She looked at Ellen’s three children and they gazed solemnly back at her. ‘Especially you, young peazan,’ she said fondly to Thomas, who was sitting angelically on his mother’s lap chewing on his wet fist, with his round cheeks rosy from teething. He dropped his fist and struggled to slide down on to the floor, where he crawled rapidly to his grandmother’s feet. Heaving himself up by her skirts, he pummelled her knees until she picked him up and nuzzled her nose into his neck, making him squeal. ‘I love ’smell o’ young bairns,’ she murmured, and Ellen was reminded that her mother really wasn’t old. She had spent her youthful years of marriage giving birth to her children. Ten children should be enough for any woman to bring up into adulthood, she considered. Ma was one of only a few women of their acquaintance who hadn’t lost a child in infancy.

Three were enough for her and Harry, she thought, but no doubt they would have more; how could you avoid a pregnancy when you had a loving marriage? Impossible, no matter how careful you might be.

‘What ’you doing, Ma?’ she asked as her mother put Thomas on the floor to crawl, and picked Mary up on to her knee. Sarah was pressing her fingers to Mary’s throat and behind her ears.

‘I just thought she seemed a bit quiet; a bit, you know, wearisome.’

‘She’s been quiet all day,’ Ellen said. ‘And she said her throat was hurting. I hope she’s not going down with something.’

‘She feels hot. When you get home, sponge her down wi’ cool water and let her chew on a strip o’ willow bark. Then put her to bed and see if she’ll sleep. She should settle.’

The toddler put her head against her grandmother’s chest and closed her eyes. Sarah kissed the child’s forehead. ‘She’s not well,’ she murmured.

When baby Sarah was born, Harry had made a wooden cradle and Ellen had made a pretty cover for it; then, as Sarah grew and became too heavy for Ellen to carry when she was pregnant with Mary, he’d fashioned a wooden box on wheels with a long wooden shaft for a handle. Ellen had padded the box with an old cotton sheet stuffed with feathers, as she had done for the cradle, and used it as a perambulator, for they were not able to afford that modern luxury; such things were not for them. She could at least pull or push the cart as far as her mother’s house and home again.