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than necessary harshness.
    Burton was a tyrant but, as with all tyrants, the girls at least found ways of deceiving him. If one wanted to go out late in the evening to see a boy-friend she would throw her coat from the back bedroom window, then nip down through the front door as if on her way to the lavatory across the yard, treading quietly so that Burton, already in bed, would hear nothing. It was risky getting back into the house at midnight or after, but one of the other girls would respond to gravel at the window and open the door if it had been locked in the meantime.
    When Burton sent one of his daughters to buy fried fish for his supper she didn’t return till eleven o’clock—having spent an hour with her boy-friend. Because she was so late he guessed what she had been up to, and in fact had only sent her out in order to confirm his suspicions. He gave her a good hiding and made sure she didn’t go free at night for a few weeks—though her coat went flying from the back window several times before the ban was lifted. There were some uses, after all, in having a lavatory set apart from the house.
    His daughters were ill-treated because he expected them to follow the same pattern he had forced on his wife, and he didn’t know that times were changing. They fared badly because they rebelled, and they rebelled against Burton because the mother had not, and they saw where it had got her. By the time they reached twenty they had had enough of him, and they had enough of him in them not to put up with him a minute longer than they had to.
    When Ivy came home one night at half past eleven Burton berated her for being the last in. ‘Well,’ she shouted back, ‘somebody’s got to be last in, ain’t they?’ He gave her a vicious clout across the face and didn’t speak to her for five years. The only recognition of her existence was that he would sometimes spit in her direction. She was thirty years old at the time.
    Burton worked at Wollaton Pit after the Great War and occasionally at the end of the day he would send word to his wife, by one of the colliers who passed Engine Town on his way home, that he would be working till three in the morning. Mary-Ann therefore made up some food and got one of the girls to take it. Whoever this job fell to would walk the two miles along lonely Wollaton Road and, afraid of being jumped on from the dark, she would carry a bag of pepper to throw in the face of any man who might try to molest her. When she got to the pit Burton looked at her with surprise and irritation. ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’
    â€˜I’ve brought you some supper.’
    He gave a grunt and said: ‘You needn’t have bothered.’
    And she walked back with his sour greeting rankling so much that she didn’t think once about the paper bag clutched in her hand. When she did, while opening the gate latch at home, it was only to wonder why she hadn’t thrown it in his face for talking to her like that.
    His three sons, who also became qualified farriers, did no better, in that Burton demanded the same standards from them that he had lived by himself, though setting them for his sons was one way of not having to follow them as thoroughly as others were expected to, since they were doing it for him. They had to saw logs on the horse by the pigsty and chop them into sticks, fetch buckets of water with a yoke from the well up the slope behind the garden 300 yards away, as well as feed the pigs and clean out the sty. They didn’t take well to this, though the only form of rebellion open to them was a stubborn idleness when orders fell too thick and fast.
    On Sunday morning the brass candlesticks and ornaments were lifted from the fireplace shelf and, together with the horseshoes that were unhooked from inside the cabinet, spread over the table to be polished by Burton’s two daughters still with the family. Cleaning the brasses