It had been a terrible pregnancy, nothing like the ones she had experienced with her other two kids. Rosie simply couldn’t keep any food down her, and the doctor had given her condition a grand name, hyper-gravida something – she could never remember the long, foreign-sounding name. All it meant (as far as she was concerned) was she couldn’t stop vomiting from dawn till dusk. As a consequence, as her pregnancy advanced, she became unbearably weak and useless. Mercifully, after a while the sickness gradually eased up a little, but, after barely eating for months, Rosie hardly had the strength to get out of bed. Life descended into chaos. The children, without a father and in effect a mother too, ran wild around the council estate. Occasionally neighbours would bring in some soup or a pie, but if Rosie didn’t drag herself to the local shop to pick up their meagre rations, the family subsisted on bread, marg and strong black tea.

The doctor had been adamant. ‘You simply can’t have your baby in these conditions – you need to get out of this slum; otherwise I might be forced to take the law into my own hands,’ he had threatened.

Terrified that she might be taken into hospital and lose sight of her children, Rosie had begged him for help.

‘There are Mother and Baby Homes all over England,’ he had told her.

‘Ain’t them for unmarried mothers and their bastards?’

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ the doctor had sniffed. ‘Evacuees, pregnant evacuees like you, have access to these places too.’

Immediately on the defensive, Rosie had cried out, ‘I ain’t being parted from mi kids.’

The doctor eyed the dirty, scruffy, scrawny boy and girl standing by their mother’s bedside; Ron was picking his nose, while Sally was scratching the nits in her hair. Who in God’s name would want them under their roof?

‘I wasn’t suggesting parting you from your children, Mrs Pickles, merely that you should go to a place where you can be taken care of,’ the doctor replied. ‘I’m told these homes take in mothers and their children too.’

‘Is there one here in Finsbury Park?’ Rosie asked hopefully.

‘I’m afraid not,’ the doctor told her. ‘They’re in the countryside.’

‘So we’d have to travel to get there?’ Rosie asked weakly.

‘Yes,’ he told her bluntly.

‘I can barely get out of bed, never mind board a train with two kids,’ she wailed.

Bored with the circuitous conversation, the doctor rose to go. ‘Then stay here and die and leave your children to go into an orphanage.’

Tears coursed down Rosie’s ravaged face, which might once have been pretty, but now, with barely any teeth, sunken cheeks and hair that clung greasily to her scalp, looked cadaverous.

‘Can you arrange it, please?’ she asked limply.

‘I’ll try,’ he told her curtly as he left.