He could feel her trembling through his own body and, pity uppermost, he said softly, ‘If it means that much to you I’ll accept anything your sister gives with good grace, all right? I don’t like it, any more than I like having to take what amounts to handouts from other folk since this strike started, truth be known. Every time I knock on someone’s door asking if they’ve any work they want doing and see their faces, I know they’re sick of us, and who can blame them? Some of the women whose menfolk are in work have had their knives and scissors almost worn away with sharpening, and they must have more tea cosies and doorstops and clippy mats than they know what to do with. I was brought up to look after me own and ask nowt of anyone and all this sticks in my craw, lass.’

‘I know, I know.’ Through her tears, she mumbled, ‘And you do look after us.’

‘Not really, and we can’t win this fight. Everyone knows it but no one’s saying it. The rest of the world is going along as normal – no one’s interested in the coal miners any more. They’re getting coal from abroad and to them coal is coal. They don’t care if it comes from our old enemy the Germans or anybody else, damn them. That is, if they even bother to consider where it’s from, which I doubt. The general strike came and went and folk were inconvenienced for a few days but that was all it meant to them. This struggle’s been for nowt, that’s what gets me the most.’ He put her slightly from him, looking down into her tear-drenched face as he said, ‘Come on, come and eat your dinner an’ I’ll eat mine but only if you add a bit more to your plate.’

‘But—’

‘No buts. Like you said to me, you need to keep your strength up. Alice needs you.’ He paused. ‘And so do I.’

In the middle of November the miners finally agreed to end the pit strike. Seeing their wives and children starve in freezing-cold houses with no heat, no hot water, no food and with everything they had in the pawnshops, accomplished what the coal owners and the government had been unable to do. Bairns weak from eating scraps that should have gone to pigs and sleeping on the floor under old newspapers because their beds and blankets were in the pawnshops had beaten the men. They had lost everything and won not one concession; it was a defeat of momentous proportions.