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against his expectation of an inheritance from an aunt, a wealthy woman then living in Morpeth. Now that he was dead, the anticipated inheritance would never be paid, and his creditors were already demanding full repayment of both capital and interest. My mother’s inheritance had already been spent in a last-minute attempt to save the electric light company. What was left of it was tied to my father’s estate through some legal misjudgment. Unless someone came to our rescue, we were ruined.
    My mother traveled at once to Morpeth, where my father’s aunt, the widowed Mrs. Ayrton, refused her admittance. I remember her returning that evening, distraught and soaking. It had been raining heavily, and there had not been money for a covered trap. There were cousins who lived at Barras Hall, a large house in the wilds of Northumberland, near Elsdon. They were a brother and sister, the children of the Ayrtons. My mother wrote to them, but they did not answer, not even a single line, not even a word of consolation on my father’s death.
    In growing desperation, she applied to other relatives, and then to friends. Most did not bother to reply. Those that did prefaced their letters with the obligatory phrase “I regret.” Our house and furniture were sold, but any profit occasioned by the sale was quickly eaten up by debts and legal expenses. Over a period of months, we moved from humbler to yet humbler quarters. My mother’s health, already delicate, suffered exceedingly. I watched her turn gray; not only her hair, but her skin.
    In November of 1899, we presented ourselves at the gate of the workhouse, in my mother’s former parish of Chester-le-Street. There was a bell above the porter’s lodge. I can still remember the sound of it, jangling in the cold air. We stood outside for a long time, shivering, before the porter opened the narrow gate and let us in. The coldest of welcomes. And the harshest of separations. They took Arthur away from us, to the men’s wing. They had rules, rules to which they made no exception, though my mother cried fit to burst her heart.

CHAPTER 4
    Those first days in the workhouse broke my heart. Were it not for what happened later, I would say they were the worst days of my life. Even now I am taken back to them in dreams and awake to find my pillow wet with tears. An old woman weeping a child’s tears. And yet, why not? We all carry the child in us to the grave. And beyond.
    A sharp-nosed, sharp-tongued woman whom I soon came to know by the name of Mrs. Moss led my mother and me to a cold, tiled room where we were bustled into cubicles and told to strip. The clothes we had come in—poor enough rags by then—were searched, labeled, and stored away in a tin chest.
    My mother had held on to a few scraps from our past, bits and pieces she had bundled into a cheap cloth bag. There were photographs, a lock of my father’s hair, the wedding ring she had refused, against all promptings, to sell or pawn, a Bible given to her by her mother, a handful of letters tied with ribbon, letters my father had written to her and that she would never let me read, some dried flowers, a locket with my father’s photograph inside. All were snatched from her and piled inside the chest.
    Years later, when I came to retrieve our belongings from that chest, the ring and locket both had gone. Mrs. Moss had broken the law in the first place by admitting to the workhouse a pair with such treasures to sell. The very possession of such items meant that we had not yet been dragged down to that very lowest level of poverty, that state of utter indigence that the Poor Law commissioners had decreed to be the necessary condition of any admitted to the palatial comforts of the workhouse.
    Our former lives were stripped from us forever, at a single stroke, as though they had never been. I had brought a small rag doll with me, whom I had named Annabel, and who had been my constant companion from an early age. In spite of my loud