‘I heard you’d come home. She told me, your Verity.’

He stiffened, half turned to face her, aware of the heat on his neck. ‘She’s not mine. I didn’t know you were still friends.’

Muriel’s smile was large in her face. Her lips were very red. ‘We’re not. I bumped into her down Askey’s milk bar a couple of weeks ago. Where’s your mother then?’

She is mine. She’s mine. She’s mine.

‘Right here, young lady.’

Arthur jerked round and nearly fell off the ladder. Mother’s eyes were like daggers.

‘Let me have that, Arthur, I’ll put it through the till. How’s your mother and the baby, Miss Gittings? Any more on the way?’ It was his mother’s acid-polite voice, the one she used with people she thought below her.

Muriel’s mother was constantly either pregnant or nursing. Her father was always out at sea, preferring the waves and the fish to the cries and the grime of the eight children crammed into their ramshackle old cottage down the East End.

‘Good morning, Mrs Silver,’ said Muriel. There was a hint of mockery in her voice.

Arthur, up the ladder, with his back to them both, tensed.

‘Freddie’s seven months now, got a mind to start crawling, I reckon. Mother don’t want any more, that’s for sure, but that hint exactly her choice.’

His mother tsked. Privately and often publicly too, she aired her opinions on the breeding of the poor and felt it was an affront to everyone else that they couldn’t ‘find a way’ of stopping. She was in her early forties and her time had come and gone. He heard her whispering the names of the babies she’d lost at her bedtime prayers through the wall, but neither of them ever mentioned the ones that had gone before. Nor his vanished father. She only had him now, him and the shop.

She sometimes slipped in something for the little ones, a twist of sugar, an egg, to other families that she felt deserved it. But not for Muriel’s family, breeding like rabbits and only the dwindling fish stocks to support them. Arthur wrapped up the meagre portion of flour and weighed the pathetic handful of greens Muriel had picked and tried to signal with his eyes his regret, his shame.

‘What do you think about the Americans then, Arthur?’ said Muriel, eyes glittering.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

His mother made a sound in her throat like a squawk. He knew exactly how she felt.