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 pronounced. 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.