Well, for my part, it was hard work all right and long hours from breakfast to after supper, but all far easier than dealing with bait and lines and cut fingers and stinking fish and heavy creels, and taking up lazy Joan’s slack.

But increasingly my thoughts turned to home. To Ma mostly. She would not know whether I was dead or alive. How long would it be before they would all stop talking of me? When would they start to think me gone for ever? When would I become unmentioned?

I soon discovered what Mrs Baxter had meant when she talked of the parish officers and their House of Correction. Late one evening, just as the ales were fizzing down to their dregs, the front door flew open. Two men in high hats stalked in, carrying brass lanterns.

‘The parish officers are here,’ I heard Mr Baxter call to his wife out back, his voice sounding strangled.

There was a flurry of activity around the room, as if a gust had blasted in. Books were tidied into bags, backs straightened, dice and playing cards pocketed. A man who had been singing a bawdy song about a street called Grope Lane fell silent.

The men walked up to the bar and would not sit down, nor take a drink, even when Mr Baxter tried to insist.

‘We do not drink spirits, and we do not take alcohol of any sort in public,’ I heard one of them say.

Mr Baxter nodded to me with a look that meant carry on as you were doing, so I continued to wipe tables with my damp cloth and pick up empty cups and glasses. The atmosphere was so tense, with no one saying anything at all, that I could not escape into the kitchen fast enough. There Mrs Baxter and Cook stood with their dish rags slung over their shoulders, looking grave.

‘They visit once a month or so,’ Mrs Baxter said to me in a low voice. ‘They are looking for any excuse to shut us down.’

‘They think we are an immoral establishment,’ observed Cook. ‘And ought not to sell any alcohol, nor let women in the door.’

‘Utter nonsense,’ spat Mrs Baxter. ‘It makes me furious that they throw their weight about.’

Cook shifted from one foot to the other. ‘We are not careful enough, Mrs Baxter,’ she said. ‘You know my thoughts on the matter.’ She turned to me.

The low rumble of voices at the other side of the kitchen door told me that the parish officers were in conversation with Mr Baxter.

‘You are our third kitchen maid in three years, Mistress Dickson,’ she continued, with a flourish of her dish rag as she brought it from her shoulder and toyed with it idly. ‘The one before you got herself into quite a fix.’

‘’Tis easy done,’ murmured Mrs Baxter.