen of Thieves’

On 25 March 1992 twenty-one Daimlers in regal procession followed Shirley Pitts (also known as Hawkins, amongst other aliases) to a South London cemetery. The woman the newspapers called the ‘Queen of Shoplifters’ was finally laid to rest, in a £5,000 Zandra Rhodes dress she didn’t buy over the counter.

Funeral of Shirley Pitts, March 1992 (© L. Gamman)

Shirley Pitts’ final request was that she should be buried as near as possible to her bank robber brother, Henry ‘Adgie’ Pitts, who had died twenty years earlier in a car crash at the age of twenty-nine. Shirley’s children made sure her final wish was granted and the music of Irving Berlin’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’ (with the lyric ‘I’m in Heaven’) serenaded a woman loved by many as she was lowered into the ground. Family and friends did their best to say goodbye privately, but it wasn’t easy. Photographers and reporters trampled on church and mausoleum roofs to get a better look and turned the funeral into an absolute farce in their attempts to locate ‘criminal aristocracy’.

Shirley Pitts’s journey had been a long one, far longer than the twenty miles between her home in Chigwell and her final stop at Tooting cemetery. Necessity appears to have been her early criminal inspiration. Shirley was seven when she first went out thieving, stealing bread and milk from doorsteps because her family were hungry. One reporter later commented on Shirley’s origins that her early life ‘was as much Dickens as Dickens and Jones’.b Yet not all Shirley’s crimes stemmed from material deprivation or Dickensian conditions. Like her brothers and her father Harry Pitts, who died in prison in 1962, Shirley grew up within a criminal subculture in London and soon came to see crime as a ‘normal way of life’.

As well as shoplifting, an activity she regarded as her ‘bread and butter’ trade, Shirley went on to earn her living from fraud, bank robbery, the escort business, jewellery theft, burglary and numerous other scams. In between wearing expensive designer clothes (she developed a penchant for Chanel suits) and having a good time night clubbing, Shirley also found time to give birth to seven children by three different fathers, to be as decent as she could to those close to her and to move home so many times that it wasn’t always easy for her partners, let alone anyone else, to know exactly where to find her.

One of the things that most surprised me when putting together Shirley’s life story was not only the extent of her criminal career, but also the fact that much of the early ‘crime’ material in this book sounds like it belongs to a different century. London fifty years ago was a very different place to the city we know and love today, and the mature Shirley was a very different person from the little girl who grew up to be a professional thief.

Shirley Pitts survived so many social changes, including those that influenced the way Sixties criminal subculture of theft and bank robbery in London evolved in the eighties to embrace a new (and perhaps even more cynical) world of drug-related crime. Yet Shirley seemed rather untouched by it all. She had simply ‘done’ every crime going, and, to use a cliché, ‘knew what it was all about’. From shoplifting to bank robbery, from confidence scams to running an escort business, Shirley really was a professional. Yet she didn’t seem cynical about crime at all, despite making her living from it. In many ways I think Shirley viewed crime as a means to living the ‘good life’. Crime was a game to Shirley, a way of providing the money needed so that she and her family could live in style until Shirley pulled off the ‘big’ one (or at least won the pools). Meanwhile, Shirley never seemed to lose hope that she would achieve her dream. Even when she was dying she still found the energy to pull one last scam – she just couldn’t give up the idea of a better tomorrow.

Shirley Pitts with Chris Hawkins, her long-term partner, in the mid-1960s (© C. and R. Hawkins)

To really understand this crazy optimism, and the determination of Shirley’s so called ‘criminal’ mentality, it is perhaps necessary to look beyond tabloid stereotypes and to scrutinise the powerful social forces that inspired this passionate woman to break the law in more ways than one. Such an opportunity to see things from the ‘inside’ is rare. Successful criminals make their careers out of not letting people know what they are really doing, maintaining a façade of respectability for the general public while going about the routine tasks of working at crime. Shirley was no different from her male counterparts in as much as she kept her secrets close to her home. It took a lot of trust between us for her to drop the masks of scam and pretence and for her to tell me how she really felt. Perhaps it also took the realization by Shirley that her life was nearly over and her words could no longer put her at risk of prosecution for her to finally ‘confess’.

On the surface, Shirley was romantic and oh so comical with her humour and ability to accurately mimic people she had met. She always made me laugh when she told me her stories, but I soon learned to recognise that she split the crime part of her self off from the rest of her personality. Her laughter often hid the sort of experiences buried deep down that most of us can only imagine in our worst nightmares. In retelling these stories, I hope not to promote more crime voyeurism, but, on the contrary, to try to accurately represent, without ‘added’ glamour, the relationship between poverty and contemporary crime as seen from a woman’s point of view.

It was no easy task trying to do this or even putting this book together. At first Shirley didn’t want to talk about anything but the past. She tried to avoid discussing the harsh realities of her life and seemed far more interested in recounting nostalgic memories of crime incidents involving friends like Ronnie Knight, Freddie Foreman, Buster Edwards, Charlie Wilson or even the Krays than she did in talking about herself. It took a long while for me to get Shirley to talk about herself in the present tense. Even then our conversations about the criminal aspects of her life were still so entwined with stories about her family that it was often impossible to get her to separate them. In the end, to help our erratic conversation make sense, it is a fact that I have substantially ‘ghost written’ Shirley’s voice in this book – even though the stories themselves originally came straight from Shirley’s lips. To the best of my knowledge, nevertheless, I can confirm that all the facts recounted in Shirley Pitts memoirs are absolutely true (I corroborated much of the material via secondary sources) except some names and places have been deliberately altered to save family and friends from possible prosecution.

Shirley Pitts lived for over fifty years as a successful thief and this book presents her story in its entirety, ‘warts and all’, hopefully without bringing trouble to anyone else’s door. It’s true Shirley lived outside of society’s rules and I haven’t written this book in order to suggest that either Shirley Pitts’ life, or her actions, were worthy of emulation. All Shirley tried to do was tell me her version of how her life of crime seemed to her, and to describe the circumstances that led to the making of a professional thief. All I have tried to do in writing up this true story is let you see the full human dimensions of the generous and likeable woman the newspapers crowned the ‘Queen of Thieves’.

To say Shirley Pitts was one of a kind, and that I truly miss that laugh of hers, would be an understatement. If only a tenth of Shirley’s extraordinary and generous spirit shines out through the pages of this book, and some people begin to review rigid definitions about what’s supposed to make a person truly ‘wicked’, then I will have done my job properly and kept my promise to a decent woman I was proud to call my friend. Unlike many of her criminal contemporaries, and it must be said even some of her own family, Shirley Pitts truly did believe in old-fashioned values, including now outdated crime values like ‘honour among thieves’. I hope by keeping my word and finishing this book – as I always promised Shirley I would – it will be clear to the reader what we shared in common. To put it in a nutshell, real loyalty and friendship are earned not bought: Shirley Pitts earned mine, as well as my respect.

The last words of this introduction should come directly from the lips of the remarkable woman whose ‘criminal’ life is the subject of this book. Before she died, Shirley Pitts asked me to send warm greetings to anyone who recognises themselves within these pages. In particular, she asked me to let them know ‘that this book is dedicated to all the lucky bastards who never got caught, as well as to some of the poor sods who did’.

Does crime pay? Read Shirley’s story and make your own mind up…

Lorraine Gamman

London, 1995

Introduction

Shirley’s Last Scam

‘There’s a woman here who says she needs to see Lorraine Gamman urgently,’ said the school-keeper at Central St Martin’s College in Holborn.

I arrived in reception to find Shirley Pitts dressed from head to toe in a grey jersey Nicole Farhi waistcoat and pant suit, looking immaculate. We exchanged pleasantries in the college canteen over coffee before she told me why she’d chosen to pay such an unexpected visit. She wiped her face with a serviette and pointed mischievously to a rather heavily stacked black bag on the chair next to her.

Finally she said, ‘Can you come to Selfridges with me? I need help carrying that lot.’

‘Of course I’ll come with you to Selfridges, but what exactly do you want me to do?’ I asked, in a voice that I knew betrayed my concern. Shirley never had any problems getting taxis and I wondered why she suddenly needed my help, guessing she was after more than just a lift in my car to Oxford Street.

She laughed at what must have been a paranoid expression on my face. ‘It’s all right, Lorraine,’ she said, looking at me shrewdly. ‘It’s all perfectly legal… I just want you to help me open a safety deposit account, I’m worried that I’m just too tired to sort it out properly myself.’

I relaxed a bit, as I could see she was genuinely tired. Over the years we had been collaborating on our book, it was quite usual for Shirley to ask me to help her with things that involved writing letters and filling in forms. She was so negligent about paperwork that I often gave her free secretarial help in between discussing chapters, so naturally I agreed to go with her.

I pointed to the black leather holdall. ‘What you got in there, then, the Crown Jewels?’

‘No, about a hundred grand in cash,’ she said, and I knew by her tone that she wasn’t joking. ‘Have you got anywhere we could be private because I really need to count it properly.’

I had the keys to a flat belonging to a friend in Kings Cross who was out at work all day and suggested to Shirley that we went there. I picked up the black holdall and we made our way downstairs towards my car in the basement of the college. This journey took longer than I thought it would. The outfit and make-up Shirley had put on for college was so convincing a disguise that, although I knew she was seriously ill, even I had underestimated how weak the illness had made her. In fact, we had to rest at least three times as we made our way down the stairs, with students whizzing past us, because she had so little strength.

Once we arrived at my friend’s flat, Shirley asked me to unpack the bag on to the coffee table in the living room. She took the opportunity to just slump in an armchair as I counted out the money. It took me about twenty minutes, and a considerable number of strong rubber bands, to make neat bundles of the small Irish, English and mainly Scottish notes that were stacked in the black leather holdall. As I counted, wrapping bands around £5,000 piles at a time, and saw how much money there really was, I became more alarmed by the minute that I was getting involved in something illegal.

‘Where did you get the money from?’ I finally blurted out. I must have looked really anxious by then, because Shirley stared very hard at me before laughing, a little bit at first, then really loudly. She said something like ‘Oh, your face…’ and burst into a good old belly laugh.

‘It’s all right, Lorraine,’ she said when she calmed down. ‘There’s nothing at all for you to worry about, I promise you. I know you’re straight and I wouldn’t involve you in anything crooked… This is just money someone has owed me for a long time. I want to get it put away before he changes his mind and tries to borrow it back. All I want you to do is help me sort things out at the bank – I’m too tired to fill in all the forms myself and I don’t want to tell anyone else my business.’

Now, most people would probably think this was an unlikely explanation, particularly if, like me, they knew Shirley Pitts had lived her life as a professional thief. But looking at her state of health, and knowing she had been sinking fast into the illness over the past few months, it was clear to me that Shirley was too ill to have been on a hoist or bank job. It’s not that such crimes were beyond her (in fact I knew she had been in on such ‘jobs’ before) but I realised that recently because of the devastating effects of cancer, just getting up and getting dressed was a major achievement for Shirley. There was no way she could have done anything that would have involved so much physical exertion.

I tried to think of the likely explanation for the cash. Anyone who knew the way Shirley Pitts spent money – she could spend £2,000 a week without blinking and have very little to show for it – would certainly not have asked her, of all people, to look after their savings. So in a crazy way it made sense to me that someone must have given Shirley the money, rather than left it with her to ‘mind’. I just couldn’t figure out who or why and I could see Shirley wasn’t in the mood to answer my questions.

I persisted, tactfully at first, and then more forcefully. Eventually I made Shirley tell me how she had come by the money. Her explanation was that she and a good friend had made a killing with a ‘semi-legitimate’ property scam about five years before, and that her friend had disappeared with her share of the profits. Shirley wouldn’t name her friend but said he had heard from mutual friends in Marbella about Shirley’s recent mastectomy. Evidently her friend had felt guilty about the way he had treated Shirley and wanted ‘to make it up to her’. To make things right between them, he had personally come round to give her the money he owed her and told her to ‘retire’ on this bit of ‘wages’ until she was better. It sounded like a fairy story, but stranger things had happened to Shirley, and she insisted every word was true.

We finished counting the notes. It was clear there wasn’t £100,000 in the holdall but just under £90,000. At this news, Shirley said, ‘That sneaky bastard must have taken some of it out of my bag,’ and started ranting to herself. Seeing me repack the wads of money into her bag, Shirley began to rouse herself. She said she felt a little better and that we should be getting into town.

It took about fifteen minutes to drive to Selfridges and Shirley got out of the car as near to the store as we could get. It was clear she didn’t have the energy for walking. She pointed to a side-street near Selfridges and said she would wait there for me at one of the pavement tables outside a coffee bar. Shirley was all smiles when I arrived back from parking the car, sitting under a large parasol drinking Perrier water in the sunshine with the bag beside her.

She said she didn’t want to walk into Selfridges without a disguise whilst carrying the bag, as she was known as a shoplifter to many of the security guards there. She laughed when she said she didn’t want them asking her to open her bag or by counting out what she was by now calling her ‘pension’.

Selfridges contains a safety deposit banking area at the bottom of the store. Virtually anyone in the world can open a safety deposit account there, as long as they can afford the cost of running the account, which is by no means cheap. To get into the safety deposit bank at Selfridges is an unusual experience. This bank is like something out of a James Bond movie. First of all, we had to press a bell near the discreetly placed unit in the sub-basement, then an electronic gate made up of gold-coloured bars automatically swung forward and let us about three feet into the bank. The gate then automatically closed behind us and I giggled nervously as we found ourselves in a sort of gilded cage – or rather a security space where we were interviewed by two rather heavy duty security guards. ‘What’s your business here?’ they asked forcefully.

‘We want to open a new safety deposit box account,’ Shirley replied automatically. I looked at her and realised that she had clearly done this sort of thing before. The security guards opened the second gate of golden bars and let us into the safety deposit area. Inside was very dull in comparison to the gold entrance. It contained row upon row of khaki-green metal boxes as well as some small cubicles with rather limp beige silk curtains hanging from them. Despite the dark drab interior my mind boggled at the jewels and riches of solid gold bars I imagined stored in the boxes in front of us.

After filling in forms to open an account, Shirley and I were shown into a discreetly curtained cubicle and given a long grey metal box, number C3531. We started to fill the box with bundles of notes, but it was only half the size of the bag. Try as I might, we couldn’t get all the cash into the box. The small notes made so many bundles that there were too many for the box. I suggested to Shirley that we take some of the money to a high street bank and change it into notes of larger denomination, but she looked at me as though I had gone mad. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t fucking be here if I could take this money to an ordinary bank. More than two grand in used notes is far too suspicious to take to a normal bank.’ She never did explain why.

So there was nothing to do but try and cram the money as best we could into the box. In my enthusiasm to press the money down, I put the box on the floor and started stamping. Shirley thought this was a good idea at first but, despite my considerable efforts, not all the money would fit into the security box. I applied more pressure but under my weight it looked like the metal box was going to bend. Shirley started laughing again and put four bundles (about £20,000) in her handbag and said without any irony, ‘Oh well, I do need to do a bit of shopping…’

We covered the rest of the money in the open metal box with leaflets for ‘home security systems’ we found in the cubicle so the guard didn’t see the money. We called him to take the box and to lock it away, and he did his job and appeared not in the least bit interested in what we had put in the box. Eventually, the guard securely fixed the metal box back in its place amongst the rows of other metal boxes on the shelf. Shirley took the key from him and we both floated outside to drink cappuccino and to laugh some more about what, by then, Shirley was calling ‘the gold James Bond gates’.

By this time Shirley’s mind really was on shopping. She had decided that she was going to buy her two granddaughters an automatic toy jeep from Selfridges (costing about £2,000) so they could enjoy playing at being drivers. She loved her granddaughters so much and was always buying them things, not least because I think she identified with children and wanted her flesh and blood to have a better childhood than she did.

I managed to talk Shirley out of buying the toy car that day (the granddaughters lived in a first floor flat with no lift) by reminding her I needed to get back to work. Outside the college I helped Shirley hail a black cab to take her back to Woodford. As she left, she kissed me goodbye and put the safety deposit key into my hand. Before I could say anything, she also passed me the leather holdall with the money in it, telling me to ‘look after it’. I was speechless by then. Back at work, I put the safety deposit key in my pencil case, scrunched the money into my handbag and carried on with my afternoon tutorials, eventually forgetting I was carrying such a large amount of money on me. I never did get to spend any of the money, so perhaps this was the right attitude.

When I arrived home from work, my husband said Shirley had rung twice already. I called back immediately and found her acting very strangely on the telephone. It was as if someone was standing over her while she was speaking. Her voice was just so weird. I asked if everything was all right and, because her tone made me panic, I said I would go over to her there and then. Shirley said, ‘No, don’t come today, come tomorrow,’ and changed the subject by saying she had thought of some things to put in our book.

During this telephone conversation, even though I didn’t understand why, Shirley kept asking me if my friend ‘the crime reporter from World In Action’ was coming over with me when I visited her. I had made no such previous arrangement with Shirley and didn’t know how to respond. I could tell she was up to something, so I played along and said my friend couldn’t make it that night but I’d set something up for the following week. I could tell by Shirley’s response that this was the reply she wanted. Shirley wished me goodnight after that and told me she was going back to bed as she felt so tired. I put the phone down feeling extremely troubled. I began to wonder whether the drug Tamoxifen, which she was taking to treat the cancer that had started in her breast, was making her confused. Deep down I knew this wasn’t true. I promised myself I would go and see her the next day to find out what was really going on.

At the time, Shirley was living with one of her daughters in South Woodford who was really trying to help her gather her strength to fight the cancer. When I arrived at the flat the next morning I found it unusually difficult to park, with more posh cars than usual filling up the road. There was at least one Mercedes and some other large aerodynamic-looking cars with tough-looking men sitting in them.

When I walked into the flat I mentioned the cars outside to Shirley, who became absolutely paranoid and started asking me a million questions about the vehicles. I had just glanced at the cars in passing and was truly unable to satisfy her with my answers. She came up close to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Whatever you do, don’t mention the money or Selfridges while you’re in the flat.’

Shirley went on to ask about close personal friends who work in the media and I didn’t really mind, because at that time our conversation was so general. Yet all the while I had the feeling I was performing for an unseen audience. Unless someone was hiding in the closet, I didn’t understand why she wanted me to talk about writing and journalism in such a self-conscious manner but carried on, as it seemed to make her happy. The point did come, however, when I had had enough. Shirley started to ask me a lot of questions about two close personal friends, one who writes regularly for a national newspaper, the other who works for the BBC. Shirley’s enquiries were unusually intrusive (how much did they earn? how often did they write? etc.) and it was at this point I snapped, ‘What are you going on about? What is this all about?’

Shirley seemed startled at my outburst and put her fingers over her lips, gesturing me not to go on. She went into the kitchen to make some tea, and, when I followed her out there, she pulled me into the bathroom and told me that the flat was bugged. ‘Just act normally and don’t mention the money,’ she said.

I assumed that Shirley was in trouble with the police and I was quite self-conscious when we again started to make small talk. At first we talked about the macrobiotic diet and the healing tapes she was trying to follow to help prevent the spread of cancer. As much as I had sympathy with her efforts to get well, I couldn’t always follow her logic. She continually changed her position from being an absolute believer in alternative medicine to an absolute cynic. It was almost as if she thought, if she could persuade me alternative medicine might work, she might be able to convince herself.

In contrast to the healing crystals dangling from the windows, and the yoga chakra poster and other signs advocating ‘serenity’ all over the flat, the audacious, action-packed stories Shirley went on to tell me about shoplifting and crime didn’t exactly sound like they would promote inner peace.

We had completed about an hour of shorthand notes in a sort of question and answer format before I suggested we should cut the session short. I could see Shirley was looking tired, her energy visibly waning in front of me, like a light bulb starting to dim. I made an excuse to go and, despite her protests, in the end I could see Shirley was relieved. She said she’d pop over the next day so we could make some more tapes for the book but it was to be another three weeks before I saw her again.

When Shirley finally did turn up at my house – with her daughter and granddaughters outside – she seemed more relaxed than the previous time we met. She looked altogether healthier, and I hoped that this might be a sign that she was going into remission. She said she couldn’t stay long because she was in a hurry and had just popped in to pick up the money and the key to the safety deposit box (which she was going to clear out). She said she needed the money to pay her daughter’s huge domestic bills as well as to go ‘shopping’. She wanted some new clothes for the children, and I gathered she planned to buy a few or steal a few, whatever came the easiest.

When I asked her if things were now all right, she tried to change the subject by making small talk about my garden. At first I made fun of this tactic and, despite the lightness of my tone, I made it clear I was annoyed at this snub. ‘First you turn up with a bag of money. Then you interrogate me about my press contacts and tell me your flat is being bugged. How can you expect me not to want to know what is going on?’

She sighed and said, ‘I know, I know’. Then she promised to explain it all to me when she wasn’t in such a rush. In response I gave her a very old-fashioned look and went into a bit of a sulk. Seeing my reaction, Shirley said that if I really wanted to hear the whole story I should take a few days off work and drive down to the coast with her. A change of air would do us both good and it would be a good opportunity to work on the book. ‘Go on, you choose. Somewhere nice and quiet, where we don’t have to drive too far. It’ll be my treat…’

I suggested Broadstairs in Kent might be a good place, as it wouldn’t involve a long drive. More peaceful than a health farm and less distracting than Brighton, it seemed as good a place as any.

Shirley wasn’t so sure but perked up when I said it was so quiet we could get lost there. Our conversation was interrupted by a car horn outside – Shirley’s daughter was getting tired of waiting. Before she went, Shirley asked me to leave the number for the Broadstairs Tourist Board on her answering machine. I did as she asked and the next day Shirley rang to say that she was going to drive down to Broadstairs on the coming Saturday. She had booked a cottage for a couple of weeks and said that I could go and stay with her the following week whenever I felt like it.

I drove down to see Shirley on the Wednesday after I had finished my teaching commitments. I arrived in Broadstairs late afternoon to find Shirley relaxing in a deck-chair with her two small granddaughters playing on the beach. She told me that all her children and grandchildren had visited, over the weekend where there had been parades of people dressed like characters from Dickens novels as part of ‘Dickens Week’ (evidently Dickens had lived in Broadstairs). The kids had really enjoyed these Victorian street spectacles and the plays and little turns that had been going on for the whole weekend. I was relieved Shirley liked Broadstairs, as I had been worried that this kitsch ‘ye olde’ village wouldn’t be to her taste.

I had brought a bottle of brandy down from London with me (which was Shirley’s favourite tipple) as well as champagne and malt whisky. That evening, when her beautiful granddaughters were in bed, I opened the champagne so Shirley and I could have a drink in a bit of peace and quiet. I was determined to get to the truth behind the money in the safety deposit box in Selfridges. By the end of the bottle, I had managed to persuade Shirley to admit to me that there was no ‘old friend’ who had just come along and given her £90,000 and that she had got the money by some other means.

Although she admitted that I was right she had been involved in a scam, she said I had to ‘understand the circumstances’. She had been nearly broke when she had stopped hoisting after her mastectomy. She knew her children wanted her to get well and she had done her best to meditate and follow a macrobiotic diet but all the time she was secretly worrying about not having much money left. She said she was the one who usually helped her children financially and none of her kids was in a position to pick up Shirley’s expenses. Each month she had lots of bills to pay, including the mortgage on at least two houses that she co-owned with one of her sons. She knew from what the hospital had told her that the mastectomy was not going to cure her of cancer, but it bought her a bit of time to put her affairs in order and she was going to put up one hell of a fight rather than give in to it. But things weren’t simple. Money was a problem – as she was not feeling well enough to ‘work’.

Shirley was now claiming social security and told me she usually gave the address of a safe house from which she could sign on. She saw signing on as a sort of ‘cover’, a false trail for the police should they ever come looking for her. She told me she had never tried to live on the social security, she said nobody could pay all the bills and have enough money left to eat just by signing on. Yet, despite all the money she earned in addition to the money she got from the social security, she still had no savings. This was largely because, even when her children had grown up and left home, she seemed to spend most of her income on buying them things or keeping them and their children in their privileged state. After all these years of working so hard, Shirley just wasn’t prepared to go without, or to see her kids go without. While she was recovering from her mastectomy she was wracking her brains to think of a way out of her financial problems. If there was one constant characteristic about Shirley it was her belief that there was always a way out.

In the weeks following her operation, Shirley had been forced to rest. During the months after that the effects of her illness were devastating and she didn’t think she would make it, but gradually she got stronger. As soon as she felt better, she went out shoplifting again, not because she really wanted to (although she admitted she did like the rush of adrenalin) but because she was so broke. She wasn’t hoisting very seriously then – just a few afternoons here and there. In between she’d rest and enjoy visits from old friends and relatives who came up to see her once word got around she was ill. During one such visit, one of her cousins offered her a ‘job’ to help solve some of her financial problems. He told her that all she had to do was accompany a South London courier and drive a car to Spain carrying half a million pounds in small used notes. For this she would be given a free holiday in Marbella as well as a few thousand pounds for her trouble.

Although no one told Shirley why the money was being taken to Spain, she realised it was to enable certain people residing there to make drug deals. Shirley said she had little respect for her cousin because, even though he appeared to be trying to help her, it was well within his means to give her a few grand without even missing it. She said that in her day that was the code – you helped out criminals if they got sent to prison or couldn’t ‘work’ – but this younger generation (whom she called the ‘drug’ generation) had no values. However, she kept these thoughts to herself and asked her cousin a few questions about the job to find out who was behind it all. She refused the job, not only because she had no time for her cousin or for drugs, but also because she didn’t like the people whose names he had put up. She said that, even if she had been tempted, the names of these people were enough to put her off. ‘Low lives’ she called them and she said she wouldn’t work with them on any account. She told me these people always ‘fucked everyone for their money’ or, when they did pay