The squeeze got tighter every month.

Greenfields started charging me for “wastage”. If one of their stores didn't sell my pasties before the sell-by date and threw them away, they took the cost out of my payments. Even when the store had ordered far too many.

They charged me for “shelf placement”. For “promotion support”. For a Christmas leaflet I never saw.

Then came another phone call.

“Twenty per cent, Ellie. Another twenty off. The market's tough.”

“Martin, I'm already selling at a loss. If I cut another twenty per cent, I'm paying you to take my pasties.”

“Then find savings. Use cheaper beef. Lose some staff.”

“I'm not using cheap beef in my grandmother's recipe.”

There was a pause on the line.

“Then I can't promise you'll stay on our shelves,” said Martin.

I wrote it down. Word for word. And the recording saved itself onto my computer.

That month, I put my house up as security for a bigger bank loan, just to keep paying my forty staff.

My daughter, Jenna, who was nineteen, found me at the kitchen table at midnight, surrounded by bills.

“Mum, why don't you just walk away from them?”

“Because if I walk away,” I said, “forty people lose their jobs. And we lose the house.”