Small Island Read online

  After Mother and Father put me to work any fun I used to have on our farm came to an end. My brothers could still run down to the slaughterhouse and beg the slaughterman for the pig’s bladder. They could still blow it up, kick it like a ball and watch it flop and fall all over the yard. They could jump around in the clouds of white down when the geese were being plucked or run into the fields when the beasts were chased and rounded up for slaughter. They could still hide their eyes as the pigs’ throats were slit, coax the turkeys out of the trees before bedtime or follow the hide-and-skin man round taunting, ‘Beardy, beardy, you’re barmy – can’t you join the army?’

  But I wasn’t a child any more. I was maid-of-all-poultry – scruffy apron, tatty headscarf with a scraper and bucket. While other girls were waving their hair and admiring their Cupid’s-bow mouths in mirrors I took my bucket and scraper round poultry pens. Fat chickens eyed me up as they sat round squawking, pecking at the ground or tap-tap-tapping at wood. Feathers, sawdust and muck. I scraped the droppings boards to get rid of the revolting black and white crust the fowls left. My instructions were to scrape the boards clean, sprinkle them with sawdust, and change the water in the pens. And while other girls read love stories and dreamed of having a best boy, I had to find eggs – perfect, delicate, oval white forms sitting in the middle of all that filth.

  The fertile eggs I hatched into fluffy yellow chicks. They arrived all shaky and curious into the incubator light, then their first faltering steps would drop them down into the under-half. I separated out the little bundles with beaks: the lanky cocks I set to one side to be fattened for Christmas, the females I led off for egg laying, which started the whole process again. I was pleased the year they got fowl pest. It was something different. I had to collect up all the scrawny dead birds with their swollen blind eyes, throw them into a barrow and take them to the boilerhouse for burning. Even though I woke up some mornings to find my eyes stinging and sealed shut with pus and no one to help me find my way to the kitchen so I could bathe them open with warm water, at least with most of the birds dead there were fewer eggs to find, fewer chicks to separate.

  ‘Watch out for them miners, Queenie,’ Father warned me every morning.

  Miners came to the farm gates, bought half a dozen eggs then hatched them. They didn’t pay the extra for a proper sitting of fertile eggs. Eggs to eat were cheaper than eggs for hatching. But I could tell by the way they carried them off. Little kids would be sent for eggs to eat. But grown men and women, carrying a sack with a warm lining, came up our path when robbing us Buxtons of our livelihood. They’d hatch our eating eggs, then keep their own chickens, collect their own eggs in their own backyard and stop calling at our farm gate. But Father soon put a stop to the thieving. He added another job to my list: pricking freshly laid eggs with a darning needle. ‘Let them try hatching those,’ he told me.

  Even though the miners stole our eggs, Father still gave them Sunday meat on strap. Some of them ran up bills that could never be paid. And when the marches and the bad times came, little kids, like the ones I’d been to school with, would come to our back door and ask me if there were any scraps. Skinny, dirty children, with eyes sunken and skin as grey as a February sky as near as begging me for something to eat. I’d have chased them away and did sometimes. ‘Go on, hop it,’ I’d say. And they’d look at me with the same pitiful eyes as when I’d gobbled Mother’s pork pies in our school playground.

  Mother told me, ‘They’re hungry, Queenie, they’re hungry,’ before she found another chore for her maid-of-all-drudgery. I had to make soup. Over the fire with the copper that usually fed the pigs, I had to boil up bones and vegetables. I made soup for unemployed men who shuffled to the door in their dirty collarless shirts. Shivering in the cold, stamping their feet up and down in the yard, blowing hot breath on to their hands. Or waiting with their heads bowed not saying a word. One man ate right there in front of me, spilling fatty juice down his chin. The women that came said, ‘God bless you, lass, and your mother and father.’ But mostly it was children that were sent. Little kids without shoes who carefully carried their full cups and mugs and jugs back up the stony path. When Wilfred, who once wore his dead dad’s boots, turned up he handed me his jug grinning, showing me yellow-stained teeth that pointed in any direction but down. ‘All right, Queenie?’ he said. He then had the cheek to ask me if I wanted to go for a walk with him. Not on your life. Any boy I was going to walk out with would have to court me in a collar and tie, with a freshly scrubbed neck and a wage packet about him.

  I should have been going to dances, larking with men who had Clark Gable hair and whispered in my ear that I was as pretty as an English rose. My legs should have been caressed in silk stockings, a pointed toe and a delicate heel on my shoe as I stepped from a car. I should have trailed lily-of-the-valley scent, my hair waved, my face powdered to porcelain perfection. I should have been a lady. But I was stuck on a stinking farm. Muck. Muck. And every day the same. Until one day Mother said, ‘Queenie, go and fetch Father from the butchering shed.’

  ‘No,’ I said to Mother. ‘Send one of the boys.’ I never went into the shed where Father did his butchering. The shed where the sharpening, slicing, chopping, grunting, slopping noises broke in the air. Not since the big-breasted girl made me cry with tales of the small boys hacked up into pink paste. I kept my eyes shut tight and my ears covered when I was anywhere near the place where Father and the stupid boys went in clean and came out covered in blood. After all, it was no place for a lady.

  But Mother made me go. ‘And don’t shut your eyes or cover your ears,’ she said. ‘You’re old enough to know what goes on. Remember you’re a Buxton.’

  I could hear the noises before I could smell the sweet vinegar of meat and blood. When I opened my eyes I was looking at Father’s back – broad and strong as a wardrobe. And by his side a small boy – but not any small boy, it was my brother Harry. Both of them wore boots, bloody boots, standing in a sludge of sticky gore. On the slab a beast’s head was lolling, mouth open, lonely and dismembered. Feet away, its raw-red skinless carcass was mangled and split with clods of yellowed fat tumbling to the floor. Blue-white splintered bones, almost beautiful, were piled up in a ghastly heap. And there was Father, knife raised like a dagger. He was going to smash Harry. Splice the knife into his head and rip him in two. I screamed. Father turned round suddenly and nearly chopped his hand off. The leather strap saved it – skidding the blade away from the skin and bone. They both stared: Father saying something angry, Harry wide-eyed. It was then that I was sick all over my shoes. And the last I remember is Father rushing towards me with his knife still in his hand.

  ‘Queen B’, that was what Father started calling me. He liked to tell everyone about the day Queen B fainted in the butchering shed at the sight of blood. ‘Soft lass,’ Father said to Mother. ‘How did you raise such a soft lass?’

  After that I became a vegetarian. ‘A what?’ Father thundered at the table, ‘A ruddy what?’ Who’d ever heard of that? A butcher’s girl who won’t eat meat. A blithering turnip head. They did everything to get me to tuck away some bacon, to swallow the chicken’s breast. ‘Pull on the wishbone, Queenie?’ But I wouldn’t. Not even a pork pie when Billy turned it round in the air – the crusty brown pastry, the pink jellied meat.

  ‘Our meat’s not good enough for Queenie B,’ Father roared, nearly every mealtime. He even banged his fist on the table, sending his dinner slap-sliding down the wall. And he whacked me hard around the head the day I tossed an apple core on to the fire. ‘There’s stock out there wants feeding,’ he shouted, as he flicked the smouldering core back on to the hearth.

  And I swear I heard an angel singing a celestial note as I looked up at him and told him, ‘I don’t bloody well care.’

  It was not long after I’d shouted at my dumbstruck father that Aunt Dorothy came to visit. Mother’s posh sister from London, who pronounced her aitches with a panting breath even when there were no aitches to be prono
unced. She had come, she told me, with a whisper and wink, to take me away and better me.

  Twenty-four

  Queenie

  In Herefordshire, Hertfordshire and Hampshire hurricanes hardly ever happen. My elocution teacher said the problem was that my mouth was too quick to stretch into a smile when I spoke. ‘You’ll never get on in polite society like that, Miss Buxton.’ Tulip, dandelion, buttercup – I said them all wrong. Bottle, cup, saucer were not much better. My mouth was too weak, it needed discipline and Mrs Waterfall was the woman to give it.

  ‘You won’t go wrong with her,’ Auntie Dorothy told me. ‘She’ll throw in deportment if she thinks you’re worth it.’ Head up, shoulders back – heel-instep-toe, heel-instep-toe. I had been walking all wrong since I was a baby. No sooner had she shown me how to do it properly than I started stumbling across the room like a cripple.

  ‘How come bath should be said barth but fat is definitely not fart in high society?’ I asked Auntie Dorothy.

  She laughed but cautioned, ‘Just do as she says, it’ll come out all right.’

  ‘And bank’s not barnk and Mansfield not Marnsfield.’

  ‘Oh, Queenie love, just do it. She’ll see you married to a prince.’

  I brought tears to Mrs Waterfall’s eyes when I finally managed to extinguish the candle while breathing out the word ‘what’. ‘Hope,’ she told me then. ‘Miss Buxton, there is at last reason for hope.’

  Auntie Dorothy swore the pink bit on coconut ice tasted different from the white – she knew everything about sophistication. She served coconut ice on a china plate, cut into neat squares, and ate it with a fork. Her feet up on a chair she called a French lounger, with her little poodle Prudence – coiffured into fancy shapes like a posh privet hedge – she delicately stuffed ounce after ounce into her oval mouth as I watched.

  She’d inherited the sweet shop from her late husband Montgomery when he died in the Great War. Not in a battle – he was run over by a tram on his way back to barracks. Auntie Dorothy was still upset about the half-pound of treacle toffee that had mysteriously disappeared from his pocket by the time his dead body reached the hospital. ‘Who could do such a thing, Queenie? Would you credit it? We live among barbarians,’ she said.

  She’d run the shop on her own for years. ‘With Prudence, Queenie. That dog kept everyone in line for me. Didn’t you, my little poppet?’ But to get out of the French lounger for some little boy with a lazy eye and hair flying up like iron filings, wanting a chew that barely cost a ha’penny, began to try Auntie Dorothy’s patience. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Queenie, it knocked baking pork pies day in day out, like my sister, into a cocked hat. But it’s not what Montgomery would have wanted for me. I was his Duchess.’ With no children of her own to help her, this was where I came in. In the big city, Auntie Dorothy had wanted to start calling me Victoria – it had more elegance as a name. I had my own bedroom, my own wardrobe and a dressing-table with three mirrors. If I angled those mirrors just right, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Queenies would appear, all smiling smugly at their good fortune. But not one Victoria was waving at me among that crowd. ‘Don’t worry, love, we’ll stick to Queenie – it’ll do till you’re more genteel.’ Auntie Dorothy loosened her corset the day I came to London to live with her. ‘Oh, Queenie, I’ll make a good catch of you,’ she said, tightening mine.

  Elocution and deportment lessons twice a week – Bourne and Hollingsworth or Selfridges for a new outfit every Saturday afternoon. At first Auntie Dorothy had come with me to Oxford Street, reclining on the shop seat telling the assistants how I took after her side of the family, all Lees being exceptionally graceful. But when the assistants began to scratch their heads trying to find things in her size – moving buttons, taking out seams – she stopped coming. She started pressing money into my hand instead, only bothering to get off the French lounger to put up the closed sign and measure out some more coconut ice.

  I worked in the shop, woken every morning by Prudence attempting to scare off the newspaper delivery with a growl as terrifying as an old man clearing his throat. Men, rushing on their way to work, cast their eyes over my display of papers – neat with all the headlines on show – before choosing which horror they wanted to read about that day. After that it was mostly little kids, two or three coppers sweating their palms green, wanting some liquorice or a quarter of humbugs. As I got the bottles down and shook their favourites into a bag, I was followed round by eyes which, in that moment, loved me better than their mum.

  I noticed him at first because he went for the Mail but then picked up The Times. ‘Is it The Times you want?’ I asked him. And he looked round like I’d just bellowed at him from the stars and blushed as pink as bacon.

  ‘Did you say it right, Queenie?’ Auntie Dorothy asked. ‘Only, men for The Times will want to be spoken to properly.’

  I was ready for him the next time. It was my best breathy voice, which would have plumped Mrs Waterfall proud, that said, ‘We have The Times, if that is what you require?’

  He gulped as loud as a stone down a well before saying, ‘Thank you, I will take The Times.’

  ‘What does he look like?’ Auntie Dorothy wanted to know.

  ‘Tall, skinny, not bad-looking,’ I said.

  She was watching for him the next time.

  He tipped his hat at me as he left, ‘It’s a lovely day today,’ he said.

  That was enough to convince Auntie Dorothy, ‘He has an eye for you, Queenie. I knew it as soon as you said he blushed.’

  A lot of men came into the shop trying to make me blush. ‘Aren’t I sweet enough for you?’ most of them got round to joking. Blowing me kisses and winking. Calling me their sweetheart, or their sugar-baby. Offering to show me how sweet they could be if I went with them to the pictures. Auntie Dorothy just shook her head at those advances. ‘The cheeky ones,’ she told me, ‘will be Cockneys. You’ll want nothing to do with Cockneys, they’re all jellied eels and knees-ups. No, that one’s a gentleman. No spivs or ne’er-do-wells ever read The Times.’

  He started coming in twice a day. Before every one of his visits – The Times in the morning and a half pound of something or other about quarter past five – Auntie Dorothy got off her lounger long enough to see me dressed right. ‘What about that yellow cardigan, Queenie love? You look like an angel in that.’ She’d check my face for newsprint smudges, taking her hankie and spitting on it to wipe my forehead or a bit off my cheek. You’d think I was going on stage the way she winked at me for good luck as she opened the door from the back room into the shop.

  ‘Good morning,’ says he.

  ‘The Times?’ says I.

  ‘Thank you. A lovely day today.’ Or variations like ‘rather cloudy’ or ‘a little inclement for the time of year’. And I’d agree, no matter what his weather forecast. His gaberdine coat was always done up, every button, and the belt too. His shirt collar was always white. And when he lifted his hat, for that brief moment of hello or goodbye, his hair was shiny as liquorice. Auntie Dorothy thought him the nearest thing to a prince she’d seen since the day her late husband Montgomery adoringly looked up at her from one bended knee.

  ‘Has he asked you yet?’ she teased me, like a best chum at school.

  ‘Asked me what?’

  ‘You’ll soon find out.’ And I did.

  A little boy, Sidney, was playing with some tin soldiers on the counter. They were all being executed by Sidney’s firing squad, which was his two straight fingers, a squinting eye and a bang. My job was to flip the dead one over.

  ‘It ain’t ’im I shot. You killed the wrong one.’

  I was just asking Sidney whether his mother wouldn’t be wanting him home for his tea when the man came in. It was neither morning nor quarter past five and he had no gaberdine coat on. Sidney was lining up his victims again.

  ‘It’s time to go home now, Sidney. You can come again tomorrow.’

  ‘I ain’t finished yet.’

  I swept up his bl
inking soldiers into a bag, threw in a piece of aniseed twist and said, ‘Go on, hop it.’

  After the sulking Sidney had slammed the door the man took a step forward. ‘I wonder if you would care to come for a walk with me tomorrow afternoon, in the park – I’ve been assured it’s to be a lovely day.’ Straight out with it like he’d been practising and had to say it in a rush or his tongue would tie. My mouth was just dropping open with the surprise so it wasn’t me who said yes, it was shouted from the back room by Auntie Dorothy.

  ‘Good. I’ll call for you at one.’ And he went to leave but then said, ‘I’m sorry but I don’t believe we’ve ever been introduced. Bernard Bligh.’

  I said, ‘My name’s . . .’ and he smiled for the first time ever when he interrupted with ‘Queenie – yes, I know.’

  We’d been stepping out for about four months – every Thursday early evening, Saturday night and a walk on Sunday if it was nice – when I began to hate the back of his neck. It was bony and scrawny, looked more like the back of a heel with his ears sticking out like a knobbly ankle. And there was a vein on his temple that wiggled like a worm under his skin when he ate – just a little but enough to put me off my sandwiches, which we often packed up to eat in the park, by the fountains or under a tree. He had this way of screwing up his face as if he was wanting to dislodge a tickling hair from up his nose. He did it first when he met Auntie Dorothy. I had to ask her, ‘Is it normal?’

  ‘Didn’t see it, love,’ was all she said.

  I don’t know how she missed it – it made him look really queer. And he dithered over change. He was paying for a pot of tea and two pieces of Simnel cake at Lyons, going through his coppers, putting them in lines on the table, then counting them off into his hand. Then doing it again to make sure, while the waitress was standing looking at him like he was backward. Did it at the pictures too, holding everyone up while he rummaged in his trouser pocket, jiggling it to hear the change then counting out his ha’pennies and threepenny bits. A man from the back of the queue complained that he and his wife would miss the sing-song.