Later in the morning mother found me and put her hand on my shoulder gently. “Come on, our Susan,” she said quietly, “If you are to go to Birmingham with your father you had better have a dress we shan’t be ashamed of. We can take the train to Wolverhampton after lunch.”
No train ran on wheels that day which could go half fast enough to get me to Wolverhampton! The slag-heaps and pit headgears floated past in a miasma of expectation, while my mother sat in the opposite corner from me, fine in her red-green Paisley shawl, smiling at my obvious delight, telling me to be patient, asking me whether I would choose a self-coloured dress or something gay like a Balmoral tartan! But I had no words for my dream-dress—it would be a dress, a wonderful one, of course, but one which was so idealised a
