Bill Foster seemed rooted to the spot. ‘If that’s not the oddest thing, I don’t know what is. I have a brother George too, the liveliest feller you’d ever meet. He’s a good deal younger than me, always in scrapes, but always comes up smiling! We’ll have a chat about it some time, shall we, about our beginnings? I reckon it’s not that far back in our heritage to trace to the start, or at least as far as we know.’ He gave a great beaming smile. ‘It’s good to know I’ve got my own folks living here in England as well as in Australia, and I reckon that you might like to see the place in Hull where the first William Foster, a whaling man, lived with his family. I managed to track him down when I first came to England; I found a few folk who had heard of him and his family.’

Ellen had never seen her mother so moved as she was now; she always kept her emotions under control, and although she showed an interest in Ellen’s plans and expressed astonishment at the massive range, her daughter saw that she constantly glanced at Bill Foster and it was as if she were seeing her late brother again.

‘You must go to see this place in Hull, Ellen, you and your bairns,’ her mother told her, ‘and you must tek Lizzie, and see where it all began, and put down roots again.’

‘Don’t expect much,’ Bill was anxious to convey. ‘I was shocked when I saw it. I reckon he must have been as poor as a bandicoot for his family to live there, but then he survived right enough, to leave so many descendants.’

‘Holderness air saved them,’ Mrs Snowden asserted. ‘There’s nowt like it. You must come, Cousin Bill,’ she said, and again there was a catch in her voice, ‘and meet ’rest of our family. We have eight daughters, not just ’two that you’ve met, another son as well as Billy, and there’s other members of my family too.’

‘Better pack a large trunk when you come,’ Ellen’s father grunted. ‘It’ll tek some time to meet ’em all.’

Ellen and Bill Foster had come to an amicable arrangement regarding the bakery and the making and selling of the bread, and both were benefiting for customers were increasing in droves. Ellen had agreed to take an assistant, the sister of the errand lad, to wash up the bakery utensils, scrub down the baking table and wash the floor every day after she had finished baking, which eased her load, for her priority was always to be home in time to be with the children and take over from Julia, who looked after them so well.