Read the opening of Small Island

I thought I’d been to Africa. Told all my class I had. Early Bird, our teacher, stood me in front of the British flag – she would let no one call it the common Union Jack: ‘It’s the flag of Empire not a musical turn.’ And I stood there as bold as brass and said, ‘I went to Africa when it came to Wembley.’

It was then that Early Bird informed me that Africa was a country. ‘You’re not usually a silly girl, Queenie Buxton,’ she went on, ‘but you did not go to Africa, you merely went to the British Empire Exhibition, as thousands of others did.’ It was a Butchers’ Association trip. Every year there was an outing organised for the butchers, the butchers’ wives and children and even the butchers’ favourite workers.

A day out. Mother liked to go. ‘It’s like a holiday,’ she would say to Father. ‘Bloody waste of time,’ he’d grumble. But he went all the same. Some years nearly everyone from our farm went. The inside girls who helped Mother with the pies. The outside girls who fed the pigs and poultry. Even the stupid boys, who helped Father in the shed, changed out of their splattered aprons and into their ill-fitting, fraying best suits for the trip.

We always got dressed in our best to paddle in the sea at Blackpool or ride a red bus round Piccadilly Circus or laugh at the monkeys in the zoo. Then it was time to go home again. The men would be dozing from too much beer and the children would be snivelling after being whacked for dirtying their clothes or getting a piece of rock stuck in their hair.

As often as not one of the farm girls would go missing with one of the farm boys only to turn up later, looking sheepish and dishevelled. The year we went to the Empire Exhibition, the Great War was not long over but nearly forgotten.