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thoughts as she approached home. She stopped just before she got to their gate and blew her nose and took out the powder compact, which had been Alan’s present on her last birthday, to powder her nose. Best not to let Mam see she had been upset again. Pinning a bright smile on her face, she walked up the yard to the back door.
    ‘Was it all right, pet?’ asked her mother anxiously as she went in.
    ‘Yes. Don’t worry, Mam, it was fine.’
    Bea lifted the iron kettle, weighing it in her hand to see if it held plenty of water before setting it on the fire.
    ‘Well, I’m glad you went to see them then, Theda,’ she commented. ‘It was only right. Mrs Price is a decent woman and Alan was her only lad. Now, I’ll open that tin of salmon and if you butter the bread we’ll have sandwiches for supper. Go and call your dad, will you? By the time he gets downstairs it will be ready.’
    Obediently, Theda called up the stairs and after a moment Matt Wearmouth answered: ‘I’m coming, I’m coming, there’s no need to wake the whole row,’ just as he always did.
    She heard him cough as he got out of bed and the nurse in her paused, listening. Was it worse than it had been last year? Perhaps not. But she had little doubt that he was beginning to suffer quite badly from what he called ‘the miner’s lung’. Still, if he was no worse . . . Satisfied, she returned to the table and began to spread margarine thinly on the bread. The butter ration was too precious to eat with anything as tasty as salmon. Butter was best eaten on its own on new bread, when it could be savoured properly.
    The tune that Alan had liked to sing was still running through her head, refusing to go away. The miners had taken it up, devising their own words to suit the melody.
    ‘Will the galloway pull the tubs for me?’ She found herself humming softly and the words brought to mind the time before the war when Joss had been fined five pounds for kicking a pit pony, a galloway that had refused to pull the tub and so threatened to put his whole weeks’ wages in jeopardy. She’d been a young girl at the time, studying in her spare time so that she could pass the entrance examination to Newcastle General Hospital. She remembered the row there had been at home, though.
    ‘How could you do it, lad, a poor dumb beast?’ her mother had cried. ‘And five pounds lad, it’s a mint o’ money.’
    But Theda had known why he did it and so did his mother really. For weeks Joss had come home from the pit full of frustration because Bessie the galloway had found herself a nice narrow part of the tunnel and wedged herself there, refusing to move. Oh, she was a wily pony all right. She would turn her head and look at him, Joss would say, and he swore that in the gleam of his head lamp her eyes would be triumphant. In other circumstances it would have been funny but when it meant the difference between a living wage and a pittance, oh, yes, she understood. The seam of coal was poor enough as it was. It wasn’t long after that that Joss’s name had come out of the hat when the mine had to cut down expenses. The gaffer had decided that that was the best and fairest way to choose and Joss had lost his job and had to leave Winton. For some reason, thinking of that reminded her of wild strawberries . . . what a butterfly mind she had, she chided herself.
    Theda cut the sandwiches in two and arranged them on a plate and got out the blackberry pie her mother had made with the last of the season’s berries. She would have to be getting back to the hospital as soon as tea was over. There was flu among the nurses and she had to work extra hours.
    On the bus going into town Theda was lucky enough to find a seat by the window and sat dreamily looking out of the window at the darkness. She thought about Alan, lying somewhere in the Dutch countryside, but for the first time her thoughts were not really melancholy. She had met him first on a bus and then at the dance