Ruby looked at Ellie who stared back at her silently. Since arriving in Newcastle at midday and emerging from the train station, both girls had been overwhelmed by the sheer size of the town. With no clear idea of where they were headed, they had set off clutching their bags and feeling very small and lost in the teeming streets of humanity. Before and during the Great War Newcastle had enjoyed a steadily increasing prosperity as world demand for its products – ships, engineering, chemicals – had grown, and although the richer inhabitants of the town had long since moved away from the quayside leaving their once fine houses to decay into rat-infested slums, new suburbs well served by public transport had mushroomed demanding a wide range of leisure and recreation activities for the middle and upper classes.

Ruby had expected Newcastle to be much like Sunderland but within a short time it dawned on her that it was far bigger, though the smells were much the same. They had walked aimlessly after leaving the train station to find themselves in a seemingly endless grid of streets, terraces of small mean houses with pubs and corner shops and the odd school and bathhouse leading to more of the same. It was only much later in the day, when Ellie said in a small voice, ‘I think we’ve been in this street before, lass,’ that Ruby realized they’d probably been wandering about in circles some of the time. She’d been so eaten up with misery and immersed in painful thoughts of Adam and Olive and her mam that she’d walked blindly without talking or being aware of her surroundings for hours, Ellie valiantly trailing after her and not saying a word. Now Ruby became aware that she was tired and thirsty and that Ellie looked ready to drop.

The street they had been standing in was much the same as many others they’d walked down, and as she had stared at Ellie her friend had said, still in the same tentative voice, ‘I recognize the name, Bath Lane Terrace, and that sawmill we passed a minute or two back.’

‘Oh, Ellie, I’m sorry.’ She’d been full of contrition.