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the woman down the street. ‘She’s
known
for it …’
    ‘For what, Annie?’
    ‘For going with men.’
    ‘Your father’s not exactly an old man, love. It’s only natural. He’s got to find his bit of fun from somewhere.’ Laurie reached out for his sack. ‘I’ve got to wash this muck off me when I’ve found a dry pair of socks.’ He groped around in the bottom of the sack. ‘Forget about your dad and the ravishing Mrs Greenhalgh, love. Where do I go to get clean? Through there?’
    To his amusement, Annie changed at once into the woman of the house, a polite and solicitous hostess, with an accent to match.
    ‘There’s a hip-bath through there at the back, and if you want to have a proper all-over wash you can put some cold in it and warm it up from the kettle. Georgie and me dad make do with a lick and a promise till Friday, just head and shoulders, but if you want a decent soak you’re very welcome.’
    ‘Will you come through and wash my back?’
    His low chuckle turned to a shout of laughter as Annie upended the iron, snatched a grey shawl from the peg behind the door, and in one swift graceful movement swept her hair up on top of her head beneath the flat cap. She spoke to him over a disappearing shoulder.
    ‘I’m going down to the shops. I’ll not be long.’
    She was off out of the house as quick as a lick. He saw her head bobbing past the window, heard her call out to someone in her normal voice.
    She was a funny kid all right …
    Laurie went through into the back room, out into the yard where the zinc bath hung from a nail hammered into the wall. A lick and a promise might do for the likes of Jack Clancy, but it wasn’t good enough for Laurie Yates.
    Annie averted her eyes as she walked past Mrs Greenhalgh’s house. The front door was closed, which made a change. Usually, when the weather was fine, the big blousy woman propped the door open with a chair and sat there, missing nothing that went on in the street. Or stood on the doorstep with arms folded across her bolster-bosom. Or came out on the flags to sit on the window bottom. All signs of bad bringing up, as Annie’s mother had often reminded her.
    Mrs Greenhalgh’s son Jim was on the late shift at the mine, and Dora his wife would still be down there working on the screens, raking over the coals with her bare hands, festering her fingertips into open cracks. Annie turned the corner with head bent, muttering to herself.
    It wasn’t right. There was so much that wasn’t right. Annie’s mother had often said that when real poverty came in at the door, dignity flew out of the window. ‘Dignity,’ she would say, ‘when God made woman He meant her to have
dignity
, Annie. Always remember that.’
    Past the forge, across the street, past the house with sixteen children, two sets of twins and one of triplets among them. Annie often wished she could see inside, but they never used the front door, always the back. She supposed they came to the table in relays and slept top to toe, but how on earth did their poor mother manage to feed them? A man carrying a wicker basket of oatcakes on his head turned round from knocking on a door, but Annie was too quick for him. He’d have to whistle for the sixpence she owed him till Friday.
    In the next few weeks the extra coming in from the lodger made quite a bit of difference. Annie not only paid the oatcake man, but bought a fresh batch from him to hang over the end of the clothes rack to dry out. Most days she had two pennorth of greens to boil up as an extra vegetable, and one day when she couldn’t get the washing dry for love nor money she ran out and bought shop meat-and-potato pies instead of making them herself.
    ‘Though you’ll need a search warrant to find the meat,’ she warned Laurie. ‘That woman probably did no more than run past the oven with a spoonful of Bisto.’
    Jack noticed the change in his daughter, but said nothing. She seemed to have shot up in the last few weeks. She