Things had come to a head one day when Alice was about fourteen months old and learning to walk, staggering around the kitchen holding on to the chair legs and every so often plopping down on her bottom before determinedly dragging herself up again. The baby had inadvertently grasped one of Adam’s legs as he had sat at the table reading his paper while Olive had been busy at the range, and she had turned round with their plates in her hands just in time to see him jerk Alice off him. The child had lost her balance and smacked down so suddenly her little head had made hard contact with the stone slabs as she’d fallen backwards.

She had slung the plates on the table with enough force for the food to go everywhere, whisking Alice up into her arms and cradling the baby against her. Alice had screamed at the top of her tiny lungs, a visible bump already forming.

The row that had followed had been vitriolic on both sides, but whereas Olive had been beside herself with rage and fright, Adam had been as cool as a cucumber, his words icy and venomous, and showing not the slightest remorse. It had been later that evening, when Alice was asleep in her cot upstairs, that Adam had come in from his nightly walk and paused at her side where she was sitting doing some mending at the kitchen table.

‘Let me make one thing perfectly clear,’ he had said coldly. ‘I bring home a wage each week that enables you and your child to be fed and clothed while you live under my roof. In return for that I expect my meals to be in peace and for my physical needs, in the bedroom and out of it, to be met at all times. I will not tolerate the sort of scene you made tonight again. Keep the child out of my way in future. Do you understand?’

She had looked up at him, into blue eyes as icy as his voice. ‘Her name is Alice, and she’s your child as much as mine.’

He’d said nothing for a moment, then he had walked across the room and paused with his hand on the door into the hall. ‘Don’t try my patience.’

Just four words, but they had chilled her blood. Even now, sitting in the warm sunshine with Alice splashing about and the sounds of normal life all around her – birds singing, the neighbours next door talking in their backyard and bairns shouting in the lane – she shivered. What was she going to do? She pushed a strand of hair from her brow. What could she do? Her da was so poorly now there was no chance she and Alice could go there, besides which, what could she say as a reason for leaving him?