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send them all packing back to the orphanage and get some replacements who would do a decent hand’s turn instead of fooling about and wasting the company’s time and good money!
    But by then of course they knew the value of Mrs Whitley’s warnings and had the measure of how far they could go with her and though they stood still and cast down their eyes, suitably reprimanded, when she was done and had gone indoors with a last admonishing wag of her finger they would giggle and jostle one another just as children everywhere will when left unattended.
    Meg had left school when she was twelve years old, bright as a polished russet apple, Mr Lloyd said, pleased that his impulsive gesture of two years ago had turned out so well. She could add a column of figures in her head quicker than any of the other servants could write them down and was a big help to Mrs Whitley whose eyesight was not as good as once it had been in the preparing of the weekly accounts for his inspection. She wrote a good bold hand and was shrewd in her dealings with the local tradesmen.
    The boys laboured just as hard, doing, as Meg did, the work of full grown adults. Polishing windows, cleaning the marble tops of the dressers and fireplaces with soda, pumice stone and finely powdered chalk, hauling carpets upstairs and down, whitewashing the walls of the outside privy and laundry. They cleaned and sharpened cutlery, attended to boxes and bellows, cauldrons, cisterns, funnels, flues, hand-mills and oil jars. They polished lamps, copper pans, brassware and plate and, as they grew and became more responsible began to help Mr Lloyd with the actual emigrants who lodged at the house. It was arduous work but the three children were fed on Mrs Whitley’s hot-pots and ‘scouse’, on her steak and kidney pies, on fruit tarts in season with custards, eggs, milk and roly-poly jam puddings and they grew like weeds, upwards and outwards. Their eyes were bright and lively and so were they, shining with good health for hard work harms no-one. Their skins glowed and their hair was glossy and their limbs were straight and strong. Beseeched by Mrs Whitley to taste her delicious tripe and onions, her cowheel and pigs’ trotters and currant dumpling the three of them grew six inches in as many months and the boys thin frames began to fill out and put on muscle, particularly Martin who would be a big man when he was full grown. At thirteen the boys were five feet four inches tall and a year later a little under six feet, the two of them! Their voices deepened and broke as they came to that stage of awkward vulnerability in which they developed the inclination to fall over their own feet as they passed into graceless adolescence. Meg, two years younger, would laugh at them, teasing until Martin turned on her pulling the thick plait of her hair until her eyes watered and Tom would patiently separate them though he himself felt like giving their Meg a clip round the earhole at times! He was very conscious of his own fourteen-year-old shortcomings as he approached young manhood and the lively child and her tormenting was more than his growing pains could sometimes endure.
    He and Martin bickered over who was to run to the ‘Fiddlers Arms’ for Mrs Whitley’s nightly jug of stout until she threatened to knock their heads together and they could scarcely understand their own snarling hatred of one another which seemed to alternate with their usual careless affection. They would pummel one another ferociously, only to go off arm in arm moments later, one nursing the bloody nose the other had given him and their young minds and bodies, growing and maturing were uncertain of which state they were in between boy and man.
    The house was part of a chain linking the old world from which the emigrants came to the ‘New World’ across the great Atlantic Ocean. Most who sailed with Hemingway’s came from Scandinavia, gathering in Gothenburg in Sweden from where they went by steamer to