Kate’s hours would have been the same: rising at dawn or in early darkness, home for supper, and then to sleep, in a bed shared with her cousin Mary, in a room divided by a curtain from the snores of John, or Kate’s uncle and aunt. It did not matter where she fled—to Wolverhampton or Birmingham, to the household of a pugilist or a tinplate worker. She could expect that this routine would command her life until she married. Then it would be her own mother’s life; the pain of childbearing, the weariness of child rearing, worry, hunger and exhaustion, and eventually, sickness and death.
