Leithy doesn’t like me any more and keeps taking him away. She makes me lie in bed on my stomach to flatten the bump. I do not sleep. How can a mother sleep when she has to make plans? There are problems with my widow’s pension. I can’t explain: a matter of a small piece of paper, that’s all. What if my precious milk dries up and he starves? I can’t bear to think that I might neglect him and he might die like Mother and Rae. Please help me and tell me what to do? I am not leaving here until there is somewhere safe to go. Can I come to you? Father doesn’t want us. He never wanted me, only my mother. My head is aching with all the plans hammering away in it. I cannot close my mind. I’m on sentry duty, on guard in case she comes in to harm little Ray. I have to search the room just in case, behind the curtains, under the bed. You never know where the enemy might strike.

I wish that Peg and Father could love us. They show no delight in him, no tenderness in the holding of him. I cannot bear for them to pick him up in case they soil him. Farms are dirty places, dangerous places for babies to live. Look what the place did to Mother. I do not want to go back there with him just in case. Jean, Jeanette. Raeburn, Rae. See how I copy their names for comfort: the only good and certain things in my life, there’s magic in the very names. I am Jeanette, part of that magic. They’re here beside me, watching us, waiting. Perhaps it would be better if we joined them in heaven. We’d be safe then, what do you think?

Give my regards to Arnold.

Yours cheerfully,

Jeanette and Ray Hunter

Netta’s head was drooping with exhaustion but she had to stay awake and keep the letters flowing while schemes for her future danced over the clean paper waiting to be pinned down. She would send the Blooms a lock of Ray’s hair and demand a gift for her son; write to the Minister, Reverend Mackay, to get him to baptize the babe quickly in case harm should come; a letter must be sent to Claire McArdell congratulating her on the designs in Harper’s Bazaar – in fact, she would write to all the London designers, to Hartnell and Molyneux and Victor Stiebel, to tell them all about herself and how she wanted to work with beautiful clothes if only as a pin-picker in their sewing department. Then they could go south and find work perhaps or emigrate to New York and join Miss McArdell’s team.