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rooms in Cornice Street. They had arrived in Cornice Street in 1921 when Mary was four and Jimmy two years old, and she had planned that their stay there would be no longer than three years at the most, by which time Mary would want a room of her own.
    She did not intend to have any more children, not if she knew it; and at this stage she had made it plain to Alee and told him he must do something about it. She didn’t know what exactly she expected him to do nor did he know exactly what he was expected to do, except use something, and he wasn’t going to all that palaver; so whether it was by chance or management they never knew, but they had no more children. This enabled Alice to set about furnishing her house properly.
    By 1923 she had a real front room, containing a three—piece suite, a china cabinet, a glass-fronted bookcase and two occasional tables. The floor was not covered with lino but with a grey cord carpet right to the walls, a great innovation in those days; and in the living-room she was the proud possessor of a drop-leaf table, a sideboard, four Georgian—type chairs which she had bought second-hand and did not know the value of, only that their shape appealed to her, and two arm chairs that had once graced a club room. In her own bedroom she had an austere satinwood bedroom suite and a double wooden bed; no brass knobs for her. She had, however, to be content with two iron beds in the children’s bedroom. Her curtains were all heavy Nottingham lace, and there was deep imitation lace on the bottom of the yellow paper blinds.
    It was in 1924 when she was looking further afield that her eye alighted on “Moat Cottage’. Why a six-roomed cottage standing in half an acre of land on the outskirts of the town should have been given this name wasn’t evident, because the ground all about was level and there was no sign of a moat, wet or dry. She had passed the cottage often on her walks into the country with the children but it wasn’t until she saw it empty that she coveted it. When, all agog, she put the proposed move to Alee his first question was, “ What’s the rent? “
    “Eleven-and-sixpence.”
    Almost double what they were paying for the present house, was she mad?
    Mad, or no mad, she had said to him, she was going to have that cottage; she wasn’t going to stay all her life in a grubby street like Cornice Street looking into somebody else’s back kitchen and somebody else looking into hers. Moreover, she was tired of living next to a lot of numskulls.
    At this he had answered quietly, “I have news for you, we’re on half-time next week.” And that had been the beginning of the end of her dream of Moat Cottage. It had also been the beginning of a change in her character.
    Previously, the objectionable facets of her nature had found vent in the ambitious drive to get on, to have a better house than the next, better-dressed children than the next, and cleverer children than the next.
    Alec’s place in the sphere of her ambitions was the provider of the wherewithal to achieve at least two of her ambitions.
    On short time. Alee became an irritant, but when he became unemployed Alice’s irritation leapt to bitterness bordering on hatred for him, and what little love she’d had for him became centred, not on her firstborn, her daughter, but on her son, James. James was going to accomplish for her all that his father had failed to do.
    She now looked at her son, where he sat on the corner of the high fender, his knees almost up to his chin, engrossed in a dog-eared comic, and said, “Put that away and get on with your homework!”
    “What, Ma?”
    ‘you heard me. Put that rubbish away and get on with your homework. “
    “But, Ma, I never start me homework until after I’ve had me tea.” He peered up at her, and she said,
    “We’re not havin’ tea until those two come in; I’m not mashing twice. And where does she think she’s got to?
    Almost five o’clock here and she finished at