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to identify with the fatherless girl. Her mother, Nellie, was my mother’s sister, though they did not look alike. Nellie was tall, thin as a reed and dark-haired, with the pale skin so often found in those of Irish descent. My mother, prettier by far than Nellie, had a softer, gentler look about her.
    Eileen herself was plain to the point of ugliness, with straight mousy hair and strange eyes that darted about constantly as if she were frantically searching for something.
    We took ourselves off to the top of the house, right up to the attic, away from all the fiddling, shouting and stamping of feet. We sat side by side on an old army trunk, our heels dangling and bumping gently against its side. She stared at me with all the wisdom of a ten-year-old, those odd, quick eyes seeming to pierce through my skull right to the very centre of my thoughts.
    ‘You don’t like ’im, do you?’ She put an arm around my shoulders. Unaccustomed, of late, to such empathy, I allowed a few tears of self-pity to run down my face and she dried them, none too gently, with the rough-ribbed cuff of her grey cardigan.
    ‘Me Mam says as ’ow you’ll get used to ’im, like,’ she went on. ‘You’ll be better off than what we are at any road – once he can get work. At our ’ouse we’ve seen nowt but bread and drip for a week now. See.’ She opened a brown paper bag. ‘I’ve fetched loads of butties up and a bottle of stout – we can ’ave our own party.’
    ‘No!’ I made up my mind quickly as an idea flashed across my brain with all the sudden brilliance of a streak of fork-lightning. ‘Save my half, Eileen. I’m running away.’
    Expressing no surprise, as Eileen had ceased to feel surprise at a very early age, she merely asked, with great calm, ‘Where to, like?’
    I thought about this for some seconds. ‘Well, I’d go next door, but they’d only find me straight off and drag me back. I think I’ll go to . . . to . . . Blackpool. That’s it, I’ll go to Blackpool.’
    She stared down at her white blancoed canvas shoes. ‘Where will you live?’ she asked. This was getting a bit complicated for me.
    ‘I’ll find somewhere. I can sleep on the pier or in a tram shelter. And . . .’ I began to warm to my subject. ‘And I’ll get food off people on the sands – bits of picnics and that.’
    Eileen shook her head wisely. ‘They’ll only bring you back. They always do – I’ve been fetched back four times now – mind, I never got as far as Blackpool, but it makes no difference. They’ll always get you in the end, Annie. Then you’ll get a right good ’iding off yer Mam. Nay. You’ll have to go ’ome with them and make the best of it.’
    She was right, of course. They did always get you in the end. I sighed deeply, trying to imagine what life was going to hold in store for me. I had already been banished from my mother’s bed, was already forced to sleep cold and alone in the small front bedroom.
    And I’d have to eat with him, sit with him in the kitchen every evening. There was no privacy in the house, no bathroom. If you wanted a wash, you used the tin dish in the slopstone. If you wanted a warm wash, then you heated water on the range or on one of the two gas rings in the scullery. Weekly baths took place in front of the kitchen fire in the metal tub from the back yard. Which was all very well when there was just me and my mother. But now, with a stranger in the house, how would we manage?
    I sobbed my unhappiness into my fingers, squeezing the tears in my palms until they ran right up to the elbows. It was the unfairness of it all that frustrated me. Grown-ups could do exactly as they pleased. We just had to fit in, were forced to fit in. We had to wait until we, in turn, became adults before we could have any choice at all in things that really mattered.
    ‘Don’t take on, Annie,’ whispered Eileen. ‘Don’t let them know ’ow you feel. Just carry on going t’ school and do your