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of his pole to the gas jet in the lamp and she saw Dave’s face properly. He was gazing down at her, his expression triumphant.
    ‘You’re my girl now,’ he said, and took her arm and held it over his. He walked with her to her gate and paused, his arm sliding round her. Karen glanced nervously at the uncurtained kitchen window where she could see Da sitting by the fire. Fortunately, his back was to them. Dave bent and kissed her, his kiss more insistent this time, pressing her lips on to her teeth so that she bent her head back as far as it would go.
    ‘Karen! Come inside this instant, do you hear me?’
    Both Dave and Karen jumped guiltily and she sprang back. ‘I’ll have to go,’ she said hurriedly and ran up the yard to where her father stood towering in the doorway.
    ‘What do you think you are doing, making a spectacle of yourself in the row? Showing yourself and your family up, you are, my lass. How could you?’
    ‘I’m sorry, Da.’
    ‘But it’s not like you, lass, letting a lad kiss you and put his hands on you in the back street, and you not even courting! You must pray to God …’
    ‘I am courting, Da,’ said Karen quietly.
    ‘What? You and Dave Mitchell?’
    ‘We’re walking out, Da.’
    Thomas gazed down at his daughter, puzzlement plain on his face. ‘But I thought … I thought you weren’t interested in him? I thought you wanted to be a nurse, Karen?’
    ‘Well, there’s a big difference between wanting to and having the chance to, Da,’ she said, unable to keep a bitter note from creeping into her voice as she walked to the row of hooks under the stairs and hung up her shawl. ‘I’m sorry if I made a spectacle of myself,’ she went on, ‘I won’t do it again.’
    ‘All right, lass,’ said Da. ‘You know, Karen, sometimes we have to accept what God wants us to do, not yearn for what we can’t have.’
    ‘Yes, Da. Now I think I’ll go to bed, I feel a bit tired. Goodnight.’
    ‘Goodnight and God bless you, lass.’
    Once in bed, Karen found herself unable to sleep, her thoughts were so mixed up. There was the insidious feeling of defeat underlying everything else. Dully she considered the options open to her. She could be an assistant nurse at the workhouse hospital and accept the fact that she would go no further. Or she could take a typing course in Bishop Auckland; that and her Certificate of Secondary Education would get her an office job, she felt sure. But she didn’t want to work in any office, that was something else she was sure of. She could carry on as she was doing now, working in the hospital kitchen and helping Mam in the house until such time as she should marry Dave. Dave … that was another disturbing thought. When he had touched her lips with his under the street lamp on the end of the rows she had felt something, an urge to hold him closer, to consider the strange trembling inside her, as though something long dormant was stirring at last. She touched her bottom lip which was still slightly sore from the way Dave had pressed it against her teeth out there by the back gate. And for the first time she wondered what it would be like to be married to him, to go to bed with him and have him take her in his arms.

Chapter Three
    KAREN HEARD THE postman coming down the row, pausing every now and then as he delivered his letters. She cocked her head, listening. Not that they got many letters in their house, she thought, but there might be one from Gran. She wrote lovely, newsy letters. Anyway, Karen could do with some diversion.
    The footsteps came nearer and stopped. She dropped the shift she had been mending on the bed and ran downstairs, getting to the door only a second after the postman knocked. But the letter which the postman was holding out to her was not from Gran, she saw. The buff-coloured envelope had a typewritten address and was stamped ‘Royal Victoria Infirmary’.
    ‘I’ve had an offer from the RVI,’ Karen said baldly, the moment she