Daisy burst into tears yet again at that. She had cried on and off since she’d stepped over the threshold. Fortunately their house was owned by a private landlord and not the Iron Company so there were no complications that way. Rose had told her she could pay twelve shillings a week which was generous, and it would leave Daisy nine shillings a week for everything else once the rent was paid. This had prompted more tears because Daisy had expected less. ‘And of course you can take home bread and cakes each day,’ Rose promised, knowing that money would still be extremely tight with five children to clothe and feed. Lonnie would have earned much more, but of course he was a man and it was accepted that men were the breadwinners. A woman’s place was tending to her own hearth and before she was wed earning a little to give to her parents as their due for caring for her for umpteen years. Where widows in Daisy’s circumstances fitted into this social decree wasn’t clear, but then there was always the workhouse, Rose reflected angrily. That’s what people would say to someone in Daisy’s position. It was a man’s world, especially a rich man’s world, and everyone just seemed to accept it. She had raised eyebrows by taking on the bakery, she knew that. The market stall was more acceptable – lots of old biddies took their allotment or garden produce to market to earn a few pennies – but a shop was aiming too high for a woman. It took her out of the normal, leaving her in no man’s land. Aye, she knew what people thought all right but she didn’t care as long as they bought from her.

The thought brought her up short, making her realize how much she had changed in some respects in the last years. In the workhouse she had been taught that women like Emmeline Pankhurst and the Suffragette movement in general were evil – tools of the Devil to overthrow God’s natural order. Well, she didn’t believe that any more. Neither did she believe that a loving God would approve of the horrors that went on in the workhouse and elsewhere. No, it was man who had engineered such things. The Board of Guardians at the workhouse had been made up of influential and wealthy men in the town, and she remembered many visits when they would come and survey the inmates as though they were unpleasant bugs under a microscope. And if anyone dared to question the order of things the old trite phrase of ‘It is the way things are and have always been’ was trotted out. Well, it didn’t have to be the way things were.