‘I do like it,’ I said, eating the rest.

‘Course you do,’ he said, ‘what’s not to like?’

After an afternoon and an evening still practising firegrates, keeping at it until the train hollered back from London, there was a break for supper. I sat beside the girl in our dormitory who’d refused to listen to my story, the one with the nose, I forced a place on the bench beside her.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ I said, ‘I want to know.’

She was a small, pale and bony girl with a downturned mouth and with that nose, but she did not yet have the grey skin of many of the Iremongers, her lips were even a touch reddish. When I sat down she kept eating, pretending I was not there.

‘Do you remember your name?’ I asked.

‘Iremonger,’ she said.

‘My name is Lucy Pennant,’ I whispered.

‘God, don’t I know it.’

‘Will you tell me your name?’

‘Do you know there are a herd of Lucy bloody Pennants, common as dirt they are. The girls have got it bad, I hear them whispering to themselves in the scullery or the kitchens, in the scrub room, in the laundries. Lucy Pennant, or variations of it, they often get it wrong, I heard one Iremonger muttering all about Lurky Penbrush. Well, Lurky, I’m quite sick of you if you want to know. I’m ill with it!’

‘Tell me your name then, if you still know it.’

‘I do know my name. I do know it! Who the hell do you think you are?’

‘I’m Lucy Pennant, who are you?’

‘I wrote it down somewhere.’

‘Did you? Well then?’

‘Yes, I wrote it down so that I should never forget it. But when I try to remember my own name I can’t, all I come up with is Lucy Pennant. For five minutes I was sure I was Lucy Pennant. But I’m not, I’m certainly not, I’ve my own name and I’ve written it down.’

‘Where did you write it?’

‘Oh, Lucy Pennant,’ she said and there were tears in her eyes, ‘I can’t remember. I just can’t remember. Though I know I wrote it somewhere, I know that I did. With a knife I scratched it. I was looking for it, you see, when Mr Briggs found me. I was taken to Mrs Piggott straight off and put to the heaps for two whole months as punishment and I’m not to see my tea strainer for two weeks neither, I do not know how I shall make it. And two months in the heaps!’

‘Just for looking about a bit?’

‘They don’t like it, they want you where they put you. And now I don’t think I’ll ever find my name.’

‘You and me,’ I said, ‘we’ll keep looking, we shan’t stop until we find it.’