I just listened to it and yes, she says, in the 'confession email' to her sister 'Tim worked for the National Trust for wages that were less than dole money, but he was happier.'
Then she says she took over the finances, started 'juggling money' and started work in an 'office in town'.
There's a slight assumption, I think, that they should be congratulated for working, rather than claiming the dole...?
This is all in the context of Tim apparently spending seven years trying to get back the money invested with his friend after the sale of the Forest Row house, which SW says was 'half our capital' -- there's no actual suggestion of dodgy dealings on the part of the friend mentioned here, only a 'promise' that he would double the Walkers' investment in two years.
No apparent understanding that this isn't guaranteed, that investment is always a risk. That the friend could have been acting in good faith, and they would still have lost the money.
SW also says that TW made the investment 'against my better judgement' and that in the process of trying to get the money back he 'drove himself to the edge of sanity over what he had done.'
Hence 'I became desperate to hold him out of it, and to keep some of the real Tim alive' while 'the backlog of debt was drowning us'.
Hence she started writing cheques to herself at the Hemmingses.
So already here we've got the suggestion that TW is a fragile soul who needs to be saved and kept from a final descent into mental illness. Only at the end of the confession email is there a mention of TW also being told he 'may have Parkinson's', which is clearly intended to pull at her sister's heartstrings.
My point is that the idea of TW as vulnerable and ill, mentally and physically, goes right back to here, and is used in the context of a very considered bit of writing, which is designed to do something very specific, to stop her sister going to the police about the theft from their mother.
That is the only reason she confesses to the Hemmings theft here -- to basically tell her sister 'You will be sending me to prison if you report this. I'm in your hands. And just so you know, Tim is also mentally dangerously fragile and possibly has Parkinson's into the bargain, so what will become of our children while I'm serving six years?'
It's designed to look like an artless flood of apology and self-blame, but it's actually a consciously manipulative piece of writing. She presents herself as barely conscious of what she's been doing, in a 'living nightmare', as the victim of TW's overly trusting nature, as absolutely thrilled that her theft from her mother has been discovered because that means 'it's over' and she's really relieved, self-loathing, and desperate to pay it all back asap.
And the thing is, it worked.
Her sister didn't go to the police, their mother eventually made contact with her again, and her sister's daughter offered them a place to stay and hide out from the bailiffs for eighteen months. Family rallied round.
If SW ever needed a lesson in how writing can tug at heartstrings and manipulate a reader into a desired state of mind via a careful construction of helplessness/wifely support of a fragile spouse, then she learned it here.
I think the seeds of TSP are sown in the confession email.