Small Island

by Andrea Levy

  ‘That is what I said,’ I told her, with vowels as round as my cheeks would allow.

  ‘What, altogether? You’ve only been married six months?’ I nodded. ‘But Gilbert’s been here about five months.’ Then, tipping her head, she looked on me playful. ‘Ah. You’re newly-weds, then,’ she told me.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Did you say “I suppose so”?’ she asked, amused. ‘You don’t sound too pleased about it. But Gilbert said you hadn’t known each other long.’

  Oh, he did, did he? How typical of that rogue man to spread our business for everyone in England who want to hear. But I said nothing.

  ‘I knew Gilbert during the war,’ she went on. ‘Did he tell you?’ She might want to know everyone’s business but I was taught prudence – especially with a man who believes a gold tooth to be appealing. She began shifting on her seat, which caused the chair to creak so I thought it would collapse under her. But she paid this shabby furniture no mind. She folded her arms, then unfolded them. She took a breath then gave out a faint ‘Ohh’ as if a pain had stabbed her. A dainty pattern of red patches flushed on her cheeks and neck. I worried she would want a drink of water next for I was not sure there was a glass. But she was not distressed. She just brushed a blonde curl behind her ear and carried on as before.

  ‘He didn’t say, then?’ she asked me. I did not reply. I was weary of this conversation and I had work that I had only just begun. At last the woman raised herself slow from the seat. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you want anything I’m just downstairs. Just call down.’ Politely I stood to follow her to the door. Suddenly she looked on my face as keen as a child who needs you to join in their game. ‘I could show you round the shops, if you like. Show you where to get things.’

  Pity had me soften. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  But this excited her. ‘No, don’t thank me. It’s no trouble. Be nice to have some company.’ I was nodding and smiling like a half-wit while all the time opening the door so this woman might leave me in peace. ‘Do you have pictures . . . films . . . where you come from?’ she wanted to know. What, this woman think Gilbert spill me from a bottle?

  ‘Of course we have films – cinema,’ I told her.

  ‘Do you like them?’

  ‘I have always enjoyed the films of Shirley Temple,’ I said.

  The woman laughed so raucous I swear the window rattled. ‘Shirley Temple, I haven’t seen one of hers for a bit. Imagine you getting Shirley Temple where you come from!’

  Again I did not reply. ‘Well, we could go if you like – to the pictures.’ And again she took my breath from me. Is this woman wanting to be friendly or is she wanting a friend? I was confused. What class of white woman was she? ‘Well if you want to go to the shops or anything I could show you how to use your ration book. It’s easy but takes a bit of getting used to.’ Then she looked upon me, puzzled. ‘Can you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, quietly.

  ‘Good. Well, give me a knock and I’ll let you know when I’m ready to go out.’ She then took her hand and placed it on my arm. She leaned in too close to me to whisper, ‘It’s all right. I don’t mind being seen in the street with you. You’ll find I’m not like most. It doesn’t worry me to be seen out with darkies.’

  Now, why should this woman worry to be seen in the street with me? After all, I was a teacher and she was only a woman whose living was obtained from the letting of rooms. If anyone should be shy it should be I. And what is a darkie? I held the door polite for her and once more said, ‘Thank you,’ in the hope this would move her more promptly through it.

  ‘You don’t have to keep thanking me.’

  She had misunderstood again. But then I remembered there was an urgent thing I needed to ask. Something that had been troubling me since Gilbert pulled the door behind him that morning. Now was my chance. But I waited until she was outside my door in case she had a mind to turn and sit back upon the seat. I said, ‘Excuse me. I will ask you something if I may? Can you perchance tell me . . .’ I raised my head to look upon her in the eye and asked, ‘How do you make a chip?’

  Before

  Twenty-three

  Queenie

  I was christened Victoria Buxton. My mother had wanted me to be christened Queenie but the vicar had said, ‘No, Mrs Buxton, I’m afraid Queenie is a common name.’

  ‘Common!’ my mother had replied. ‘How can it be common? It’s a queen’s name.’ The vicar had then given an impromptu sermon, which my mother, father and their gathered guests had to listen to as they stood round the stone font in our bleak local church. The vicar went on at length about monarchs having proper names like Edward, George, Elizabeth while everyone, dressed in their pinching church-best shoes, shifted from foot to foot and stifled yawns behind their scrubbed hands. ‘Take our late queen,’ the vicar finally explained, ‘her name, Mrs Buxton, was not Queen but Victoria.’

  So that was how – one thundery August day in a church near Mansfield, dressed in a handed-down white-starched christening gown that wouldn’t do up at the neck – I, the first-born child of Wilfred and Lillie Buxton, came to be christened Victoria yet called for ever Queenie.

  My mother, Lillie, was an English rose. Flaxen hair, a complexion like milk with a faint pink flush at her cheeks and a nose that tipped up at the end to present the two perfect triangles of her nostrils. She was a farmer’s daughter and had hands that could clasp like a vice, arms as strong as a bear’s and hips that widened every year until even the old men on the village green agreed they were childbearing.

  My father, Wilfred, was a butcher – the son of a butcher, the grandson of a butcher and the great-grandson of a butcher. Father was ten years older than Mother and not very good-looking. Some said it was his good luck at courting and winning the hand of a lass who had once won a village country maid contest that had left his face with that startled ‘You don’t say’ expression. The front of his hair was cursed by a ‘cow’s-lick’ which meant that every day it fell in eccentric wild swirls over his forehead. His bulbous fat hands were like great hams. Broad, pink and fleshy with stubby fingers. He wore leather straps round each wrist to protect them from the sharp blows of his butchering knives. I thought those straps held his hands on to the ends of his arms. Leather and three inches wide, they only came off when he had a bath on alternate Saturday nights in front of the range in the kitchen. I had to bring the hot water that rolled black grime down his skin like mud washing off a wall, while the leather straps would be on the floor, still in the shape of his wrists. Blackened manacles – worn, battered and bloody. I never looked at the front of him in the bath in case I saw stumps where his fat ham hands should have been.

  There was a shed on our small farm, out of the back door, across the yard and round a bit, where Father did his butchering. Carts from the cold store, driven by young boys whose aprons were splattered and smeared with dried blood and who smelt acrid like vinegar made from rotting flesh, would come into the yard and dump the carcasses of slaughtered cows, sheep and pigs. Father carried them over one shoulder into the shed. And with sharpening, slicing, chopping, grunting, slopping noises, cattle were turned into topside, rump, sirloin, best rib, chuck, shin, brisket, silverside, lambs into leg, loin, best end, neck, breast, shank end, chump chop, cutlet, scrag end, shoulder, and the pigs were turned from snuffling muddy pink porkers that had been fed every morning on swill boiled up in a copper into heads, feet, hind, loin, knuckle, fillet, belly, spare rib, blade bone. Or salted, cured and smoked in an outhouse for bacon. The bits that had no name were squeezed into sausage skins, extruded and twisted as Buxton’s finest pork sausages. All the offal – the liver, the kidneys, the hearts – was packed on to trays. The fat was rendered down in a cauldron and set into lumps of lard. And anything left after that was stuffed into a mincer. The bits that had fallen on the top of the table were finest beef mince and the bits that were swept off the floor were not. Father always dreamed of having sons. Sons who c
ould sharpen, slice, chop and carry. Sons who would replace the stupid boys he had to hire who stole cuts of meat when they thought he wasn’t looking, stuffing them under their caps and down their shirts.

  When I was born the midwife came out of the upstairs back bedroom, wiping her hands, saying, ‘Well, Mr Buxton, I’m pleased to say you have a lovely daughter.’

  At which Father slapped his forehead, slumped on to the stairs and groaned, ‘God, this’ll be the death of me.’

  Mother had wanted a daughter, someone who could help her out just as she had done with her mother. She got out of bed at four every day, sprinkled clouds of flour over the kitchen table and prepared the hot-water-crust pastry for her pork pies. She kneaded it on the scrubbed wooden table, rolling and slapping the dough into shape, her knuckles pressing pastry the colour of babies’ bottoms until it was made malleable, adding more flour, banging and stretching it round a wooden form, then thumping it into the baking tins ready to take the pork meat that Father handed her every morning in a bucket. When the pies were baked, steaming and golden, the rich pork-bone stock was poured through a hole in the top of the crust and left to set into a marble jelly.

  Mother could craft her pies without looking down at her hands. This left her time to watch the dozy girls who came up from the village to help her. She could direct them to open the oven quicker, wash up the pans cleaner, pass her the flour faster, without losing a moment of pie time. ‘Hurry up, I’ll need to put the tops on these pies,’ Mother told the dozy girls every morning, no matter how fast they went. Then, after that, tea was made – for the stupid boys and Father, who came in rubbing his bloody hands down his apron before cupping them round his old chipped mug. After two mugs of sugary tea Father directed everything to be loaded on to the van. He and Mother ran a shop that sold everything they produced on our small farm. The pies, the meat, the sausages, the bacon were all driven down to the shop where Mother and Father spent the day serving their ‘blinking fussy’ customers.

  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.