Salt of the Earth

by Sally Spencer

Genres: Sagas; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

The first novel in the wonderful East End saga from the author of UP OUR STREET Becky Taylor is born the last of seven children into a poor working class family during the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. Her mother is exhausted by poverty and child-bearing; her father has given the best years of his life to Worrells salt works as a miner. But in spite of the hardships, Becky grows up in a family full of warmth, loyalty and determination. Spanning twenty years, this is at once a family saga and a story of the indomitable working class spirit; it is also the story of a beautiful woman who is determined to rise about her origins and lead a better life. Her challenge is to achieve her dreams without losing the friends and family to whom she owes everything.

Release date: July 26, 2012

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 416

Sample

PROLOGUE

1871

 

Ted Taylor covered the ten feet from his back gate to the corner of Ollershaw Lane, then, as usual, stopped and tried to force himself to feel at least a little enthusiastic about the fourteen-hour shift which lay ahead.

Looking down the lane, into the darkness, he could make out the glow of cigarettes, bobbing about like fireflies as they hung loosely in the mouths of other men on their way to work. He could hear familiar sounds, too – the click of clogs on the cobbles, the rasping of early morning coughs, the mutterings of others as reluctant to get to work as he was.

‘Still, there’s no getting round it,’ Taylor said with a sigh, stepping out into the road.

The moon was shrouded with cloud that early morning, and though Ted could have trodden his way to work blindfolded, he couldn’t help wishing that there were gas lamps to light his way, as there were in Northwich. But it would have been too dangerous to install gas pipes in Marston. The ground below the village had been mined for over half a century and was a honeycomb of current and abandoned workings.

And that’s why you can never bloody trust it, Taylor thought grimly.

Sometimes the ground gave way suddenly and dramatically, as it had the year before.

He’d been having his supper at the time, Taylor remembered, and the first indication that anything was wrong had been an angry growling noise, like a wounded animal might make.

‘What’s that, Dad?’ young George had asked, frightened.

‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ his father told him as the crockery rattled furiously on the table.

And as it happened, it wasn’t – not for the Taylor family. But for the people on Cross Street it had been a different story. Slates had fallen, windows and doors had buckled, cracks had appeared in walls and – in one case – a whole gable end had fallen down, leaving the roof it had been supporting hanging precariously in the empty air.

Of course, it wasn’t always like that. Often, the ground was more cunning, waiting until night when everyone was asleep, and then slowly – almost gently – beginning to give way. Houses often sank several feet overnight – with the occupants knowing nothing about it until they tried to open their back doors the following morning.

Aye, it’s a bugger, Ted Taylor thought to himself.

Halfway up the humpbacked bridge over the canal he heard footsteps behind him and turning his head saw the silhouette of a lanky figure doing its best to catch up with him.

‘Is that you, T . . . Ted?’ the pursuer asked.

‘Yes, it’s me,’ Taylor replied, and slowed down to allow Harry Atherton, known since their days at infants’ school as Ha-Ha-Harry, to draw level.

‘How’s your M . . . Mary?’ Atherton asked.

‘The size of a house. But she’s as pale as anything, and not eating enough to keep a sparrow alive,’ Taylor told him.

‘The b . . . baby’s due soon, isn’t it?’

‘Soon enough. Some time next week.’

The two men continued to climb the bridge.

To their left was Worrell’s Salt Works. Ted Taylor remembered Len Worrell when he’d been nothing but a boiler-maker. Then Worrell had come up with his invention – a special valve or summat – and, to give him credit, he hadn’t blown the money as some men would have done, but had bought the salt works. Now he was sitting pretty – and good luck to him.

Taylor turned his mind back to his wife. He was worried about her, and there was no point in denying it. Seven kids, he’d given her, and none of them seemed to have caused her anything like as many problems as this one. It wasn’t just that she had no appetite – his Mary who could normally eat a horse. She looked tired all the time, and once or twice, when she’d thought he wasn’t watching her, he’d noticed a twinge of pain flicker briefly across her face.

‘She’ll be all right,’ he said, though he’d never meant to voice his thoughts out loud.

‘You m . . . mean your M . . . Mary?’ Ha-Ha asked.

‘That’s right,’ Taylor agreed. ‘I mean, Ma Fitton’ll be looking after her, and you can’t go wrong with Ma, can you?’

‘M . . . midwife to royalty,’ Ha-Ha said, and both men laughed at the old joke, even though it was no joke to Mrs Fitton who continued to claim, despite the ridicule heaped on her, that she had once assisted in the birth of a German princeling – ‘almost a cousin of the Queen’s.’

At the top of the bridge they paused for a second. Just ahead of them, before the National School, lay the Adelaide Mine, their place of work. They could hear the winding engine clanking as the engineers built up a head of steam. They could see the black smoke, swirling like a malevolent snake, up towards the moon.

‘It’s dark when we go down there, an’ it’ll be dark when we come up again,’ Taylor said.

‘True enough,’ Harry Atherton agreed philosophically.

Mary Taylor had got up early, as usual, to make her husband’s breakfast – a big mug of hot, sweet tea and a piece of bread. She’d watched him spread the bread thickly with lard and wished he’d try that newfangled margarine stuff, which was all the rage now. But Ted was a creature of habit, always had been and always would be, so there was really no point in arguing with him.

She shouldn’t really complain, she thought, as she pushed the hob over the blazing fire. Ted was a bit set in his ways, but then what man in Marston wasn’t? And if it hadn’t been for him, she’d still have been a maid of all work – scrubbing and polishing in someone else’s house till her hands ached, ironing the master’s shirts well after midnight and knowing that she’d have to be up again in a few short hours to light the fires. All that for £10 a year plus her keep!

She looked up at their wedding photograph, which dominated the centre of the mantelpiece. He’d been a good catch, she decided. He had a hard, compact body which many other men would have envied, and even if his forehead was perhaps a little too broad and his chin a little too square, he was almost a handsome man.

Not that Ted had done badly out of the deal either, she thought in fairness to herself. She’d been something of a beauty when she was younger, and even now, though she had a few grey hairs, her chin was as firm as it had ever been. Her breasts had not lost much of their firmness, either, she reflected, and a burning on her cheeks told her that she must be blushing. And her eyes were still as deep green and sparkling as the day she’d married.

Yet she felt tired. Seven children she’d borne Ted. Little Walter had died almost as soon as he’d come into the world, and poor Clara hadn’t lived to see her fourth birthday. But that still left five kids to look after. A real handful. And there was another baby well on the way.

Ted didn’t seem to realize how painful giving birth could be. Nor did he appreciate how dangerous it was.

Just look at Peggy Larkin, Mary told herself.

Strong as a horse Peggy’d been, but two days after her time came they’d been laying her in a hole, with the infant beside her.

And she wasn’t the only one – not by a long chalk.

There was that Mrs Worrell, too. Her husband had plenty of money for fancy doctors, what with running the salt works and all, but that hadn’t saved her, had it? She’d died giving birth to her second child.

‘And this will be my eighth,’ Mary groaned.

The kettle was boiling fiercely and as she bent over to pick it up, Mary felt a stab of pain.

The baby?

It couldn’t be. The head hadn’t even dropped yet.

‘No more after this one,’ she said aloud as she poured the hot water into the teapot.

Mary waddled to the foot of the stairs.

‘The tea’s made,’ she called out. ‘Get up right now, you lot, or you’ll all be late for school and then Mr Hicks will have something to say, won’t he?’

The problem was, she told herself as she returned to the kitchen, she didn’t really feel ready to give birth right then.

If only I’d had time to build me strength up, she thought.

But there never was time, was there? How could she ever expect to get stronger when there was so much work to do? The only rest a woman got was a few days after the baby was born, when the neighbours pitched in and helped a bit. Otherwise, no matter how pregnant you were, there was still the washing to do, the house to be cleaned, the meals to be cooked.

‘I’ve warned you kids,’ she shouted. ‘If I have to come up there and get you out of bed you’ll feel the back of me hand.’

Not that she had the energy to climb the steep, narrow stairs and carry out her threat. It was as much as she could do to struggle across to the kitchen chair and lower herself clumsily onto it.

As the sat there, doing her best to regain her wind, Mary listened to the sound of the children moving around in their bedrooms.

‘Hurry up, Jessie!’ she heard Eunice say loudly.

‘I’m being as quick as I can,’ her younger sister protested.

‘Well make sure you are,’ Eunice told her. ‘It’ll be me what gets in trouble if we’re late – ’cos I’m responsible and you’re not.’

‘Oh, stop being so bossy,’ Jessie said.

Despite her discomfort, Mary caught herself smiling. Eunice had become a little bossy, but that was understandable now she was a monitor and had the education of the smaller pupils in her hands.

A pounding on the stairs told Mary that Jack was on his way down, and a second later he burst into the room, looking as fresh and alive as if he’d been up for hours.

‘Morning, Mam,’ he said as he rushed across the crowded kitchen to the back door.

‘Have you combed your hair?’ Mary asked, looking at the mass of curls which crowned Jack’s head.

‘Yes, Mam,’ Jack replied, shaking his head so that the curls seemed to swirl.

‘Well, it doesn’t look like it to me,’ his mother told him.

Jack grinned guiltily. ‘I’ll just get a bucket of water for me wash,’ he said, and before Mary had time to say any more, he was out of the door and heading for the wash-house.

There were new footsteps on the stairs – slower, more deliberate ones. That would be George. He did everything slowly. Some people said he was a bit slow himself, but Mary knew that wasn’t true. If little George took his time about doing things, it was because he always thought a lot about them first.

The two girls arrived last, Eunice bustling self-importantly, Jessie still looking a little resentful at her sister’s high-handed treatment.

Minutes earlier the kitchen had been a quiet, still place. Now the whole family was there with the exception of Ted – who would already be down the mine – and little Philip, who was sleeping peacefully in his crib in the front room.

A sudden scream told Mary that Philip was far from asleep.

‘Go and see to your brother will you, love,’ Mary said to Eunice.

Her eldest daughter pulled a face.

‘Do I have to, Mam?’ she asked. ‘He’s always whining.’ And then she noticed the look of pain on Mary’s face and her tone changed from irritation to concern as she said, ‘Are you all right, Mam?’

‘Of course I’m all right,’ Mary replied, forcing herself to sound cheerful. ‘I’ve just got a bit of indigestion, that’s all.’

‘I’ve never seen you look like that with indigestion,’ Eunice said worriedly.

‘Well, that’s all it is,’ her mother insisted. ‘Now go and see to our Philip. You know he won’t quieten down until somebody’s had a word with him.’

As Eunice turned to go and comfort her brother, Mary felt another spasm of pain. Eunice was right, she thought. This was a lot worse than even the most painful indigestion. But it couldn’t be the baby, she told herself. The head hadn’t dropped yet, and the baby couldn’t possibly be coming if its head hadn’t dropped.

‘I allus feel like a p . . . pile of bloody washing in this thing,’ Harry Atherton complained.

Ted Taylor laughed. The tub they were standing in did look a bit like the one Mary did the family’s wash in every Monday. But Mary’s tub stayed firmly on the ground, while this was being lowered, slowly but surely, down a shaft which was a hundred and twenty yards deep.

The tub touched the floor and the men climbed out. They were in a large cavern. The anteroom of the mine, one of the gaffers had called it – whatever that meant. The ceiling was sixteen feet high and supported by pillars of rock salt thirty feet in diameter. The pillars hadn’t been put there, at least not by man. Rather, they had been carved out, allowed to remain standing when all the salt around them had been blasted away and shipped out.

Taylor looked around the cavern. He’d been told by his father that when the Tsar of Russia had visited Marston just after the turn of the century, owners of the mine had held a ball for him on this very spot, complete with orchestra and sumptuous banquet. And probably it had looked very attractive, Taylor thought. What with the candles shining on the browny-silver rock salt crystals, it must have been a bit like holding a dance in the middle of a diamond. Aye, but if the Tsar had had to work the salt, day after day, it would soon have lost its appeal.

‘Ready, Ted?’ Harry Atherton asked, as he did at the start of every working morning, and Taylor, as he did every working morning, replied, ‘In a minute. I’ll just have a word with me mates first.’

He walked over to a fenced-off area which was strewn with straw.

‘How you doin’, Beauty?’ he asked the nearest animal, a jet-black pit-pony with a white star over its eyes.

The pony ambled over to him, an expectant look in its eyes.

‘Didn’t manage to get anything for you today,’ Taylor told the pony.

Beauty snorted in disbelief.

‘One of these fine days my missis’ll catch me doing this,’ Taylor said, reaching into his pocket for the twist of paper he’d put there earlier, ‘and then we’ll both be in trouble.’

The pony whinnied as if to say that it was sure he was far too clever to get caught. Taylor opened the twist and poured some sugar onto his hand. Beauty quickly licked it clean, then raised her head and gazed hopefully at him.

‘Don’t be greedy,’ Taylor admonished. ‘There’s others want their share.’

He had a few words – and a little sugar – for all the ponies.

‘How are you today, Snowdrop?’ he said to an almost pure white animal.

‘We’re bursting to get to work, aren’t we, Hercules?’ he said to a dappled grey, and when the animal shook his mane as if in agreement, Taylor added, ‘We’re bloody liars – the pair of us.’

Though he could not see Harry Atherton, Taylor could feel the other man’s impatience. Well, that was only natural. Atherton was a ferrier, one of the blokes whose job it was to fill the pit-ponies’ trundles with rock salt, and he couldn’t do that until his mate Ted Taylor – who was what was known as a rock getter – had drilled or blasted the crystals from the salt face.

‘Ted . . .’ Harry said tentatively.

‘I know, I know,’ Taylor replied. ‘I’ve never met a feller as keen to get to work as you are.’

‘We are p . . . paid by the t . . . ton,’ Ha-Ha pointed out. ‘And I’d have thought that with a new n . . . nipper on the way, you could use all the money you could make.’

A new nipper! Soothed by his time with the ponies, Taylor had temporarily managed to put his wife’s condition to the back of his mind, but Ha-Ha’s words brought all his worries flooding back.

She’s got to be all right, he told himself desperately. If she’s not all right, I don’t know what I’ll do.

Len Worrell eased his cut-throat razor over his cheeks, scraping away the foam and revealing the face beneath – large hard eyes, big autocratic nose, a wide mouth which in anger could set as tight as a drum.

He was getting fat, he told himself. Well, not exactly fat – but he could certainly do with losing a bit of weight. And had his cheeks always been so red, or was that something new, too?

In the old days he’d been leaner and harder, he thought. Back then, when he was a boiler-maker, he could have taken anybody on – and often did. Then he’d come up with the idea for his pressure valve. It was a good idea, and they were sure they could find a use for it, his employers had told him as they’d encouraged him to sign his rights away for a few hundred quid. It had been a good idea all right. Thousands it had made for them – thousands!

Still, that had been the last time anybody had ever taken him for a ride, he reflected as he wiped away the remaining soap. Ever since he’d bought the run-down salt works, he’d made damn sure that nobody – nobody – got one over him.

Having finished his toilet, he rang the bell to summon his valet.

His valet!

Who would ever have imagined that Len Worrell would have servants waiting on him hand and foot? He’d had no idea how to handle them at first, but Caroline, in her clever, unobtrusive way, had slowly steered him in the right direction.

It had turned out to be a surprising marriage, he thought as his valet helped him on with his jacket. He’d married Caroline because he was ambitious, because her family, though technically ‘in trade’, were a considerable cut above his. He’d married her for the sake of the children he hoped she would bear him – for the dynasty he wished to establish.

Love had never been part of his plan, yet love had come unbidden, and when she’d died – giving birth to their second son, Michael – it had hurt him more than he’d ever imagined possible. Now his sons – and his hopes for them – were all he had left. Caroline had given up her life for his dynasty, and whatever else happened he would see to it that her death hadn’t been in vain.

When Worrell entered the breakfast room his sons were already seated but jumped to their feet the second they noticed his arrival.

‘Good morning, Father,’ said Richard, the elder one.

‘Good morning, Father,’ echoed Michael.

Father! Worrell relished the sound. ‘Dad’ was what he’d called his old man – it would have been unthinkable to call Ebenezer Worrell anything else – but his own children were different. Richard and Michael didn’t have to rough it as he had – they had a governess and when they were old enough they would attend one of them expensive public schools. Richard and Michael would grow up to be gentlemen.

Worrell helped himself to some food from the buffet – kidneys, sausage, scrambled egg with salmon – and sat down facing his sons. As he tucked into his food with the enthusiasm of one who knows what it’s like to have gone hungry, he thought about how different his sons were from each other.

Richard, now aged eight, had inherited his father’s rugged handsomeness. Michael, just past his sixth birthday, owed much more to the mother he had never known. He wasn’t effeminate – far from it – yet looking at him now Worrell could discern a delicacy in his appearance that definitely didn’t belong to his side of the family.

And it was not only in their looks that they differed, Worrell reflected. In almost everything they did they were poles apart. Take eating, for example. Richard loved kidneys, but rather than start on them he had pushed them to the side of his plate. As he ate the rest of his food, his eyes never left them, and it was kidneys – not bacon or egg – he was tasting. But Worrell knew that when his elder son did finally come to the kidneys, he would find them a disappointment – just as he found most things in life a disappointment once he had attained them.

Michael, on the other hand, worked his way through his breakfast as though he regarded food as nothing more than fuel – or as though he were eating it only to please his father.

Yet Worrell did not find it easy to be pleased by his younger son. Michael tried too hard to be amenable, as if his whole life were dedicated to proving his own worth. How much easier it would have been to take to him if he had been more like his brother – charming, witty, easygoing.

‘May I be excused, Father?’ Michael asked.

Worrell glanced at his son, and saw in the boy’s face a look which reminded him so much of his dead wife – a wife who would still be alive but for Michael.

‘No, you may not be excused,’ he said harshly.

At ten o’clock Mary Taylor told herself that she’d feel better after she’d had a little sit-down. When eleven struck, and the pains were worse than ever, she was finally forced to admit that even though it shouldn’t be, the baby was definitely on the way.

Grabbing the edge of the kitchen table for support, she pulled herself to her feet. Standing was agony, and for a second she was tempted to sit down again. But she knew if she did that she would never get up again – and then both she and the baby were as good as dead.

She staggered over to the fireplace. Gritting her teeth, she bent down and picked up the poker. The thing seemed to weigh a ton, she thought, as she made her way groggily across the room to the wall which divided her home from the next-door neighbours’.

Lifting the poker was a tremendous effort for Mary, and as she struck the wall several sharp blows with it, she felt as if her stomach was on fire.

The poker fell from her hands, and she knew that even if they had not heard her next door she did not have the strength to pick it up again.

When Clara Gibbons answered the urgent summons on her wall, she found Mary Taylor back in her seat and looking as pale as a corpse.

‘Is it the baby?’ she asked.

‘I think it has to be,’ Mary admitted.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ Clara asked worriedly.

Mary shook her head. She was a nice girl, Clara Gibbons, but that’s all she was – a girl, with no experience of having children.

‘Just get me Ma Fitton,’ Mary gasped. ‘Everything’ll be all right if you just get me Ma Fitton.’

Nellie Fitton was sitting in the best room of the Sportsman’s, one of Northwich’s busiest pubs. She’d only meant to call in for a quick drink after picking up the lace she’d ordered, but then she’d met this very nice young woman who seemed very interested in her life in midwifery, so naturally she’d stayed a little longer.

‘You were going to tell me about your princess,’ the young woman said.

‘I was in service at the time,’ Ma Fitton told her. ‘Sir Robert Aspbry, I was working for. Well, this lady – I didn’t know she was a princess at the time – came to stay for a few days, incognito, as they say. She thought she wasn’t due for a week or two, but I could see different. Well, when she started getting her pains, they all fell into a panic. There they were, in this big country house, miles from the nearest doctor, and they didn’t know what to do. “You leave it up to me,” I told Sir Robert. “I helped deliver three of me brothers and this one, for all that’s it going to be royalty, shouldn’t be no different.”’

‘Was it a difficult birth?’ the young woman asked.

Ma shrugged. ‘I’ve known worse,’ she said. ‘But then, when you’ve delivered half a village, like I have, you seen just about everything there is to see as far as babies are concerned.’

‘And when’s the next one due?’

‘Some time next week. A lass called Mary Taylor.’

‘Well if it’s not until next week, you might as well have another milk stout, mightn’t you?’ the young woman said jokingly as she opened her purse.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Ma Fitton said.

Clara Gibbons had made up the bed in the front parlour and helped Mary Taylor into it – but that was about as much as she could do.

‘I need Ma Fitton,’ Mary groaned. ‘I’ve got to have Ma Fitton.’

‘Stop worrying,’ Clara said reassuringly. ‘Everybody’s keeping an eye out for her, and if she’s anywhere in the village she should soon find out she’s wanted.’

Jack, her eldest, had been a difficult birth, Mary thought, but after him it got easier and easier, and she’d hardly noticed she was having Philip. But even the pain of having Jack had been nothing like this – nothing at all.

She was going to die! She knew she was going to die! But what about the child she was carrying?

‘Where the hell are you, Ma?’ she screamed. ‘Come and save my baby!’

Ted Taylor looked at his pocket watch in the light of his helmet lantern. Six o’clock. Another day over, another bloody long shift completed. The tub arrived and he and the other men stepped inside. Overhead, the steam engine hissed, the machinery groaned and the tub began to rise.

‘How come it always seems to take about twice as long to haul us out of the bloody mine as it does to lower us in?’ Taylor asked grumpily.

‘You’re in a b . . . bad mood tonight,’ Harry Atherton said.

Yes, he was – and not without cause. When the basins had been lowered down the shaft at twelve o’clock his had not been among them. Which meant that instead of tucking into the food his wife had cooked for him that morning, he’d had to scrounge – a bit here and a bit there – from the other workers.

The tub reached the winding shed. Taylor stepped out and looked up through the skylight at the stars.

‘When a man’s down the mine for fourteen hours, he’s entitled to a decent meal in the middle of the day,’ he said.

Mary, who knew how much he needed a good hot dinner when he was working down the pit, would never have forgotten to prepare it. So the fault must lie elsewhere – with whichever of his kids had been given the job of delivering his basin. Yet he couldn’t really believe that, either. Eunice had always been a very responsible girl, and hadn’t put a foot wrong since she’d become a school monitor. You could always rely on Jessie, too. And as for Jack – well, he might be a bit wild, but he’d never see his old dad go hungry. And little George, for all that he was only five, was the most serious of the lot of them. Still, it had to be one of his children who was at fault, and when he found out which one, the young bugger would feel his belt.

Most nights Ted would walk home with Harry, but tonight he didn’t feel like it, and before Ha-Ha had a chance to fall in step with him he was striding off towards the bridge over the canal.

By the time he reached Worrell’s Salt Works the men were already knocking off, and the evaporation pans, which had been bubbling and steaming all day, lay still and empty.

It’s a good business Len Worrell’s got himself, Taylor thought.

But he did not envy Worrell his wealth. What was the good of money, after all, when you had no one to share it with?

The rest of the family would already be home, including the one who had failed to deliver his basin. The offender would have to be punished – spare the rod and spoil the child. But Taylor was not really looking forward to it, and so instead of heading straight for his own kitchen as he normally would, he found himself being pulled towards the light shining from the bar of the New Inn.

On the doorstep of the pub he stopped and checked through his pockets to make sure that he had enough coppers on him. A pint now would mean no pint later – he knew that – but there were times when a man really felt like a drink. Pocketing his change again, he pushed open the pub door.

The room which he entered was so familiar to him that only if it had been changed around would he really have noticed it at all. But there had been no changes: the leather settle still ran around the sides of the wall; the round tables, with their wooden tops and cast-iron legs, stood where they had always done; the oak bar counter, set against the far wall, continued to dominate the whole place.

Taylor looked around him. The bar was empty, but through the hatch to the best room he could hear a strident female voice which told him that ‘Not-Stopping’ Bracegirdle was holding court.

‘How are you tonight, Paddy?’ he asked the man behind the bar.

‘Fine,’ Paddy O’Leary replied as he automatically reached for a glass to pull Taylor’s pint. ‘And how’s yourself, Edward?’

Taylor strode over to the counter, placed one foot on the brass rail and rested his elbow comfortably on the oak top.

‘I mustn’t grumble,’ he said, although he’d been doing little else – in his head, at least – since his basin had failed to turn up.

Still, things were looking up at last. Taylor picked up his pint and took a measured sip. That was better.

Elsie Bracegirdle had earned her nickname of Not-Stopping by her habit of following her announcement that she was ‘not stopping’ with at least half an hour’s juicy gossip. She was not a natural beauty. She had a large nose and that, plus the fact she kept her black hair in a tight bun, made her a little like a crow. And she was crowing now, over yet another domestic tragedy she claimed to have predicted with accuracy.

‘I warned Jennie Becket right from the start,’ she told her listeners. ‘I said, “He’s bought that animal as a fighting dog. You can tell just by looking at it. And where there’s fighting, there’s betting.” And was I right? I was!’

‘Any news on poor Mary Taylor?’ asked Dottie Curzon, obviously bored with the subject of dogs.

‘You might well ask,’ Not-Stopping replied. ‘She sent for Nellie Fitton this morning. Well, they couldn’t find her, could they. She was out boozing in Northwich. And all the time, Mary Taylor’s lying there and . . .’

‘Are you talking about my missis?’ asked an urgent voice from the bar.

Not-Stopping