I’ve won a camper van!’ The laughter was followed by a dour Scottish voice: ‘You have not read the small print. Joyce provides a cast of characters – Sister Lucy and Sister Catherine, the Pearly King, Barbara, Finty, Mr Henderson.įor the majority of the novel, Queenie’s fellow residents provide some much-needed comic relief:įrom the other side of the door came a hoot of laughter. The second is the daily routines of those in the hospice. ‘I made my sea garden to atone for the terrible wrong I had done to a man I loved, I said’.
These sections tell us of the beach house she renovates and the sea garden she builds which illustrates her heartbreak and attracts others who walk along the costal path. Her memories of Harold, Maureen and David are divided in the structure of the text by two things: the first of these is Queenie’s life after she left Kingsbridge. If only you could walk to the desk and say to the assistant, I’d like to return the painful memories about David Fry or indeed his mother, and take out some happier ones please. If only memory were a library with everything stored where it should be. I recall one sliver and the whole picture comes rushing back, while other things, for instance, other things I would like to remember, are completely unavailable. I don’t know why some of these memories must remain so crystal clear. Queenie tells us how she managed to get an accountancy job in a brewery, despite the rampant sexism she tells us how she and Harold met (which is not the way he told us) and about their drives once he’s appointed to take her to and from work, and she tells us all the things she knew about Harold and Maureen’s son, David, things that Harold never knew. My life has been small, it has been nothing to speak of. I made my home in a derelict timber beach house, and I tended my heart in a garden by the sea. Since I left Kingsbridge, I’ve remained single. Aided by one of the nuns in the hospice, Sister Mary Inconnue, Queenie writes her second letter to Harold. In the companion novel, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, Joyce allows Queenie to tell her side of the story. Queenie is in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed dying of cancer.
Those of you who read Rachel Joyce’s debut novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry will be familiar with Queenie Hennessy as it is she Harold walks towards wanting to atone for acts committed twenty years previously. I will tell you everything and the rest will be silence. My secrets have been inside me for twenty years, and I must let them go before it is too late. There are so many things you still don’t know. There were so many things you didn’t see. I will confess everything, because you were right that day. This is my second letter to you, Harold, and this time it will be different.
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