Wife who could not stop spending

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 777.

Arranging jumbled text

Text 3 SKILLS DEVELOPMENT

Reading

1 On this page there are two newspaper stories, but they have been mixed up. Look at the headlines. Read the paragraphs quickly and first decide which paragraphs go with which story.

2 Put the paragraphs in the right order.

Mary

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3 Housewife

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Mary will not be giving up smoking...

a. A HOUSEWIFE who went on an £11,922 three-year spending spree complained in the London Bankruptcy Court yesterday that credit was far too easy to get. 'There ought to be a law to change these things,' she told the court. 'It's so easy, you just go on and on.'

b. Mary Padley smokes 60 cigarettes a day, plus the odd Churchill-sized cigar—and she is not giving up for anyone.

c. 'Every time I got a monthly state­ment it always said: '"Why don't you increase your credit limit".'

d. Even her doctor admits there is no point asking her to stop. Mrs Padley has just celebrated her 103rd birthday.

e. Her recipe for long life is 'work hard and don't think too much about tomorrow'.

f. She planned a small lunch party. But forty guests turned up and staved until midnight.

g. She said all she had left now were assets worth £92. She had filed her own petition for bankruptcy because she 'didn't know how to solve the problem'.

h. Mrs Linda Smaje, 39, who earns £32 a week as a domestic worker, and whose husband is unemployed, used finance companies and big-store credit cards to buy presents for her children and furnishings for her home.

i. Mrs Padley saw little of the out­side world till she was 28. Orphaned at six weeks, she was raised by nuns in Ireland and at 17 joined the very strict Poor Clare order. She left at 28.

j. Outside court Mrs Smaje com­plained that the stores and finance companies continually tempted her to go on spending. 'They never checked my credit-worthiness. They always said "of course you can have the money".'

k. 'My goodness was I innocent,' she recalls. 'Apart from a few priests, I had never seen a man. I knew nothing at all about life.'

1. Questioned by Mr Albert Billing, Assistant Official Receiver, she said she started opening bank accounts, applying for credit cards, and gener­ally getting credit in 1979. In March 1980 she obtained a £1,640 loan to buy a caravan. Then she borrowed £2,000 elsewhere for kitchen equip­ment she did not really need.

m. She moved to London, where she worked as a maid and cook. She was a nurse during the First World War and an air-raid warden in the Sec­ond, crawling out of bomb debris on four occasions.

n. She married fellow warden Fre­derick Padley in 1939. He died in 1961 aged 72.

o. 'I blame the London stores who encouraged me to spend and spend. I just had to pick up the telephone and ask for more, and their salesman replied: "Of course, madam".'

p. Nowadays Mrs Padley has a home help, but likes doing her own house­work and bakes all her own cakes. She used to tend two gardens until Age Concern stopped her digging up last year's potato crops.SKILLS DEVELOPMENT Reading