Vera O’Neill was always keen to remind Katie that she hadn’t spent all of her eight years in such a poor place.

‘When your father was still alive we lived in a much better neighbourhood,’ she would say. The time before – that is, before her father, Michael O’Neill, contracted TB and died, when she was not yet two and a half years old – was always spoken of as a lost golden time, like the time in the Garden of Eden, before anyone had come across any talking snakes or apples. It sounded very nice to Katie. She had only the vaguest memories of her father, but they were good ones, warm ones of being held, and his death felt like the gateway into loneliness.

But for her now, this was home: the constant whiff of the gas works at Windsor Street, the whistle of trains going in and out of the shunting yard, the great chimneys of the power station looming behind the long skeins of sooty brick houses and the equally sooty brick edifice of Cromwell Street School. And going to school – because she lived at number six and the Browns lived at number eighteen – had always meant calling for Em on the way. But not any more.

Two

She woke the next morning from a broken night’s sleep and a dream of seeing Em at the Browns’ green front door, of them both smiling and linking hands and everything being all right. She woke with a terrible ache in her chest.

And now she was going to have to walk past Em’s door on the way to school, without knocking for her.

But by the time she had dressed and tried to swallow down the porridge that her mother insisted on her having, she had worked herself up into a different mood. She was full of confusion – but she had to obey Mother. So she put on all her pride. Wasn’t it true that Em’s family was a bit rough? Some of the things her brother Sid came out with! And Bob, her dad there with his stubbly cheeks, coming home all covered in coal dust from the power station! But Katie ached to have a father, like all those other children who waited for them outside the pubs in ragged shorts and with grubby knees, knowing there was a dad in there who, in the end, would come out to them. And it had been lovely seeing Em’s baby sister Violet – Katie had felt very jealous. If only she had a baby sister to play with! And a house with other brothers and sisters, and all sorts going on. But then, as Mother had pointed out, some people round here bred like rabbits, having all these children they couldn’t afford to feed. Maybe she and Em shouldn’t have been friends after all, she told herself. It had only been because there was nobody better. Now Lily Davies had come along – and she only had one older sister – Katie could have a friend who was more like her.