She was particularly enamored of Richmal Crompton's
Just William books, which featured adventures in the great outdoors not unlike those Townsend herself experienced in the peaceful wooded countryside surrounding her childhood home. Not all was idyllic, however; in an 11 October 1999
Daily Telegraph (London) article, Elizabeth Grice notes that as a child, Townsend had witnessed a murder while sitting in a tree with two other children but had told no one for fear that adults would not believe her.
This distrust of adults did little to help Townsend in the formality of school settings; she finally left school permanently a week before her fifteenth birthday. With no official qualifications, she worked at a series of unskilled jobs in dress shops, shoe factories, garages, and in encyclopedia sales before meeting and marrying Keith Townsend, a sheet-metal worker, when she was eighteen years old. When her husband left her for a younger woman in 1971, Townsend was left to raise their three young children alone. She soon found herself in need of public assistance and was forced by economic necessity to move into government-subsidized council housing, where she more than once was reduced to searching for loose change down the back of her sofa to pay for food.
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