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and a bit of that. Put in a new row of lettuces, went out with Bill and did a bit of painting on some old biddy’s house, had a few beers in the pub after lunch.’
    Allie nodded. Bill was a mate of her father’s, also an exwatersider, but unlike Sid, Bill had done something about his unemployed status and set himself up in the house-painting business. He gave Sid as much work as he could, which amounted to about four half-days a week, but it wasn’t quite enough to pay the bills. Which was why Allie’s mother also went out to work from nine until two, four days a week, behind the counter at a tearoom near the beach at Mission Bay. Allie’s board helped, and she gave her mother extra money whenever she could, but they sometimes only just managed to pay the rent, her father’s battered Morris 8 had been parked outside the house for the past six months because there was no money to fix it, Allie’s younger sisters were continually demanding new clothes, and Colleen would kill for one of the new electric washing machines she’d seen at Farmers, instead of the copper she laboured over twice a week.
    They’d moved into the state house in Coates Avenue three years ago, and it was much more comfortable than the old place but they didn’t own it, which quietly irked Colleen. Her dream was that she and Sid would have their own home before they retired—though it seemed that Sid had almost reached that point. Colleen hadn’t wanted to move into a state house at first, believing it would be nothing more than a glorified railwayman’s cottage—poky, in a row that were all the same—but she’d changed her mind after she’d been to see one. They’d put their names down straight away but had had to wait for over a year. Theirs was red brick with three bedrooms with built-in wardrobes, a separate lounge, a proper bathroom, a washhouse and a toilet off the back porch, and its own semi-underground bomb shelter that a previous tenant had built on the long back lawn.
    And then the lockout had happened, and for five very unpleasant months there had been no money at all and they’d had to live on handouts. When it finally ended, Sid, as a militant and now deregistered watersider, found himself unofficially barred from the waterfront, and any other industry run by ‘those fascist bastards’, the National Government. Then one afternoon, coming home from the pub, he’d been hit by a car and badly hurt, and couldn’t even walk for six months, never mind work, so when Allie got a job after she left school and then Colleen had found work as well everyone had been very pleased. Colleen had high hopes for her daughters, and Allie being taken on at Dunbar & Jones was a very good start because everyone knew that their salesgirls were a cut above the rest.
    Allie sipped her own tea, noticing how quiet the house was. ‘Where’re Pauline and Donna?’
    ‘In the bomb shelter, I think,’ Colleen replied, reaching into one of the kitchen cupboards and sorting through a bag of potatoes for some that hadn’t sprouted. ‘Your nan’s coming for tea tonight.’
    ‘Is she?’ Allie was pleased; she was very fond of her grandmother—unlike her father. ‘That’ll be nice, won’t it, Dad?’
    Sid grunted behind his paper and muttered, ‘Bloody harridan.’
    Allie laughed. ‘What’ll it be tonight, do you think? No job, no money or no car?’
    Her father turned a page and pretended he’d gone deaf.
    ‘No job, probably,’ Colleen said. ‘It was no money last week.’
    It was no secret that Rose Murphy had never been keen on her son-in-law, and when he’d lost his job it had only proved what she’d been saying for years—even before he’d had his accident and regardless of his impressive war service—that he was good for nothing and certainly not equipped to take care of either her daughter or her granddaughters. When Colleen had come home twenty years ago at the age of nineteen and told her mother she was in trouble, Rose had