‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘I get enough.’ But she knew this wasn’t strictly true. She was eating plenty of bread, but she knew that since they had come to live in Hull her intake of fresh food was not sufficient to make the child she carried healthy and strong.

As the weeks moved on, Ellen’s thoughts turned to Christmas and how she would cope, with a small fire and little money. At least, she thought, it would be a challenge to occupy her mind, rather than having only a daily walk by the river with the children to relieve the boredom. She had been teaching Sarah and Mary to read, but as their few storybooks were read so frequently she was unsure if they were learning the words or simply remembering them.

Roland Tannerson had told Harry he gave all his employees a fowl or a joint of beef for Christmas, and as the holiday drew nearer he asked for their preferences so that he could put in an order to the butcher. Ellen said that Harry should ask for beef, and she planned to cook it slowly over the fire. She salivated as she thought of what she would cook with it: carrots, of course; onions, parsnips, potatoes and cabbage, which were cheap to buy; and she would make dumplings from flour and lard and chopped suet from the beef to flavour them.

The weekend before Christmas she asked Harry to reach to the top shelf in the scullery and bring down the Christmas pudding that her mother had made, hoping that it hadn’t gone mouldy in the damp room. She unfastened the string on the lid of greaseproof paper that Mrs Snowden had carefully wrapped round the top of the bowl and opened it up, putting her nose to it and sniffing.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Does it smell all right? The fruit isn’t rancid, is it?’

Harry sniffed at it, and then again. There was certainly a strong aroma. Then he laughed. ‘Your ma’s been heavy-handed wi’ brandy bottle, I reckon.’

Ellen took it from him and breathed the scent in again. She hoped that was what it was, because if it had gone off it would have to be thrown away; she couldn’t risk using it.

‘It’s brandy,’ Harry assured her. ‘But if I were you, I’d start cooking it straight away, just to be sure.’

‘It is cooked,’ she said, taking another sniff. ‘It just has to be heated through again.’ She stood, deliberating. ‘If we can keep a low fire burning, I could leave it simmering all night and most of tomorrow, cos if you bring ’beef on Christmas Eve I’ll have to start cooking that straight away and there’s onny room for one pan on ’fire.’