She finished the tea and went into her bedroom, tidying her hair and taking off the apron she tended to wear in the house before she returned to the sitting room. ‘Would you like to go and see Auntie Amy and take her some of the coconut ice we made yesterday?’ she asked Betsy, who immediately closed her book and jumped up. Coconut ice was Amy’s favourite sweet and because she was eight months pregnant – the longest she had ever carried a baby – she was being careful and following the doctor’s orders to stay in bed until the child was born. For the bubbly, lively Amy the enforced confinement had been onerous in the extreme, especially with the ever-present fear that this pregnancy would go the way of all the others forever at the back of her mind, but as she said to Rose each time she visited, she would do anything – anything – to have a healthy baby. Amy’s mother came in every day to prepare and cook the evening meal and do any washing and ironing, and Daisy went first thing in the morning on her way to the bakery to get breakfast for Amy and Frank and see to Frank’s bait that he took with him to the works. When Rose had asked why Frank couldn’t help out in the house due to the circumstances, Amy had looked at her as though she’d grown two heads. ‘He’s a man,’ she’d answered as though that explained everything.

Which, Rose thought now as she put on her straw bonnet and summer coat, she supposed it did, for Amy and Daisy and probably most folk hereabouts. Men didn’t lift a finger in the house – it was beneath them to do ‘women’s work’ – and it was up to other women to rally round if the lady of the house was incapacitated, but she didn’t see it that way, not in recent years anyway. The more she’d had to fend for herself and Betsy, the more she had questioned the rigid dos and don’ts of working-class society. Why shouldn’t a single woman without a man run a bakery and provide for herself? Why should it have prompted the virtual scandal that had followed when she’d done just that? And someone like Frank, who loved his wife dearly, feeling it was unmanly to make even a cup of tea in his own house was wrong.