Small Island: Chapter 23: Queenie Summary & Analysis

In a flashback, Queenie details her own childhood. Her mother wanted to name her Queenie, believing that this was the queen’s first name. Even after the vicar explains that the queen’s real name is Victoria, and christens the baby with this name, everyone calls her Queenie. Queenie’s mother, Lillie Buxton, is a strong farmer’s daughter, and her father, Wilfred Buxton, descends from a long line of butchers. He wears leather straps on his wrists as protection from his knives, and only takes them off when he bathes on Saturday nights.

The Buxtons live on a small farm with a shed where Father does the butchering, carving up every usable part of the animal and saving “the bits that had no name” for sausage. Father wants sons to help him with this work and is disappointed to be presented with Queenie. Mother, who wakes up every day at four in the morning to prepare crust for pork pies, is happy to have someone help her with this grueling work. After working on the farm every morning, the Buxtons load their products into a van and drive to their shop in town, where they spend the day serving customers.

Queenie spends her childhood in the care of various girls who work for Father and Mother, all of whom mother scorns as “miners’ daughters.” Mother tries her best to avoid becoming pregnant again, but when Queenie is six, Mother gives birth to a son, Billy, with twin boys, Jim and Harry, following the next year. By the time Queenie is twelve, she has to get up with her mother to make the pies and then feed and dress her younger brothers. Jim dies of rheumatic fever when he’s very young.

No matter how hard her life is, Queenie still feels superior to the miners’ children who make up the bulk of her elementary school. These children are encrusted with grime, and many of them don’t even have shoes. They’re all underfed, and Queenie sometimes taunts them when her mother sends her a pork pie for dinner. Once, she catches Harry sharing his lunch with another child and slaps him, telling him not to do it again.

Queenie is a good student and her teacher, Miss Earl, favors her and often sends her on errands. But when Queenie is fourteen, Father decides any further education is useless for a girl and puts her to work on the farm. From then on, Queenie has to work every waking hour, cleaning chicken coops, finding eggs, and helping Mother with the pies. During the Depression, when many people go hungry and children come begging at the Buxtons’ door, Queenie has to make soup to feed them.

One day, Mother sends Queenie to fetch Father from the butchering shed. Entering the shed for the first time in her life, she sees her father and Billy, both covered in blood raising knives over a cow’s grotesque carcass. Queenie screams and faints. Afterward she decides to become a vegetarian, sticking to this vow even when her father shouts at her. In the midst of this family turmoil, Aunt Dorothy, “Mother’s posh sister,” arrives from London and invites Queenie to come live with her.