Betsy raised her eyes and looked at her mother, and such was the expression on the child’s face that Rose put out her hand and pulled her daughter in to her. ‘It’s all right, hinny, it’s all right.’ But it clearly wasn’t.

Glancing at Alice, who appeared to be the fount of all knowledge, she said softly, ‘Can you tell me, Alice?’

Alice looked at her mother and as Daisy nodded her encouragement, the little girl said, ‘Dora and her friends were saying that Mrs O’Leary—’ She stopped, biting her lip.

‘Yes?’ said Daisy. ‘Go on, pet. You’re not going to get wrong.’

‘They said that Mrs O’Leary has got a fancy man who bought her the bakery and that she’s no better than Polly Stamp.’

Polly Stamp was a big, blowsy woman who lived in Pitt Lane and was known for accommodating any of the Consett Iron Company employees who knocked on her door for a bob a go. Like Betsy, Alice wasn’t too sure why Polly Stamp was someone everyone tut-tutted about, but to link her name with Mrs O’Leary’s wasn’t good, she knew that.

Daisy looked at Rose. ‘That didn’t come from bairns,’ she said grimly. ‘It’s their mams and das.’

For a moment Rose had frozen as Alice spoke, but now she said, ‘Betsy, look at me, hinny. Dora and her friends are just silly little girls who don’t know anything, all right? I bought the bakery myself with money I’d saved and what’s called a loan from the bank which I have to pay back bit by bit. No one bought it for me.’

So this was what everyone had been thinking – that Alexander was her lover and he had set her up with her own business? That she was in effect a kept woman? The very thing she had feared when he had first shown an interest in her had come about, but strangely, rather than feeling crushed she found she was furiously angry. How dare their gossip and tittle-tattle upset her child like this?

‘They – they said that you were bad,’ said Betsy, finding her voice at last now it was out in the open. ‘That’s when I slapped Dora’s face for her.’

‘She did an’ all,’ Alice put in, admiration in her voice. Dora and her gang were all big and well built, not to be messed with. ‘She nearly knocked her over and Dora ran in to Miss Walton bawling her eyes out.’