She paused, her curvaceous frame half in and half out of the car. ‘You’re from the New Side, too?’ she asked, glancing around furtively. ‘And you came here with a baby?’

‘No,’ I replied, then added quickly as the look of alarm reappeared and she made to slam the door shut. ‘I’m not from any side! I’m from Windermere, and London, and I’m currently staying at Damson Farm.’

‘So, what do you want?’ she asked, clearly eager to get away.

‘I want to get across the river so I can buy Hope some bananas. The mini-market’s run out and besides milk it’s her main food group.’

‘You can’t get across from the village. Have to go back to the main road. It’s miles away, though. It’ll take hours to walk there and back. And there’s no pavement for most of it.’ She looked up and down, sizing us up while still half in and half out of the seat. ‘Stick her in the back, I’ll take you.’

‘I thought you were short on time. In the shop you said that you didn’t have time to go anywhere else…’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Course I had time. I was bored and fancied a mission. Plus, don’t tell anyone in the village I said this – like, literally, don’t or they’ll lob a brick through my window or slash my tyres or something – but who in their right mind can be doing with a stupid old feud anyway? And the pleasure I get from knowing Jase is smoking cigs from the Old Side is worth the risk. He’d choke on them if he knew.’ She cackled, eyes glinting, and I started to wonder if a lift was a bad idea. But then she looked me directly in the eyes and said, ‘Trust me, he deserves it. I’m Alice, by the way.’ Her dark eyes were so lovely that I felt like I could trust her, so together we clicked the car seat part of Hope’s pram into the back of her Fiesta, loaded the frame into the boot and then I took my first voyage into the New Side.

‘So, I don’t know anything about this whole Old and New Side thing,’ I said as we sped out into the open countryside. ‘It seems a big deal, though.’

Alice grimaced. ‘It is a big deal. Or at least it was. See, Ferrington was a mining town. Apart from Old Main Street, New Road and a couple of the smaller side streets, every house in the village was built for the miners back in the fifties. Ferrington was just a bridge and a boathouse surrounded by a few farms before the mine opened. The pit is who we are. But in the strikes, back in eighty-four, the village was split. The Old Side of the river went on strike, and it was brutal. Some families starved. All of them froze. If it wasn’t for the help of the farms, who stayed neutral, whole families would have died. But the New Side, they wouldn’t strike. Said they needed to keep working to support their elderly parents, put shoes on their kids’ feet. And the worst part of it is, the entrance to the mine is on the Old Side, so every morning the New Siders had to cross the village to get to the picket line. It was their right to work, to keep earning a living, but the Old Side didn’t see it that way, so they thought it was their duty to stop them.’