The upshot of Bridget’s word on their behalf was that on a bitterly cold morning in mid-March with the snow thick on the ground and more forecast, Ruby and Ellie caught the tram into the Arthur’s Hill ward of the town. On leaving the tram they stood for more than a minute staring at the imposing three-storey building with a central archway at the entrance to the grounds of the workhouse. They knew from Bridget that this building contained waiting rooms and receiving wards on the ground floor, with a three-roomed residence above and then storerooms on the top floor. Looking at the forbidding Victorian frontage where people would enter into the soulless complex that made up the workhouse, Ruby shivered. Everything inside was run with a view to discouraging the poor from wanting to live at the expense of the community and life was deliberately hard and uncomfortable. Her da had always maintained that the workhouse made it seem as if ill health and destitution were crimes that deserved punishment, and that charity was an offence to God and man.

Ellie’s voice was small when she said, ‘I don’t think I can go in there, lass.’

Ruby was talking as much to herself as to Ellie when she said briskly, ‘Of course you can. Whatever it’s like we shall be together and that’s the main thing, and frankly, there doesn’t seem to be much else going, Ellie, and we need to earn some money. If we get the jobs, having a good lunch will be a bonus. We can stuff ourselves and then just have some toast or bread and jam at night, which will help things.’ She was finding buying coal for the fire, small as it was, expensive, and if they bought pies or bread or cakes the money just seemed to melt away. Somewhere with an oven would have made all the difference but of course that was impossible.

Ellie nodded slowly. Living with Ruby was wonderful, that’s what she had to remember, and anything was better than being in Sunderland with her mam an’ da. But the workhouse . . .

They were interviewed one at a time by Matron Henderson, an iron-faced woman whose husband was the master of the workhouse. Ruby was shown into the matron’s office by a thin wisp of a girl clad in the workhouse inmates’ uniform. Bridget had told them that only the officers wore black dresses and white aprons with caps and cuffs, and that paid hands from outside wore blue dresses and white aprons with caps. The inmates were dressed in grey smocks and mob caps of inferior-quality cloth, but it was their sad faces, Bridget said, that distinguished them the most.