The Most Precious Thing by Rita Bradshaw

mother had enjoyed putting the knife in more than once, and had done nothing but glare her rage all day.
     
    ‘Chin up, lass.’
     
    David’s voice was low, and when he took her arm, linking it in his, Carrie forced herself not to flinch away. She had tried, she’d really tried to rid herself of the churning sensation she experienced every time he touched her, but still it remained. Even a pat on the hand from a male other than her da made her flesh creep. She was going doolally. She made herself look up and meet David’s eyes, smiling at him. At this rate she’d be fit for nothing but the company of the other loonies up at the asylum.
     
    ‘Another half an hour or so and we can go, then you can put your feet up. How are you feeling now?’ he asked softly.
     
    ‘All right.’ It was a lie. The nausea which now often claimed her every waking moment hadn’t let up all day, and she hadn’t dared to try and eat anything. Far from gaining weight she had lost a couple of pounds every week since the middle of January, but the effort of trying to hide how she felt from everyone outside the house was the worst thing. She had been counting the hours to this day for the last week, deeply thankful for the unwritten rule which said a married woman should not work outside the home. That Renee had guessed how she felt and the reason for it was apparent in the fact that her sister had not tried to dissuade her from giving in her notice at work, even though since her marriage Renee was becoming more fervent by the day in support of equality for women both at work and at home.
     
    It was another hour before Carrie left the house she had called home for the last sixteen years. She was feeling so ill and tired that the walk through the icy streets, banked high with frozen snow and lethal beneath the feet, would have been beyond her but for David’s arm round her waist.
     
    By the time they had walked the length of Southwick Road and turned into Black Road, which was near the pit head, she was light-headed, and David was cursing the fact that she hadn’t eaten anything. They were renting a room in Brooke Street, one of the roads in the area known locally as ‘Back of the Pit’, which indeed it was, as the thick black grime clinging to every building testified.
     
    After passing colliery square, a collection of miners’ cottages on the east side of the road, they crossed over Wreath Quay Road where the wind blew enough to cut you in half, and into Hay Street before turning into Brooke Street some moments later. The Back of the Pit was a community within a community, cut off from the rest of Monkwearmouth by the train station and North Bridge Street. It consisted of some of the most smoke-blackened dwellings in Sunderland, along with many small factories that all added their quota of stench to the sooty air.
     
    Their new home was one room on the ground floor of a two-up, two-down terrace in the middle of the dreary street. Several of the houses shared a backyard which contained two dry privies, one washhouse with a coal-fired boiler and the communal tap. This supplied all the water for the households and the many families they contained. It was a world away from James Armitage Street.
     
    In the days since they had settled on their lodgings, Carrie had been doggedly repeating to herself that they were lucky to have found somewhere with a downstairs room vacant. It would save having to lug buckets of water from the yard up the stairs, and the small range in the room had been an added bonus. The two rooms they had viewed before this one had both been on the first floor of each house, and both had had only a small fireplace with a bar across it for resting one pan on.
     
    They entered the dark narrow hall and Carrie watched David open their door with the key their landlady - a large, plump, bustling type who lived in the other downstairs room with her three cats - had given them, and for a moment, having stepped inside,