‘We were,’ she said softly. ‘But it was not to be. Dr Lucan brought me home after visiting you that first day you were in hospital and I began to miscarry. I don’t know what I’d have done if he hadn’t been there.’ She tenderly kissed his lips. ‘We will have another,’ she murmured. ‘But not just yet.’

As she had already determined that she would, Ellen found work on three mornings a week in the villas on Beverley Road. She helped with the washing for a large family on a Monday, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays she scrubbed floors and front steps of two others. She had asked a local grocer if she might put a note in his window advertising her services and he’d agreed. His was a busy shop, selling flour, sugar, butter, lard and general commodities as well as vegetables; she often saw a queue of women outside when she returned home from her chores at seven o’clock in a morning, having started at five.

She called in one day when there were not so many waiting and asked for bread; she had been tired the night before and hadn’t set any dough to prove, and she thought she would buy instead of making.

‘Sorry, missis, I don’t keep fresh bread, not since my wife died some years ago. She was a fine baker and we’ve two ovens going a-beggin’ for want of someone to fire them up. There’s a woman down in Wincomlee who bakes good bread, but maybe it’s too far for you to walk?’

‘I know her,’ she told him, ‘and she’s an excellent bread-maker. But I have an oven in ’house I’m in now and I can make my own.’ She sighed. ‘I didn’t set any to rise last night, and I’m so tired this morning I don’t think I can face it.’ She gave a half laugh. ‘But I will. I’ll make soda bread, that’s quick and easy.’

‘I see you walking down the road sometimes,’ he said. ‘You’re an early riser. Do you work locally?’

She nodded. ‘My husband isn’t well,’ she confessed. ‘He had an accident at ’mill and I’m working to earn some money until he’s able to go back.’

She was intrigued by his accent and asked him if he was a Hull man. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m Australian. Came to England thirty years ago when I was a young man, going walkabout, you know, like the Aborigines.’ He grinned. ‘Only came here for a visit to try and trace my ancestors; I met my wife and married her and here I am still.’

‘I don’t know what walkabout means,’ she confessed. ‘Is it like when we say up sticks, and it means to go off somewhere new?’