Daisy and Tommy Branning’s orphanhood

Daisy and Tommy Branning’s orphanhood is not a single loss but a condition shaped first by their mother’s death, then by the workhouse that takes them in, and finally by Daisy’s death after they have begun to find care beyond its walls. The siblings arrive grieving and dependent on one another; Sunday Small’s protection gives that bond a witness and a practical source of support. When Daisy dies, Tommy’s childhood seems to end with her, though the story also insists that he is not without love.

Loss and admission to the workhouse

After their mother dies, Daisy and Tommy are admitted to the workhouse, where Sunday has already grown up knowing no other life. The difference matters: she expects little for herself, while the siblings remember the home and affection they have lost. Daisy tells Sunday about the meals their mother once cooked, the cakes she baked before becoming ill, and the cosy house where the children had lived. These memories open an unfamiliar world to Sunday and reveal how sharply the siblings feel the contrast between family life and institutional care.

Daisy’s memories carry an earlier bereavement within them. She recalls that her mother had been sick in the mornings while expecting the children’s youngest brother, who did not survive the birth. When Daisy later sees Cissie Burns becoming ill in the same way, she fears for her friend but cannot accept the explanation that Cissie might be pregnant: the children believe that a woman must be married to have a baby. The episode shows how the siblings’ own experience of maternal illness and infant loss informs their concern for others, even when they do not understand what is happening.

Life under institutional separation

The workhouse’s organization compounds the children’s loss. Women, boys, girls, and men live in separate sections, and inmates rarely come together except on Sundays, when they may attend church. Daisy and Tommy therefore cannot simply depend on their sibling relationship throughout the day. At eleven, Tommy is in the boys’ quarters, tall for his age but dangerously thin; scuffles there leave him with a black eye. Daisy, nine and a year younger than Sunday, is among the girls. Their separation reflects the institution’s routines rather than any choice by the children.

Daily labor and poor food make the workhouse an especially hard place for children who remember a home. Some men and stronger boys pick oakum, teasing fibres out of old hemp ropes for shipbuilders, while others crush bones brought from the local slaughterhouse to be sold as fertilizer. Women and girls sew uniforms, cook, clean, or work in the laundry. Meals offer little comfort: Sunday remembers dry grey bread, greasy porridge, and soup with floating pieces of vegetable; meat is usually served twice a week and only sometimes three times. The children receive plain food while staff eat bacon and eggs. Sunday accepts the regime because she has never known anything else, but Daisy and Tommy have a remembered standard of care against which to measure it.

Punishment and neglect further expose the vulnerability that accompanies their orphanhood. Sunday tells Lady Lavinia Huntley that the cellar punishment room contains only a bucket, with no bed or blanket, and is pitch-dark, cold, and damp. She herself was kept there for three days without food or drink and became so weak that she needed the sickbay after Verity Lockett found her. Sunday also recalls two little girls who disappeared after being locked away; Miss Frost said they had died of influenza, but Sunday remembers no proper funeral. Her testimony gives the siblings’ circumstances a wider institutional context: their hardship is part of a system that separates families, controls children through punishment, and offers care unevenly.

Sunday’s protection and the siblings’ bond

Sunday responds to the siblings’ bereavement by making herself their protector. Since Daisy and Tommy entered the workhouse, she has tried to find ways to make life easier for them. Her concern is especially clear when she is locked in the cellar: hurt from a fall and shivering in the dark, she thinks first of Daisy and wonders how the younger girl will manage without her. This focus makes their attachment more than a general friendship. For Sunday, protecting the siblings is an active responsibility; for Daisy and Tommy, her steadiness supplies some of the reassurance their mother’s death has taken away.

Tommy’s own protectiveness toward Daisy is equally visible. When Sunday tells him that Daisy is recovering in the sickbay from a fever, he looks anxious and asks whether Sunday promises that she will return. He tries to reassure Sunday that he can take care of himself, despite his black eye, but the thought of Daisy lying ill makes his face crumple. He has taken their mother’s death badly, and his misery is intensified by fear of losing the sister who remains closest to him. Sunday recognizes this and offers an honest, limited hope: he may not be allowed to visit Daisy in the sickbay, but he can see her at church when she is better.

The siblings’ closeness also appears in their physical likeness and shared history. Tommy and Daisy both have curly brown hair and brown eyes, and Sunday thinks they would be difficult to distinguish if Tommy were a girl. That resemblance is not merely descriptive: it accompanies the book’s portrayal of them as children formed by the same family loss and sustained by mutual concern. Their isolation in separate workhouse quarters makes their attachment more precious, not less.

Daisy’s death and Tommy’s bereavement

Daisy’s later death turns the siblings’ orphanhood into a more complete and devastating isolation for Tommy. At her funeral in Chilvers Coton churchyard, he stands beside her grave and grips Sunday’s hand while staring at the mahogany coffin. He cannot accept that Daisy is gone; he imagines waking from a nightmare to find her smiling and caring for him as she always had. Sunday shares his grief and, unusually, cannot stop herself from crying. The scene makes clear what Daisy had been to him: not only his sister, but a daily source of affection and care in a life already stripped of parents.

The funeral is followed by a candlelit gathering at which the five mourners sit together after Jacob has said a prayer, each thinking of the girl they will never see again. Daisy is buried as close to her parents as Biddy Spooner can arrange. Tommy’s grief does not end with the service. The narrative says that it will be a very long time before he accepts the finality of her death; overnight, he seems to have changed from a boy into a young man. The language of sudden change captures the burden placed on him: he must live with the loss even while he is not yet able to comprehend it.

Daisy’s death also brings the siblings’ vulnerability into the lives of the adults who have tried to help them. Lady Lavinia Huntley attends the funeral despite Ashley Huntley’s order that she stay at home because she is pregnant. She knows Tommy is devastated and remembers her own grief after the deaths of her babies, while trusting that he is loved and may eventually endure his loss. Biddy Spooner, too, has become deeply fond of Daisy and worries about how Sunday will manage the work at the house without her. Their responses show that the children’s losses are witnessed beyond their original family, even though sympathy cannot restore the sister Tommy has lost.

Care beyond the sibling pair

Tommy’s orphanhood is not resolved by Daisy’s death, but the people around him prevent his isolation from being absolute. Sunday remains beside him at the graveside, and Lady Lavinia recognizes that he is suffering after losing both parents and now his sister. The distinction between being bereaved and being wholly without affection is central: Tommy has no surviving immediate family in the same way he once had Daisy, yet others care about what becomes of him.

The workhouse itself also begins to change after the period in which the children endured its worst conditions. Verity Lockett reports that meals have improved, the atmosphere is better, and the shadow of fear and bullying has lifted. The new matron has snapped Miss Frost’s split cane in two and thrown it away, and Verity proposes better bedding for the residents. These changes do not undo the siblings’ earlier deprivation or Daisy’s death, but they mark a difference between the institution that received two grieving children and the one that might offer children better treatment afterward. Their orphanhood thus carries both a record of what institutional care failed to provide and a measure of the reforms sought in response.