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booklearnin’. I’ve ’eard as ’ow you’re clever at school. They can’t take that away from you now, can they? You’ll likely get a scholarship when you’re eleven – oh aye, you’ll pass for t’ grammar alright. Then you can be what you want, do what you want.’
    ‘What can I be, Eileen?’ I gripped her hand tightly.
    ‘Ooh, anythin’. Well, nearly anythin’.’
    I thought about this for a few minutes, my sobs beginning to subside.
    ‘Could I be a teacher, Eileen?’
    ‘I reckon as ’ow you could, yes.’
    ‘Then I could tell people what to do instead of them telling me. Only I’d be a nice teacher like Miss Best with legs. I could never be a nun. I don’t like nuns.’
    Eileen, a not too frequent attender at St Gregory’s, which was also under the tender auspices of the Passionists, agreed with me wholeheartedly. She sat, tugging at her hair, twisting it about her fingers. Perhaps she thought if she twisted it for long enough it would go curly.
    ‘I’m goin’ to work in a shop,’ she announced. ‘A food shop. If they don’t pay me proper I can always pinch enough to eat.’ She grabbed a sandwich from the bag and swallowed it in two bites. For a moment or two I forgot my own troubles and thought about poor Eileen.
    Auntie Nellie worked full time in the mill, yet there was never enough to eat, seldom any coal for the fire. Most of the time, Eileen did not go to school, simply because she had little to wear. For days on end, her mother would lock her in, telling her that the house was being watched and should Eileen ever open the door, let alone step outside, then she, Auntie Nellie, would surely be informed by her spies.
    This poor ten-year-old child was, therefore, left without food to eat, without fire to warm her, while her mother, who did not always come home as soon as the working day had ended, spent her wages in the Swan or the Black Bull, returning only once her purse was empty and her belly full of ale. Surely my life, even with Eddie Higson in it, could not be as terrible as Eileen’s?
    ‘Do you get frightened when you’re shut in?’ I asked.
    She nodded quickly.
    ‘Shall I come sometimes and put a bit of bread or maybe an Eccles cake through the letterbox?’
    Now she was shaking her head vehemently. ‘No. They’ll only find out. Whatever you do, they always find out.’
    ‘But it’s not fair,’ I cried. ‘You should go to school like me and you shouldn’t be locked in on your own all day with no dinner.’
    She put a finger to her lips. ‘Shush. Nobody knows, ’cepting you. If me Grandad ever found out, he’d flay me Mam, you know he would. Then me Mam would go for me – aye, she would that – and where would that get me, eh?’
    ‘But it’s not fair!’ I shouted again.
    She looked at me wisely, shaking her head as if exasperated at me for expecting it to be fair.
    We sat together for a long time until the room grew chill, two girl children separated by four years, connected by the strangeness of our lives, she with the crazy mother, I with the horrible so-called stepfather. Yet we drew strength from each other as we sat there waiting, waiting for our day to come. It would be a long wait, we knew that. It would reach beyond this room, this house, this day and into dimensions as yet uncharted. But our strength, joint and separate, lay in our youthfulness, in our unspoken hope that we would be survivors.
    Thus began my journey into my mother’s second marriage, my pathway into a hell I could never have imagined. So fierce was the heat in my particular hell that when, some three years after this wedding day, I learned that Eileen and her mother had perished in their gas-filled scullery, I felt not only pity and grief, but something approaching envy too.
    Eileen had not survived. I was condemned to live.

5
Moving On
    Our house in Ensign Street was a slum. Although my mother did her best, scrubbing floors, blackleading the grate two or three times a week, making