In return, she sometimes took Jenny and Peter out for a walk at the weekend to give Maudie a break, although Maudie often said she wanted to come too and they ended up chatting together in Handsworth Park; or Maudie’s mother came round, so Katie didn’t have to do much. But as she was of an orderly nature and Maudie was anything but, Katie did try to keep things tidy in the house. She made lists for shopping and jobs that needed doing, until Maudie would say, ‘How on earth did I manage before you were here?’ And Maudie sometimes took things rather over-seriously and Katie could make her laugh. They found that they were good for each other.

On Sundays, Katie often went over to St Francis’s parish for Mass while Maudie joined her mother at Handsworth Old Church, by the park. Maudie was not especially religious, but going to church was something they had always done, and she liked to read bits of the Bible to the children. Katie found it a comfort to go to Mass. As things settled, as her body recovered and she continued this new life, she began to dwell more on the past. She missed Uncle Patrick, and going to Mass was a reminder of him. It was painful thinking of him, but not as painful as thinking about the other people who had bowed so cruelly out of her life. Many of her memories of him were happy ones, and Mass brought some of those back. Sometimes, in the evenings, when Maudie was settling the children down, reading to them, Katie would sit on the stairs of the little terraced house and listen. Maudie always read a story and then, as they were lying down to sleep, a psalm.

‘The rhythm of them is so beautiful,’ she told Katie. ‘It doesn’t really matter if they don’t understand the words.’

So Katie sat, if Michael was settled, in the almost darkness at the top of the stairs and listened: ‘The Lord is my shepherd: therefore can I lack nothing . . . But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’ Psalm 23 was her favourite, but there were many others that took her back to Patrick’s gentle, musical voice. She found it soothing.

And there was something else for which she was especially grateful to Maudie. At first it took some getting used to. All Katie’s life she had been schooled – first by her mother, then by circumstances – to be secretive, even to lie if necessary, so that shameful truths should not be disclosed. Anyone who asked questions was seen as suspect. But Maudie asked questions – lots of them. And not only that, she talked, straightforwardly and with an artless trust that Katie found astonishing.

‘The thing is,’ Maudie told her one afternoon, while the children were napping, not long after Katie had arrived. She was perched on a low stool, looking rather like a little girl, in ankle socks and with her hair hanging loose. She was working on a long skein of green knitting, though it would have been hard to say what kind of garment was meant to be developing from it.