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shouldn’t upset you with my problems, none of this is your fault. Are you feeling badly? Shall I get you your pills? A glass of water? Howay, now, come and have a lie-down on your bed for a while.’ Karen put her arm round her mother’s thin shoulders, ready to help her into the front room, but Rachel shook her head.
    ‘No, I’ll be fine here, pet. I just felt unwell for a minute, I’m all right now. Just get some water, eh?’
    Karen ran into the pantry where the pail of water she had just brought in from the pump on the end of the row was kept. She poured a dipper of water into a glass and took it to her mother. While Rachel drank it, Karen watched her surreptitiously, alert to the danger of her mother slipping into a faint – something which happened too often lately. But no, Rachel’s faint colour was returning to her cheeks, she was looking better already.
    ‘Don’t mention this little bad spell to your father,’ she whispered urgently as they heard the click of the latch on the back yard gate. ‘It’s nothing, I’m feeling grand now.’
    Da and Joe came in from the pit and then Karen was busy for a while, filling the zinc bath for them and setting out their meal. Afterwards, when she had a little time to herself, she put on her old shawl and told them she was going for a walk.
    ‘Just to get a breath of air.’
    ‘Well, don’t be late, mind,’ said Da. ‘The nights are drawing in and I don’t want you wandering about the fields in the dark.’
    ‘I won’t, Da.’
    Karen walked to the end of the rows and on, past the colliery yard to the fields beyond, away from the stink of the coke works. Though it was a fine, sunny evening, September was already half over and at this end of the country, autumn was beginning to turn the leaves and a sharp breeze was blowing from the north. Karen wrapped her woollen shawl closer round her shoulders and walked on as the road turned into a rutted country lane. Idly, she looked into a farmyard and saw the farmer herding the last of his cows into the byre. She paused for a moment, the smell reminding her of Weardale and her grandmother’s small-holding on the moor. For a moment she felt a longing for the old place and Gran. But it was a working day tomorrow, she didn’t have the time for a visit to Low Rigg Farm.
    It was as she was walking back in the gathering twilight that she met David Mitchell just coming out of the corner shop with a packet of cigarettes in his hand.
    ‘Hallo, Karen,’ he said, falling into step with her. ‘If I’d known you were out walking I would have come with you.’
    She did not give him a tart reply as she might have done before the death of his father the year before, for she had seen him vulnerable and filled with a natural grief that day and it had softened her view of him. Still, she had refused to go out with him whenever he asked her for her mind was full of her ambitions and she couldn’t think of anything else. Until now, that is. Today her ambitions had all come to nothing. She would never get a place on a training course at a big hospital; what was the use of trying any more? She felt worthless and humiliated and so Dave’s attentions were balm to her soul.
    ‘That would have been nice,’ she said, and Dave stopped walking in astonishment.
    ‘Do you mean it?’
    She turned to face him. Though now it was almost dark she could see little of his expression. But there was his outline against the darkening sky, large and strong-seeming, his cap pushed to the back of his head so that the brim made a kind of halo above him.
    ‘I do,’ she said, and moved out of the way for the lamp-lighter, plodding from lamp to lamp with his long pole. Dave bent his head to hers and she closed her eyes as he touched her closed mouth with his. Something trembled within her, disturbing her.
    ‘I have to go now, Da doesn’t like me to be out in the dark on my own,’ she murmured. There was the hiss of gas as the lamplighter touched the end