‘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.
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.