Edith’s Harrogate ladies had been altogether a better class of people, wives of bankers, tradesmen, engineers, mill owners and teachers. Edith had once personally nursed the wife of a distinguished local Member of Parliament. The Mary Vale residents were younger, poorer and had no finesse. Not that Edith didn’t know about poverty; she had dragged herself single-handedly out of that hole. Affecting a posh voice and saving whatever money her mother hadn’t snatched from her wages, Edith had reinvented herself from back-street kid to genteel professional lady. Unfortunately, Edith had not initially had the resources to leave her miserable home, and the end of every day saw her back in the poky two-up, two-down terraced house with her gin-soaked abusive mother, whom Edith yearned to break free of.

It had been a battle for Edith to train as a nurse. Her widowed mother had whined constantly that her only daughter should join her brothers in the local mill, in the weaving shed, which paid good money, but Edith’s eyes were set on higher things. Nursing was her ambition, a possible way out of the life she detested, but it had been a fight right from the start.

‘You’re too stupid to be anything other than a mill girl,’ her mother had cried. ‘You should be bringing money home, putting your wage packet on the table every Friday night.’

‘Right,’ Edith bitterly thought. ‘So, you can spend all of it at the out-door licence.’

By studying every hour that God sent, Edith had achieved the grades required to commence her training and, after promising to give her penny-pinching mother all her wages (which she never entirely did, always squirreling away something even if it was only sixpence a week), a deal was finally struck between mother and daughter. Slowly and patiently adding to the tiny amount of money she had saved and hidden in the coal shed next door to the outdoor privy, Edith began the process of transforming herself into a ‘lady’. She had worked with enough posh patients to know what ‘ladies’ looked like, and many of her colleagues were from good middle-class backgrounds, so it was easy to copy their style.