From the day she’d married Adam, exactly a month after Ruby had left Sunderland, Olive had known that this mistake superseded anything that had gone before. Tricking him into sleeping with her, falling for a baby, the breakdown of his engagement to Ruby and her sister leaving and breaking their mam’s heart, all that was as nothing compared to becoming Adam’s wife. He was going to continue to make her pay for what she’d done to her dying day and by marrying him she’d effectively put a noose round her own neck.

Turning back to the range, Olive checked the tin of baked herring in the oven. It was the second week of June and the country was in the grip of a heatwave. Cloudless skies, backyards swilled daily to lay the dust, and the roads to the beaches jammed tight at the weekends as folk sought the relief of a sea breeze. Consequently, the old fishwives who plied their trade along the seafront and round the back lanes had been selling their glut of herring that the good weather had brought in for knockdown prices. Hannah, the old woman whose round included Olive’s back lane, was a character, but then most of the fishwives were cut from the same rough cloth. Dressed in a cotton blouse, heavy woollen skirt and thick linen apron, an old shawl round her shoulders and her feet shod in black hobnailed boots, Hannah wasn’t to be trifled with. All the bairns were fascinated by the coil of thick material on her head on which her fish basket was balanced, and by the way Hannah kept it steady when she walked. She never came in winter or bad weather when the herring were difficult to fish, but come the summer months her cry in the back lanes would ring out and housewives would appear out of their yards.