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some word of comfort and a couple of coins to some man who had lost his job. I thought them mad to do it. We had been kind enough to our neighbours, back in Whitstable; but the kindness had had limits to it - Mother had never had time for feckless wives, or idlers, or drunkards. Florence and Ralph, however, helped everybody, even - or, it seemed to me, especially - those layabout fathers, those slatternly mothers, whom all the rest of Bethnal Green had taken against. Now, hearing Florence''s plans to visit the family that had the bailiffs coming, I grew sour. ''You''re a regular pair of saints, you two,'' I said, filling a bowl with soapy water. ''You never have a minute for yourselves. You have a pretty house - now that I am here to make it so - and not one moment to enjoy it. You earn a decent wage, between you, and yet you give it all away!''
''If I wanted to close my doors to my neighbours and gaze all night at my pretty walls,'' she replied, still passing a hand across her bleary features, ''I would move to Hampstead! I have lived in this house all my life; there''s not a family in this street who didn''t help Mother out, at one time or another, when we were kids and things were rather hard. You''re right: we do draw a fair wage between us, Ralph and me; but do you think I could enjoy my thirty shillings, knowing that Mrs Monks next door must live, with all her girls, on ten? That Mrs Kenny across the street, whose husband is sick, must make do with the three shillings she gets making paper flowers, sitting up all night and squinting at the wretched things until she is gone half-blind