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she’d first started earning she’d given all the hard-earned pennies to her mother, proud of bringing something in. But after seeing them spent on gin, she had started keeping the odd coin for herself sewn into her only petticoat which she never, ever left lying around. Those pennies were needed when you were hungry and there was nothing at home to eat.
    She did wish she could have said goodbye to the kind ladies at the Mission, though. She was going to miss them. How would she improve her reading and writing now? You had to be able to read and write to get a job in service, they’d told her, and becoming a maid in a respectable household was her greatest ambition.
     
    As they drove north out of Manchester the next day in Gus’s slow, lumbering cart, Emmy breathed in deeply. She hadn’t realised how much fresher the air was outside the city. It had stopped raining now, so everything looked clean, with drops of water sparkling on leaves and blossoms. She stared round in amazement at fields and meadows, dry-stone walls, trees covered in new leaves of a tender green and the odd whitewashed farm house. Would Northby be like this? She did hope so.
    It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Northby was a big disappointment, hardly large enough to be called a town, and when you looked down on it the rows of red brick houses lay like scars along the sides of the narrow Pennine valley. At the upper end there were a few bigger stone houses, with a church in the middle and a mill on the lower ground to one side. It had a big square pond next to it. The moors were still green, but below them smoke lay like a haze over everything in the valley. It poured out in thick charcoal-coloured clouds from the tall mill chimney and rose in smaller trails of transparent grey from the chimney pots of houses.
    ‘It’s grown a lot bigger!’ Madge exclaimed, staring around. ‘Look at all those new houses they’ve built!’
    ‘Ah, well, it’s the mills,’ Gus said. ‘Brought a lot of work into Northby, they have, especially Rishmore’s, the big ’un. T‘others are only little places, but still, they provide a few jobs for folk. Old Rishmore owns most of the town now. He’s the one as built most of them new houses over there. Had to have somewhere for his new workers to live, didn’t he? Eh, folk have moved here from all over the place, from as far away as Ireland even - though them Papist buggers could go back again to their bogs and I shouldn’t miss ’em a bit.’
    At the outskirts of the town he reined in his two horses, which were now looking tired. ‘Here we are, then.’
    On one side of the road was a dry-stone wall, beyond which stretched a ploughed field, while on the other was a row of tumble-down stone houses, three storeys high with big windows on the top floor. Some of the panes were cracked and broken, stuffed with rags to keep the weather out, and the houses were leaning against one another as if they might otherwise fall down. The roofs were sagging and even the chimneys looked crooked.
    Emmy looked at her mother, pleading wordlessly for this not to be their new home.
    ‘This is the lower end of Weavers Lane,’ her mother announced in a tight voice that said she was not happy, either. ‘George has got us a room here.’
    ‘Mum, are you sure we can’t find somewhere better?’ Emmy whispered.
    ‘We’re not paying for it, are we, love?’ She forced a smile. ‘Ah, it’s just temporary, to give us a start. I dare say George will find us somewhere else quite soon.’
    Gus sniggered. ‘If you think he’ll find you a whole house, you’re far and out. He’ll not spend a penny more than he has to, old George won’t. Terrible fond of keeping his money to hissen, my little cousin is.’ George was a big man, but Gus was even bigger and picked up one of the tea chests as if it weighed nothing. Shoving the front door open with his shoulder, he carried his load inside without bothering to knock and disappeared up the