‘Well, if you think you’ll be all right,’ Aunt Hatt said. ‘You needn’t get lost – just ask for Chain Street and anyone’ll tell you the way. Mrs Sullivan puts our dinner on the table at one o’clock, all right?’

Straw hats on, they set out into the humid morning and the stench and clamour of the streets at the heart of the jewellery quarter.

‘Oh, dear – I do feel we’re in the way,’ Margaret fretted. ‘We can’t stay long, can we?’ She felt in every way out of place, a country bumpkin with a gentle West Country accent, not knowing how to go about anything.

‘I don’t know,’ Annie said. ‘I think she likes having us – but it would all be so much easier if we had something to do.’

‘How can we?’ Margaret said. ‘There’s so much to learn. I can hardly even remember the name of anything Uncle told us about this morning, can you?’

‘No!’ Annie laughed. ‘Never mind – let’s just have a look around and see. It’s not as busy as yesterday, is it?’

‘I’ve never seen so many people as then,’ Margaret agreed.

Margaret was glad of Annie’s steadiness, when her own heart was aflutter with nerves. She felt queasy – partly from having to eat porridge which always turned her up a bit. But this seemed to be how she felt all the time now, shocked and trembling inside, as if she was horribly changed and life could never be the same again.

The streets were not as thronging at eleven in the morning as they had been at going-home time. All the same, there was still plenty happening. They linked arms and walked the blue brick pavements, gazing about them. They passed along Frederick Street, Vittoria Street and Vyse Street, reading the signs and plaques over the doorways, trying to take in the sheer number and variety of trades: the silversmiths and goldsmiths; the factories making buttons of brass, bone and shell; the pen makers, enamellers and die sinkers; the badge makers, spectacle and false-eye makers; the gem setters and engravers and makers of church metalwork. Each street was a warren of doorways, entries, overhead passageways linking buildings with ramshackle parts added on to them and protruding out of them, looking as if they must fall at any moment. The roads were busy with horses and carts.

Margaret felt a rank taste building in her mouth. To walk was to move through smells: here the sudden stench of horse urine, or a pungent acid whiff from the nearby buildings; coal dust forever on the air, horse muck lying on the cobbles with flies swarming over it, and in the heat, which was becoming oppressive, the rot of refuse collecting in the backyards.