‘Oh, I get it – that’s down Walworth way,’ the man told her. ‘Bit of a way from ’ere, love.’

She had thought Bert Carter might have forgotten about her by now, that he used his chat-up line wherever he went, handing out his address, but he had seemed very pleased to see her. She arrived at the Gaumont, a dark old fleapit of a place, and, heart sinking, asked the girl in the ticket kiosk for him by name.

The girl looked her up and down with a snide, knowing glance and said pertly. ‘Who shall I say it is?’

‘Molly Fox,’ Molly said, trying to sound dignified.

Anyway, if he doesn’t remember or he’s rude, he can stuff it, she thought.

But Bert Carter soon appeared, in his shirtsleeves, red-faced as if he had been hurrying, and seemed delighted to see her. A job? Of course! Hadn’t he promised? Within a day Molly was installed as an usherette at the Gaumont and had a room in the house of a Mrs Willetts a few streets away.

The work was all right, and she liked to see parts of the pictures as she stood waiting. But she waited to see what the catch was. Sure enough, it was the obvious one. Bert Carter’s line of suggestive remarks – ‘You’re looking very lush-civious today, my dear . . .’ – and attempts to grope her in dark corners whenever he got the chance were no more than she expected. But, as Mavis, the rather superior girl who worked at the front, told her world wearily, ‘Oh, you don’t want to take too much notice – ’e’s all mouth, that one. Some of ’em like the girly papers for a bit of an eyeful; ’e just likes to ’ave it walking around, that’s all. It don’t amount to anything.’

Molly fended him off and made friends with the other usherettes, all of whom were pretty, buxom girls, and comparing notes, they realized they had all been employed for the same reason. As Lily, one of them, said with a cackle one day, ‘We’re just ’ere to ’elp ’im keep ’is right hand busy!’

It was all right until Christmas. Christmas Eve was hectic, but Molly could feel it building up: the sense of dread of the next lonely day. Why had she come back to London of all places? She’d burned her boats with Liza, so there was no invitation there. That evening, on the way home, she broke all her rules and bought a bottle of Scotch.

‘I can’t get through tomorrow without you,’ she whispered to the bottle, tucking it under her arm in the foggy, dimly lit street. As she stood there, she had a moment of complete giddy panic: a vision of herself, all alone on the vast, spinning world. She had to right herself against the front of a shop.

Her landlady, a reclusive woman, didn’t seem to be celebrating Christmas either. Molly spent the day alone in her room, sinking lower and lower. For lunch she heated a tin of soup and ate a ham sandwich. Too late she realized she should have done something about it, gone to Birmingham and asked Em if she could be with them. But the thought of Birmingham – and of being anywhere near her mother – oppressed her.