Small Island (25 page)

I did not wish to appear rude to this woman on my first day in England so I acknowledged her questions with a small nod of the head.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ she said. What cat was she talking of? Don’t tell me there was a cat that must also live with us in this room. ‘My name’s Mrs Bligh,’ she carried on. ‘But you can call me Queenie, if you like. Everyone here does. Would you like that?’ The impression I received was that she was talking to me as if I was an imbecile. An educated woman such as I.

So I replied, ‘Have you lost your cat?’

And this woman’s eyes rolled as if this was a question I had asked of her several times before. ‘No,’ she told me, too forcefully. ‘In English it means that you’re not saying very much. Everything all right, though? I just thought I’d come and have a word with you.’

I did not wish to appear ungrateful as the woman was obviously trying to be kind, even though she had me confused with this cat business. I opened the door wider for her before she thought me impolite. I merely meant for us to talk through a larger opening. But she walked straight through, even though I had not formally invited her in!

‘Oh, you’re tidying up a bit. Men, eh – they’ve got no idea.’ She perused the place as if this was her home. Pushing her nose into corners, she walked the room as if inspecting some task she had asked of me. Alighting upon the sink she said, ‘Bit cracked, isn’t it? Still, you’re keeping it clean, that’s good.’ Now, as she was the landlady and at that moment viewing the sink, I thought to take the opportunity to ask something of her. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘but would you perchance have a basin that I might get a use of?’

‘A what?’

‘A basin,’ I repeated.

‘Sorry.’

‘A basin to put at the sink.’

‘A bee – to put what?’

‘A basin.’

‘I’m sorry but I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

I thought to say it again slower but then remembered an alternative that would work as well. ‘A bucket,’ I said.

‘A what?’ she started again.

It was useless. Was I not speaking English? I had nothing but the potty to point at instead. But she would surely misunderstand that. And who knows where that confusion could take us? So I hushed my mouth.

‘Where did you get that thing?’ she said, pointing at my blanket. ‘It’s so bright. You need dark glasses for that.’ It obviously amused her. She began a giggle. ‘Did you bring it over with you?’ Moving past the blanket she went to warm her hands on the fire. She bent over closer to the flame. ‘It’s perishing today. I bet you wished you never left somewhere nice and hot?’ When I made no reply she looked to me and mouthed the words, ‘Cold today,’ as if I might have lost my hearing. ‘When it’s cold,’ she went on, ‘we say it’s “perishing”. Perishing cold. It’s a saying, like the cat got your tongue.’ She turned back to her hand-warming while telling me, ‘You’ll soon get used to our language.’

I told this Englishwoman, ‘I can speak and understand the English language very well, thank you.’

And she said, ‘No need to thank me.’ But I had not meant it to sound grateful. Still she carried on: ‘I’m sure there’s a lot I could teach you, if you wanted.’ And then she sat down on a chair and invited me to come and sit with her. But this was my home, it was for me to tell her when to sit, when to come in, when to warm her hands. I could surely teach this woman something, was my thought. Manners! But then I questioned, Maybe this is how the English do things when they are in England? So I sat.

‘That’s right – sit down.’ Did this woman think I did not understand the injunction, sit down? ‘You don’t say very much, do you?’

I held my tongue. Forbearance prevented me informing her that what I do say she does not appear to comprehend.

‘So how long have you and Gilbert been married, then?’

The barefaced cheek of the question sucked all the breath from me. Did she want to know all my business? I just look on her and wait. Soon this white Englishwoman must realise she is talking ill-mannered to me. But she say it again. This time in that slow way, as if I did not grasp her meaning the first time. But she tricked me. If this woman was to realise that I am an educated person then surely I would have to answer her enquiry. Cha.

‘Gilbert and I have been married for nearly six months,’ I said clearly.

‘Six. Six months?’

‘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 could 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.