A maze of railways brought raw materials such as limestone and coal into the town, and on the hillside to the west of the ironworks were enormous slag heaps, vast man-made mountains. Amy told Rose the company had umpteen pits of its own as they walked towards Daisy’s, filling her in on the locals. ‘It’s mostly miners and steel men in Consett,’ she said as they swung Betsy between them, each holding one of the child’s arms. ‘Our Daisy lives in Steel Street, which is a step up from Blackleg Row and Consett Terrace and round them parts. One-down-and-one-uppers they are, and when scarlet fever’s about an’ whooping cough and the like, it’s always them folk who get it worse. What can you expect with a standpipe for water and the open drains right at the backs of the houses? Lonnie, Daisy’s husband, was born in Puddlers Row and when he come round courting her our da told him he’d better fix his sights higher ’cause he wasn’t having a daughter of his living in one of them houses. Steel Street is nice, though, and they’ve got the park at the end of it. That’s where I usually take the bairns when I have them. Better than playing in the gutter or in the back lanes, a park, isn’t it, and the bandstand’s lovely.’

Rose nodded. She found that was usually all that was required of her in the company of Amy, who was the proverbial chatterbox.

On her daily walks she had explored much of the town, trying to work out where was the best area to rent a property. She agreed with Amy that the older houses in the streets that had first been built by the Derwent Iron Company for their employees decades ago seemed unsanitary and smelly, the open brick channels for waste that ran at the back of the dwellings emptying into large gullies close to the habitations. Now, at the height of summer, the streets reeked, and the privies in the back yards added to the smell.