‘I can’t do this to you, I can’t face it,’ Peggy sobbed, knowing there was only one way out from this, only one escape. She felt the edges of her mind blur and, laying the naked baby on the bed, rose and walked over to the press and removed a small drawer from the top. It contained very little: the boys’ christening gown and the odd undergarment that she owned. She took out the only fresh clothes she had for herself and changed and then wondered what was the point. She took an old nappy from the drawer and ripped it apart. Bending down, she placed it into the clean knickers between her legs, sobbing for the past and the future she could no longer have. She wrapped the other half around the baby and took out a grey and rough towel and wrapped it around her.

She picked up her baby, who lay uncomplaining, eyes wide, and smiled through her tears at the small folds of fat on her knees.

‘I should call you biscuit,’ she said. ‘It’s what you’ve been fed on, but someone else can do that now.’

Laying her daughter in the drawer she moved with extreme difficulty into the boys’ room and pushed the drawer under the bed next to the cardboard box that little Paddy kept there. The boys were beginning to get restless downstairs, moving about. They would hear her, they could find her, and by the time that happened she would be gone. It hurt to walk and she felt light-headed, but with absolute clarity she knew what she had to do. They would all be better off without her. She was not good enough to be their mother, could not face the shame of the bailiffs and everyone knowing what an awful failure of a woman she was in the four streets full of perfect, uncomplaining women, whose children never went without a meal. Women who, even in hard times and short work, did not have to pawn their children’s shoes and their mother’s clock.

At first, the boys didn’t notice her walk into the kitchen. She put her arms in her coat and, removing the money that was left from what the pawnbroker had given her, laid it down on the press. And then little Paddy saw her.

‘Mam? Where are you going now? You haven’t had your chips, I kept them there.’ He pointed to the draining board. Peggy drew on every ounce of reserve she had to carry her through the next sixty seconds. She had no idea what to answer and then it came to her.