In spite of his weekly lickings Abner’s life was generally happy. He had no cares for the future. He knew that when his schooling was over he would be sent to work at the pit. He wouldn’t be sorry for that, for it seemed to him quite natural to work underground, to earn big money and spend it freely. When that day came he felt that he and his father would be able to drink together on equal terms. By the time that he was fourteen he was already taller than John Fellows, and meant to grow a lot taller still. He was going to be strong and to learn boxing: perhaps, in a few years’ time, he would be able to strip and fight in one of the boxing-booths at the wakes: perhaps, in stripes of chocolate and yellow, he might even play football for Mawne United and talk like a brother with the great George Harper. In this manly, indefinite future, women had no place. He had never had a sister; as far as he remembered he had never had a mother; and so he followed the example of his father whose domineering attitude towards the widow, Mrs Moseley, was beyond any doubt correct, while Mrs Moseley, who had her living to make, accepted it without protest, as a woman should do. Towards girls themselves Abner felt no positive hostility, though he passed them in the street as a well-mannered dog passes cats, with a solid appreciation of their potential evil; but for members of his own sex who dallied with emasculating tendernesses he and the boys with whom he played were full of scorn and even of active malice. The worst libel that any of his companions could suffer was a chalk inscription on his own back door of the words: ‘Tommy So-and-so goes with Cissy Something-else.’