At your grandfather’s funeral I wore a scarf of purple silk to say my goodbye. Even Clementina looked a tiny bit shocked. But then I stilled everything in me and set about finding work. I am thirty-three years old, I told myself, I have a family depending on me. My children, Clementina, her children: that was the shape of my family now.

I’d not expected finding a job to be easy, but the factory took me back in the early summer. I was lucky. Mr Prentice was still at Mills & Ware and he remembered. When he looked at me I think he saw not who I was but who I had been, a girl he’d taken a chance on, who hadn’t let him down. A widow I was now, one of many—it seemed there was an army of us—and even among the single women there were those who probably felt themselves widowed. They’d lost to war the men and boys they had thought to make a life with.

At Mills & Ware, five years on, it was almost like I’d not been away at all. There’d been changes, of course: a wafer machine, a third oven, factory back to full production. But it was still the same place, aye, hot and sweaty, slippery underfoot, its floury air tasting of whatever sweet thing was baking in the ovens.

I was put on Cakes, icing the big squares of sponge once they had cooled on the benches—chocolate, orange, vanilla. I liked slapping on the buttery icing with big flat spatulas and smoothing it in circles over the top and round the sides. Satisfying, getting it even and a nice shiny finish. It was my job, too, to run the empty bowls to the Mixing Room and bring back more. I didn’t know how anyone could see through the dust of the Mixing Room. When I went home at night, little wisps of icing sugar would puff from my hair whenever I turned my head, and Steven and Kathryn would fling their arms around my neck and breathe it in. As well as bags of broken biscuits, now I would bring home odd-shaped bits of sponge in a tin—thin offcuts and splodgy spills from the trays—always with a scraping of whatever icing was left on the spatulas at the end of the day. Clementina huffed a sigh as she squeezed an extra fold around her middle—her Victoria Sponge Layer, she called it. But no complaints from Jessie and Hal, Steven and Kathryn, sticky smiles on their faces.

The twins were so good with Steven and Kathryn, keeping them away from Clementina’s hot iron, making games in the garden with balls and the chickens, picking up Kathryn when she cried. Can you imagine fourteen-year-olds today with such forbearance?