‘A breath of fresh air?’ If Olive had said she was going to take off her clothes and dance naked in the snow, her mother’s voice couldn’t have expressed more amazement. ‘It’s bitter out there and I need you to help me get ready for the morrer. I thought I was going to have the pair of you here tonight, and there’s Ruby gone off to meet Adam—’ Her mother stopped abruptly. ‘They haven’t had a tiff, have they?’

‘Not that I know of.’

Cissy Morgan breathed a sigh of relief. That would have been all she needed. She was up to her eyes in it as it was. Coming back to the matter in hand, she said, ‘And now here’s you skedaddling off an’ all. It’s not good enough.’

‘I said I won’t be long. It’s hot in here and I’m feeling a bit off colour.’ This had the advantage of being true. In the last days since the morning sickness had kicked in she’d had a job to hide it from her mother, but now the sickness seemed to be all day and the smell from the remains of their evening meal added to the heat coming from the range was making her nauseous.

‘You do look a bit peaky.’ Now Cissy’s voice was anxious. She knew it was daft, but since the winter after the armistice when the Spanish flu had swept through the country killing tens of thousands of people, many of them young folk who, for some reason, had been especially susceptible to the terrible disease, she’d lived in fear of one of her girls being taken from her. Her lads were among the three-quarters of a million British soldiers who had given their lives for King and country, and George would never be well again, she knew that, but after the weeping and wailing she had come to terms with that. Thousands of women were in the same boat as her, and some of them without the blessing of one surviving child. She had told God she would shoulder her cross as best she could, at the same time pleading with Him to spare Olive and Ruby as the flu had picked off folk as near as in their own street. When the epidemic was over she had lit goodness knows how many candles of thanks in church and she never missed Mass – it had been part of her bargain with the Almighty. Now she said, ‘You sickening for something, lass?’