She was awake before daylight on Monday morning and after peering anxiously out of the window was relieved to see it wasn’t snowing yet. She expressed some of her milk into a little cup and let a rusk dissolve in it before she woke Betsy for her breakfast. Her breast milk alone didn’t satisfy the baby now. Betsy was a little grumpy at being woken but ate her breakfast, finishing with a top-up of breast milk after which Rose bathed and dressed her and then got ready herself.

At eight o’clock she was downstairs in the dining room although her stomach felt as though it was in a knot and she didn’t know how she was going to eat, added to which she’d had to bring Betsy with her as the baby wouldn’t settle. She forced her meal down quickly while Betsy contented herself chewing on a crust of toast, and after telling Mrs Harper she was going after another job in the town she left the dining room before the landlady could ask any questions.

Within five minutes they had left the house and were walking along Summerfield Avenue. It was bitterly cold but the sky was high and blue, a weak winter sun shining on the banked-up snow either side of the pavement. She had left their belongings in the room; she would come and collect them later if she was fortunate enough to find a position somewhere.

It was eleven o’clock when Rose arrived at the small market town of Birtley. She had caught a tram to the outskirts of Gateshead but had walked the last couple of miles along lanes deep in snow, and her boots and the bottom of her skirt and coat were sopping wet by the time she walked into the market square. She saw the Pig and Whistle public house immediately, a large whitewashed and thatched building with a battered sign of a pig prancing with a whistle in its snout.

The market place was a large open square and mostly cobbled, bordered on three sides by buildings of various kinds. It seemed to be divided in two from what she could see; on the far side there were a number of stalls selling vegetables, meat, flour and yeast, tea, sugar and other food, along with pedlars plying their wares from trays hung round their necks holding tapes and ribbons and trinkets. Closer to the Pig and Whistle it was clearer, just two farm carts standing side by side, both with middle-aged women selling baskets of eggs, cheese, cream and butter, and milk from large churns which they doled out to customers who had brought their own jugs and bottles.