Biddy sighed. ‘Oh, close your mouth, Malcolm! Honestly, she asked did you want any breakfast, not a four-course meal, and given that this is a guest house it seems to me that maybe she should start learning now. Right, a bacon and egg sandwich for Mr Coffey, Mary, with lashings of HP sauce. Let’s see if you can find your way around his kitchen. A bit of toast for me, queen.’

Mary made no reply but, glancing around the large kitchen, set to work while Biddy turned again to an impressed Malcolm. Maybe Biddy was right; maybe he could do with the help.

‘Right, Malcolm, you are the only one who gets the telegrams when a crew is coming in, so can you send a telegram the other way like, to a ship? One that’s still on the water.’

Malcolm shook his head. ‘Tramp ships like the Morry don’t have a schedule, so no one knows when they are going to turn up and they trade on the spot, but I do know the man in America who buys for Conor’s ship. I can send a telegram to him if it helps?’

‘That sounds like a good idea, though you’d have thought he would have got a message to Ena, wouldn’t you? But anyway, let’s go to the post office, Malcolm, and send a message to Captain Conor through this buyer fella. These streets need a haul, for no one has anything. The docks are only taking on half a pen every morning because there aren’t many ships in and those that do come in have smelted iron and lumber and you can’t toast a carnival or put a roastie in a child’s belly with that, can you?’

Malcolm looked aghast. ‘I’ll be doing no such thing!’ he spluttered. ‘I won’t be a part of anything crooked and underhand. I’ll ask Captain Conor when his crew needs the rooms, but I won’t be mentioning a haul.’

Biddy took a deep breath as Mary placed a teapot on the table. ‘Kathleen Deane and her daughter-in-law, Alice, have been to see me. They’re worried sick about the carnival so we must tell Conor what we need before he fills in the manifest.’

A haul was when an agreement was reached with a captain and enough cargo was slipped off the ship at night to sell on the black market, with some being kept for the dockers’ families and widows. Biddy hadn’t slept well the previous night. She’d thought the days of the hunger on the streets that she’d seen during the forties were over.

‘I thought that with the end of the war and the busy traffic in the docks, we could rest easy, that there would be enough work for everyone forever,’ she said now. ‘But we can’t, Malcolm.’