Mrs Nimrod had made hats. There was no factory so she had done piecework at home, and once Alice was old enough to wield a pin without taking her own eye out, she had made hats too, day after day, dawn until dark, until midnight sometimes, affixing ribbons and decoration to straw hats and felt hats and cloth hats and silk hats, every kind of hat delivered in huge boxes at the start of each week by a boy and taken away at the end of the week by a man who studied each item and handed over a pile of coins and took some back for each defective or spoiled item. The room in which they lived, in which Alice grew up, was strewn with straw and bits of silk and hatpins and ribbons and feathers and lace and tiny little fruit and flowers made from hand-painted plaster, and clouds of tissue paper and boxes and boxes and boxes.

They had lived in a room, she and Mum and Milli. Not the same room, far from it. They had moved often and at short notice, though it might as well have been the same room for they all had the same sour smell, the same bugs in the beds and in the nooks and crannies, the walls were always damp, the roof always leaked and the window—if there was a window—never shut properly or was sealed shut and could not be opened even in the swelter of summer. The room was always in a house that was dilapidated and ramshackle, two storeys, three storeys, sometimes four storeys high, where four or six or eight families lived, with one standpipe in the street outside that sometimes produced water and that sometimes the council closed off because the water was bad and might kill you, and outside was a huge iron tub and a ringer where you did your laundry, and in the corner a dunny over a foul-smelling pit. The house was in Commonwealth Street and Wexford Street and Campbell Street and Riley Street and then back to Commonwealth Street. Always different, always the same.

Mrs Nimrod’s husband, Bert Nimrod, was a cooper who made barrels for the brewery, which was skilled work, and folk would always need barrels, wouldn’t they, Mrs Nimrod had said, but when Alice was four there had been an accident and Bert Nimrod had been crushed to death by his own barrels. That was the time from which the moving from room to room and house to house and street to street had begun. Or so Milli had told her, for her sister was five years older and could remember their dad. Or said she could.