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stormy frown.
    ‘Ron, Joseph, are you listening?’
    Ron, chastened, stared innocently at her. Joey Phillips glanced up for a second as if she was summoning him from another world, then looked down again. There was something about him that disquieted her.
    She struggled on, and when the bell rang at four o’clock she almost cheered with relief.
    Walking back in the freezing afternoon to the tram stop opposite Winson Green prison, she felt as if her whole body was full of an urgent, heavy ache. It was some time, sitting on the tram, before she knew it for what it was: homesickness. The day hadn’t been so very terrible, she reasoned with herself. She’d managed the children, just about, and Millie Dawson looked as if she’d be a good friend. And she didn’t want to go home, did she? But it felt terrible, and the thought of going back to Ariadne Black’s house did nothing to cheer her. It was the first time she’d been properly away from home. Birmingham felt big and cheerless and she longed to see a familiar face. If only good old Edwin was here with his buoyant approach to life to put his arms round her!
    She let the tears roll down her cheeks. Her mother was right. She had been mad to come away and do this. She could have just stayed where she was, where she was comfortable, the children loved her and it would have been easy to work out the last months before she married Edwin and they settled down together to a life of village parishes, church fetes and a family of their own.
    But this thought made the feeling of panic which she could never fully explain rise up in her. Why did it all feel so inevitable, so stifling, when it was so obviously the right thing to do? No – she had been right to come here! She had to get out. Spread her wings. Then she’d be able to settle down and be the kind of wife Edwin needed and expected.

 
    Three
    ‘Come on , will you?’
    Joey Phillips strode out of the school gates, hands pushed fiercely into the pockets of his shorts.
    Lena trotted behind him.
    ‘Wait for me!’ she wailed.
    ‘Can’t,’ Joey snapped in his gruff voice. ‘Things to do.’
    He elbowed past a knot of boys from the form above who were peering at cigarette cards in the gloom.
    ‘Oi!’ one of them shouted after him. ‘Stop shoving! Who d’you think you are?’
    ‘Well, get your bleedin’ arses out the road then.’ Joey squared his shoulders as if waiting for them to come for him, striding along with his eight-year-old swagger. Insults followed him along the road.
    ‘Got more important things to do.’ He put his head down, clamping his jaws tightly so they didn’t chatter in the cold. This was money-making weather all right. Fetching coal from the wharf for the people in the bigger houses up the street was one trick. Sometimes he hired a barrow for a penny to carry it. And selling firewood. He could beg a few boxes from a greengrocer he knew among the shops along the Flat and sell them broken up for a penny a bundle. However long it took, he was going to get enough to buy a bowl of hot faggots and peas for Mom tonight. That’d help make her better.
    ‘Good food – that’s what you need, Dora,’ Mrs Simmons was always saying. And she did her best helping out, bringing round broth or leftover pease pudding when she could. ‘You want to get some flesh on those bones.’
    Joey wrenched his mind away from the rumbling of his own stomach. The watery scrag end he’d had for dinner seemed a long time ago, but it was more than Mom would have eaten all day.
    ‘You gorra penny, Joey?’ Lena said longingly, slowing as they passed the huckster’s shop on the corner of Mary Street. There was nothing Lena loved more than the boxes of cheapest sweeties at the back of the shop behind the shelves of matches, gas mantles, needles and string: sweets two for a halfpenny, liquorice laces and imps and gobstoppers.
    ‘ No ,’ Joey roared. ‘Where would I’ve get a penny from? And if I had I wouldn’t give