The shard of light had widened, and although she couldn’t help comparing the dawn of the town with the ones in the wide skies of Holderness, there was a beauty ascending this morning, heralding a fine day. The silver light was a curtain, rising to show the break of day as the sun’s rays spread beyond the house tops, highlighting the dark windmills and the tall factory chimneys and filling the confined span of sky with a fusion of cobalt blue, amber and rose.

It’s the same sky, she had thought. My family and friends in Holderness will be looking at the same view, except they have more of it. Her throat had tightened as she’d thought of her old home, but she knew she must accept their new life. I will make it a happy one, she decided, even though we might always be poor. I will make a home that my husband and children will be glad to come back to, and I’ll make friends; there are good people living here and I’ll seek them out. This will be our town.

She turned now to Harry as he finished speaking. ‘You’re quite right, Harry,’ she said. ‘Once you’re earning more money, we’ll look for somewhere else, with a separate bedroom and mebbe a patch of garden.’ She smiled. ‘And there will be someone who’ll be glad to take this one and make it their own.’

Billy came on the Sunday, bringing a basket of victuals as promised, a young hen, a bag of corn, some pieces of wood, nails and a hammer to knock together a box to keep her in, and a sack of straw to line it with.

The children were delighted with the hen and chased her round and round the yard wanting to stroke her. Ellen groaned, knowing that they would cry and refuse to eat her if she wrung her neck.

‘Tell a lie and say she escaped,’ Billy grinned, watching Harry sawing the wood for the box. ‘Or that a fox got her.’

‘I don’t think there’ll be many foxes round here. She’s a very pretty hen,’ Ellen added. ‘And a young one. Are you sure you haven’t brought ’wrong one? Ma said it had gone off ’lay.’

Billy shrugged. ‘That’s ’one she pointed to; mark you, one hen looks like any other to me. They’re not like pigs or cattle, which do look different. And they all scattered when I tried to catch her.’

Ellen went inside to make a pot of tea and rustle up something to eat for Billy as he said he wanted to get home before dark. He followed her into the house.

‘Ma said would I tell you to tell Harry that his ma isn’t too well and suggest he comes over when he can to see her.’