Aunt Hatt rushed to let her in. Annie saw Margaret’s frightened face looking round the door of the family’s living room. To Annie’s surprise, her aunt fell upon her and pulled her into her arms.

‘I’m so sorry . . .’ Annie began, but had the air knocked out of her by the embrace.

‘Oh, my dear – where on earth have you been all this time?’ Aunt Hatt repeated. She sounded close to tears. ‘If anything happened to you I could never look your father in the face again. Come in, come in – we’ve been waiting . . . We didn’t like to start without you.’

Annie hurriedly took off her hat and coat and joined the others now seated at the table. To her horror the clock on the mantelpiece said twenty to nine!

‘Annie, why’re you so late?’ Margaret hissed, furious that her uncle and aunt had been so put out. She had been frightened as well. ‘We’ve all been beside ourselves.’

‘Ah!’ Uncle Eb greeted her. ‘So you’ve not been sold into the White Slave Trade like your aunt was quite sure you had?’ He was smiling, but she could see that he had been anxious.

‘I’m very sorry to cause you worry, Uncle and Aunt,’ Annie said, genuinely contrite as she took her place at the table. ‘I really am. Only, there’s a girl, Lizzie Poole, works in the factory with me – she was very ill. I took her home and when I got there, it was the most terrible place, on a yard, and her mother was sick as well and just lying there on the floor . . .’

She was gabbling, the shock of it coming to her now. In her young years of assisting people, she had never seen a household as abject as that of the Pooles’.

‘So I had to help and it took for ever just to boil some water . . .’

‘You’ve been in those backyards, a little thing like you?’ Aunt Hatt stilled the spoon she was serving stew with for a moment and stared at Annie appalled. ‘What did you want to go there for? They’re filthy, dirty places, those yards. You never know what you might catch – or what sort of rough people’ll be hanging about! You might’ve . . .’ She decided not to share her thoughts about what might have befallen Annie. ‘I’ve never set foot in one of them places – nor would I! Where was this?’

‘In Pope Street,’ Annie said, astonished by her aunt’s reaction. Their parents had always told them that no place was too humble for them to visit, no person beyond the reach of the Lord’s light and care. She knew Aunt Hatt was from a well-to-do family, but had she never set foot in a place where so many people lived close by? Didn’t she care about the people around her?