Small Island (26 page)

Years before I was born an envelope was pushed through the door of the butcher’s shop. ‘Wilfred Buxton’, it said, written in a childlike script with capital letters where they shouldn’t be. Father thought it was someone paying their bill. They all owed him. Most of his customers had stuff on strap that they paid off at the end of the week. Mother said he was a soft touch but he liked to think that he understood his customers – if he didn’t give on strap they’d go elsewhere, he’d say. So Father casually opened the envelope and a white feather fluttered out and circled gently down to the ground.

He was alone in the shop but he was being watched. He’d never thought of joining up, of fighting in the war. He was a butcher. If he joined up who would supply the meat? The war seemed so far away, nothing to do with him, just names in the paper, pictures of young lads and a lack of good men to work round the place. But his customers – probably the fancy ones who bought the topsides on Sundays then ham
and
turkey at Christmas, or was it the miners who ate scrag end and pigs’ heads? – obviously thought that fat butcher’s hands like his could be put to better use strangling the Hun.

Mother complained when he went away to the army that the two boys he’d hired to replace himself were skinny and ill. ‘Too young for Kitchener, and too young to be any good to me,’ she said.

Father went south. Three weeks later there was a rap at the back door of the farmhouse. Mother opened it to see Father standing there. ‘The army won’t have me,’ he told her. Turned out he was too old and had a weak heart. Three bouts of childhood rheumatic fever left it murmuring loudly. ‘I’m not bloody fit enough to be shot,’ he moaned. That night, Mother prayed that if she ever had a son he’d get rheumatic fever because, she reasoned, it might keep him alive a little longer.

I was looked after by an assortment of girls while Mother wrapped sausages, sliced bacon, cleaned blood from counters and chatted over a pound of black pudding in the shop. These girls were daughters of miners who worked for a few weeks, then argued with Mother about a job not done or something gone missing. They were sent packing and another one hired. These girls would wake me up and get me out of bed, feed me warm milk and biscuits, wipe a damp cloth round my face, dress me. One of them used to pinch my arm hard – she liked to hear me squeal. Another refused to wipe my bottom after I’d done a number two. A spotty girl with cross eyes used to slap me when I laughed and squeeze me when I cried. And the big lass with breasts like two stolen cushions used to scare me to trembling with her tales of the small boys she said Father cut up in his butchering shed. I never learned these girls’ names. ‘They’re only miners’ daughters,’ Mother told me. She called them all ‘Girl’, and they were that stupid they never seemed to notice.

I was six when Mother became pregnant again. She’d held off having ‘bothersome childbirth’ by breast-feeding me until I was old enough to ask, ‘Mum, can’t I have milk from a cup?’ Or she’d flush herself out with a mixture of water and vinegar, which she squirted inside her using an old rubber forcing bag that looked like a cow’s udder. But then one day she was sick over the smell of her pork meat and said that the jelly stock looked to her like scum on the top of a blocked drain.

The midwife was delighted when she came from the back bedroom to tell Father, ‘You have a son, Mr Buxton.’

But Father just said, ‘About bloody time.’

The next year mother gave birth to two more sons – twins.

That birth had Father moaning to the midwife, ‘Twins! Bloody hell! They’ll castrate me.’

There were three sons now: Bill, Harry and Jim. And by the time I was twelve I was my mother’s little helper – the filler of pies, the ladler of jelly, the person to whom Mother snapped, ‘Hurry up, I’ll need to put the tops on those pies.’ After pie duty I got my three little brothers out of bed. I wiped a cloth round their faces, fed them warm milk, cleaned their bottoms, combed their hair with water – one by one daubing down the cow’s licks they’d all inherited from Father. Then I changed the sheet that little Jim always seemed to wet in the night and slapped all three of their heads just in case. Then one morning I went to wake little Jim and found the bed wet, not with his usual wee-wee but with sweat.

Mother got her wish. Rheumatic fever the doctor pronounced. Little Jim turned scarlet and complained that his wrists hurt. Mother screamed, ‘I didn’t mean it,’ as the body of my little dead brother was brought out of the room in a wooden box.

He was buried in the churchyard, and as the coffin was lowered into the ground Harry, his twin, shouted, ‘Queenie, we can’t leave Jim down there, it’s all dark. Jimmy don’t like the dark.’

And I told him, ‘Don’t be daft, he’s dead.’

The doctor gave Father a bill for three visits and a death certificate. Father slapped his forehead as he read it and groaned, ‘We’ll all be in the workhouse by Christmas.’

I knew from the first day that I ever walked into Bolsbrook Elementary School that I was a cut above the miners’ children. Miners’ children had snotty noses and grime round their faces that was so worn in they would need to be soaked in a bucket overnight to get it out. And a lot of them didn’t even have shoes. Reginald Watkins came to school in girls’ boots with paper stuffed inside instead of socks. And there was another boy, Wilfred Allcock, whose dad had been killed in a pit accident. This was obviously sad, him losing his dad and the body not being found for days. And I joined in when all us children sympathetically tapped Wilfred on the back during playtime. But I couldn’t see how it entitled him to turn up for school every day wearing a pair of his dead dad’s old football boots with the studs taken out.

They used to follow me round the playground, these miners’ children, wanting to know if I had brought one of my mum’s pies in for dinner. When I had I’d show it to them. I’d turn it round in the air – the brown crusty pastry, the pink jellied meat. Then I’d take a bite and lick the crumbs from my lips. ‘Ooh, it tastes lovely,’ I’d say. I liked to see them all unconsciously miming chewing, closing their teeth round air as I ate. And then they’d plead for a bite, ‘Go on, Queenie, give us a bit, go on. Be your best friend.’ When I saw my soft brother Harry sharing his pie with Wilfred in his dead-dad’s-boots I hit him round the head and told him not to do it again. And Harry whimpered, ‘But he were hungry, Queenie, he were hungry.’

Our school teacher’s name was Miss Earl. It was only behind her back we called her Early Bird. Early Bird slapped children for scruffy work and appearance. She whacked the backs of hands twice with a ruler for daydreaming. Three times for opening your eyes during prayers. She shook children for dawdling or not knowing their times tables. She knocked heads together for talking out of place and used the cane liberally for answering back.

Our classroom had neat rows of dark wooden desks and was heated by a coal fire that often had a motley assortment of steaming wet boots lined up in front of it. Early Bird used me for all her errands: I was the tallest in the class and a butcher’s daughter. I collected the register from the headmaster and took it back when Early Bird had ticked all the names present and correct. I gave out the pens, the nibs and filled all the inkwells with watery blue-black ink. I led every queue for dinner and playtime. And I fetched wool from the village shop when Early Bird had us all knitting blankets and scarves for missionaries and starving black babies. When a message needed to be taken to the headmaster, Early Bird’s twitching finger always beckoned me out to the front.

‘You’re a sensible girl, Queenie Buxton,’ she’d say, before she handed me the message on a folded piece of paper. Sometimes I ran for most of the day performing errands – missing out on sums, copying from the board, grammar, spelling, even hands-on-head time.

‘What’s the point of the lass being at school when there’s work to be done around here?’ It was three weeks after Father had said that to Mother that I left Bolsbrook Elementary School to work on our farm as a skivvy – the outside-inside-three-bags-full girl. I was fourteen with a large bust that my brother Billy always yelled, ‘Crikey’, at when I had a bath. I knew how to read and write, add, subtract and divide but, in all honesty, not much of anything else.

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.’