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she’d got a splinter in a finger from the worn poss stick, but there was the mangle to wipe down and the copper to empty, saving a bucket of good soapy water to give the oilcloth up in the front bedroom a good going over.
    Annie could still remember her mother and Georgie bringing the roll home from the market, carrying it between them like a stepladder. It wasn’t quite big enough , and the green and orange colours shouted at you as soon as you opened the door, but it had gone for a song because it was an off-cut, and as Annie’s mother had said, the colours would fade. You could get used to anything. ‘You could stand on your head for three days if you were forced to,’ she was fond of saying.
    The fire was half-way up the chimney-back and steam rose from the washing draped over a massive clothes maiden, drying them nicely. There was the ironing still to do, but by eight o’clock that evening everything would be folded away in the big wicker basket, ready to be taken to Mr Thwaites’s red brick house overlooking the spare land at the top of the next street.
    Annie hoped it would be the eldest girl who paid her. Last week the pit manager had given her a funny look and held on to her hand as he passed over one shilling and threepence, counting each coin separately, and pressing them into her palm before closing her fingers over them. He had stared at her with a blank expression on his face. As if he was going to be sick, Annie thought. As if he’d lost a tanner and found a threepenny bit.

3
    ANNIE WAS WELL on with the ironing when Laurie Yates came in from the mine.
    ‘It rains as hard down there as it does up here. Did you know that?’ He slumped down in the rocking-chair. ‘I could sleep on a clothes-line.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Your father’s down in the bottom house seeing his woman, but he’ll be back for his tea, and your Georgie’s playing football in the pit yard with some of his mates.’
    ‘Our dad hasn’t got a woman!’ Annie’s voice was deceptively calm. The transformation from the good looking , impudent young man to the exhausted figure sprawled in the chair shocked and disappointed her. In his pit dirt Laurie Yates looked like all the others; worse than most, with his white teeth flashing in his black face. She had thought he was different, with his alien way of speaking and his gentlemanly manners, but she’d been wrong. He was bending down to his boots, so tired he was fumbling with the laces. Doing it less than a foot away from the clothes maiden with Mr Thwaites’s combinations steaming in the heat from the fire.
    ‘You’re having me on about the woman,’ she said, still in that same quiet tone. ‘There’s a Mrs Greenhalgh in the bottom house, a widow who lives with a married son and his wife.’
    ‘That’s her. Mrs Greenhalgh.’
    Annie could feel the heat from the iron coming up at her, flushing her face. Her dad wouldn’t go with Mrs Greenhalgh. Not that fat sloppy woman with scragged-back hair and a voice on her like a corncrake. Not Florrie Greenhalgh, who’d been seen more than once fighting in the street with her daughter-in-law, pulling her hair and thumping her between the shoulders.
    ‘Our dad wouldn’t
look
at Mrs Greenhalgh, not if she was the last woman on earth.’ In her agitation Annie pulled off the atrocious flat cap, releasing the long fall of her hair. ‘If you’d known me mother you couldn’t even
think
a thing like that.’
    Laurie was staring at her in total disbelief. Annie’s hair was
beautiful
. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. He supposed it was red, but red was far too ordinary a name for it. More gold than red. He half stretched out a hand, then drew it back quickly, anticipating the way she would swipe it away. Titian … the glinting warmth of a shining copper pan. That hair accounted for the paleness, the creamy tinge to her skin and the way a spattering of freckles marched across the bridge of her nose.
    She was still going on about