Not for the first time, she wondered how she was going to fill her days when Alice started school after her fifth birthday. She knew Adam wouldn’t agree to any suggestion that she work outside these four walls; as far as he was concerned, once a woman had a bairn her place was in the home and that was that. Admittedly they were in a better position than many families who had several bairns and just one wage packet coming in, but things were still tight. She had to watch every penny and she was canny with her housekeeping, only buying scrag ends and brisket and other meat that needed long, slow cooking and could stretch to a second or even third meal when the leftovers were used for broths and stews or meat rolls and panackelties. She knew of families in her own street who existed on a staple diet of tea, bread, margarine, potatoes and cheap jam, the shadow of the workhouse forever hanging over them. Even the butcher’s offal was beyond their reach, or the herring that was often plentiful at the height of summer.

Adam had lapsed into silence, staring into the glowing coals of the fire in the range as his mind turned over some of what had been said between the men that afternoon, things he wouldn’t worry Olive with. Since the statement from Downing Street encouraging strikers to go back to work by saying the government would protect them from any loss of trade union benefits and that the courts would take action against any union that expelled a member for returning to work, and that anybody caught jeering or insulting such a person would be liable to a fine of forty shillings, things had taken a nasty turn. Men were being arrested, quickly convicted and sentenced to hard labour, and anyone found picketing on main roads could now be jailed for ‘interfering with the King’s Highway’. Trade union offices had been ransacked, private papers, printers and typewriters removed, funds frozen and anyone in the building at the time arrested. His da had heard on the grapevine that in some places the mounted police along with their bruisers on the ground had laid into folk with their truncheons, and that university students, members of sporting clubs and the Fascist Movement were looking on attacking the strikers as entertainment. They were being thrown to the wolves, his da had said, and when Lord Londonderry, the Durham coal owner, had said publicly that he wanted ‘them smashed from top to bottom’, he was only voicing what the government and the upper classes were thinking.