Charity

by Lesley Pearse

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Audio available 4.5

Charity Stratton is fifteen when a fire kills her parents and the authorities separate her from her younger siblings. Sent into service as a boarding-school kitchen maid, she endures exhausting work and isolation before a relationship with a student leaves her pregnant and without protection.

Charity escapes to London, where the apparent freedom of the early 1960s offers opportunity alongside exploitation and poverty. Determined to regain her brothers and sisters, she must build a life in which neither her upbringing nor other people’s judgement decides her worth.