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Were we to move below the ten-pounds-a-year property threshold, he would lose his right to vote.
     We were currently paying twenty-five; a reduction of just five or eight pounds would help significantly.
    ‘Preposterous,’ was what he hissed back at me. ‘Quite preposterous. Must I really trouble myself with instructing you, again,
     of the evils – the injury to our character and standing – which would be occasioned by such a descent? I beseech you to think
     beyond the capabilities of your sex and experience, and recognise what would be involved with the loss of our home and our
     station. It would be failure; it would be unseemly, un – un – un- man ly. No, we have a good name, and we must preserve it at all costs!’
    But Damage was not a good name, and there was no use pretending it was. ‘What’s the damage?’ some bookseller wag would say
     when they came to collect their bindings, and would think they were being original. And as for me, the moment I married Mr
     Damage, I became Damaged Goods. Damage? Dommage , my mother the governess said, and I knew now what she meant. Besides, it was never as if Peter seemed particularly anxious
     to pass his name on. On our wedding night he had led me to the bedroom, where he had prepared a tin bath, and waited outside
     the door barking instructions at me to scrub myself all over with carbolic soap and baking soda. When he was fully satisfied
     of my cleanliness, we managed the act during which Lucinda was conceived, but as it drew to a close he fretted that I was
     having a fit and that I, too, like my grandfather, was a convulsive. We did it twice more after her birth, both times again
     preluded with carbolic and soda, which may well explain my subsequent aversion to housework. I remember suggesting a third
     time, some months later, to which he replied in wonder, ‘What do you want to be going and doing that for?’ as if I had suggested
     we steal a hot-air balloon and see if we could fly to the moon. It was a wrongful disposition for a respectable wife and mother;
     I learnt to acquire an appropriate aversion. And if I dared to speak of wanting more children, Peter would silence me, and
     demand of me why I wanted to bring more children into this terrible world, before answering the question himself. He did not,
     he would say, desire me to die bringing forth our tenth child, as his poor mother did, leaving him and seven surviving others
     to be brought up by his long-suffering sister, until she went into service, when it fell not to Peter, Tommy or Arthur, the
     next in line, but to Rosie, who was only ten, to look after them all. But at least, by then, Peter had been apprenticed to
     my father’s bookbinding establishment, and Arthur had started his ecclesiastical training under the Bishop of Hadley, who
     lavished favours on his family, which meant that life started to feel kinder to the little Damages.
    Peter had been silent for a while. I did not imagine he was still contemplating my blundering suggestion. The truth was that
     Lambeth had not been what we had hoped for ourselves. We had chosen it with the best of intentions: Peter was apprenticed
     to my father at his workshop in Carnaby-street, where we lived on the floor above, and we continued to live there until we
     had to find our own dwellings because of the impending birth of our baby. And then both my parents died: my mother from cholera,
     which she caught from the notorious water-pump in Broad-street, and my father shortly after from pulmonary disease, although
     I suspect a broken heart also had something to do with it. I was four months pregnant. We could have stayed in Carnaby-street
     – we no longer had to leave in search of more space – but Peter was determined to whisk his precious wife and future child
     to somewhere cleaner. So we chose Lambeth, because its water was supplied by the Southwark and Vauxhall Company, and the pipes
     went down all the streets, into houses rich and poor,