And then the thought came, blatant: how straight and narrow my life was after Mother died, and how ill it made me!

She sat on the side of the bed, staring at the winter light from the window.

They took the tram to Soho Road, even though the day was cold and turning blustery, to walk in fresher air. Daisy was wrapped in her warm coat and hat, a thick scarf wound round and round over her long hair, and her eyes lit up as they reached the wrought-iron gates of Handsworth Park.

‘I love it here,’ she said. ‘Pa – can’t we move out to live here, like Mr Watts?’

Margaret had told them that the new house was just up the road from here.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Philip said, with a comic air of exhaustion at all Daisy’s demands. ‘Give us a rest, young miss – it’s Sunday.’

Daisy laughed and skipped ahead. The ice was melting on the grass and the sky was now thick with fast-moving clouds so that the sun came and went like a winking eye. Margaret walked beside Philip Tallis and they chatted, she telling him what had happened on Friday, what Mary Poole had resorted to. He looked appalled.

‘What a choice,’ he said furiously. ‘For a child to be orphaned like that when she still has a mother. It’s a stain on our country that this woman is in such desperate straits.’

‘It’s having young children that does it, isn’t it?’ Margaret said. ‘Now Nellie is not there she can go out to work. She’s no family to help. It’s women with little ones who are the worst off. And those other poor children of hers. Little Ivy has lost her two closest sisters. And I really don’t know what to do for the best for Den.’

‘You do all you can,’ he said. ‘Soon as he’s old enough he can get some proper training – but it’s not in line with the law now. I can’t employ a lad that young . . .’

‘I know,’ Margaret said. ‘No one was suggesting you should. And you’ve been very kind. His being able to come to your house and learn things off Daisy means a lot to him.’

‘He’s not the sort of lad that would come if it didn’t,’ Philip Tallis agreed. ‘Though mostly I think he comes for the food!’ They laughed.

‘Well, for whatever reason,’ Margaret said, ‘he’s learning things. He likes it, I think.’

She breathed in, looking across the frozen green of the park towards the church. Walking here, out of the hubbub of the close-packed place where they lived, and seeing trees and water, and being here with Philip, she was filled with a sense of bliss, of which she found herself questioning and being suspicious. Even though she knew she had seldom been this happy, somehow confusion was never far away.