The mutual-support family bond among Sunday, Daisy, and Tommy

The mutual-support family bond among Sunday Small, Daisy Branning, and Tommy Branning is formed not by blood but by care repeatedly given and returned. In the workhouse, Sunday becomes a protective older-sister figure to the bereaved siblings; in return, Daisy and Tommy trust her, confide in her, and help sustain her hope of a life beyond the institution. Their imagined future gives them a measure of family belonging in a place defined by deprivation and the risk of separation.

Formation in the workhouse

After Daisy Branning and Tommy Branning entered the workhouse following their mother’s death, Sunday Small took them under her wing. She had grown up knowing no other life, but understood that they had lost the love and home they remembered. At night, the girls slept in adjacent beds beneath one thin blanket. Daisy spoke of her mother’s cooking, baking, and the small house they had lived in, giving Sunday a glimpse of a kind of domestic warmth she had never known. Their closeness therefore begins in unequal experience: Daisy carries memories of family life, while Sunday offers the steady care that helps her and Tommy endure its absence.

Sunday’s concern for the siblings persists even when she herself is being punished. Confined in a dark room, she thinks chiefly about how Daisy will manage without her. The emphasis on Daisy’s welfare, rather than Sunday’s own discomfort, makes the bond practical as well as affectionate: Sunday understands herself as responsible for someone more vulnerable. When she learns that Miss Frost punished Daisy for letting Sunday do her work, Sunday comforts her and renews her promise to protect her for as long as they remain there. She imagines that they will eventually leave for a place where Miss Frost cannot hurt them.

A shared promise of escape

The promise grows into a future the three can picture together. When Tommy Branning asks Sunday to look after Daisy, she agrees. He tells her that he has enjoyed learning carpentry in the workshop, though the bleak surroundings make him doubt whether he will ever get out. Sunday answers that all of them will leave one day and imagines working on a farm: caring for animals, growing food, and no longer going hungry or being hurt. The farm is a hoped-for destination, not an achieved escape in this moment; its importance lies in giving their loyalty a common purpose and a future tense.

The siblings’ confidence in Sunday is clear when her birthday and possible placement approach. Daisy Branning worries about how she will manage if Sunday is found a position, but believes Sunday’s promise to return for her and Tommy. When Lady Lavinia Huntley brings Sunday news of a possible job with Biddy Spooner, Sunday does not consider the opportunity without also asking whether the household could employ all three. She explains how close they are and how much they want to stay together. Lady Lavinia doubts that Biddy Spooner will want to hire them all, making the prospect of advancement inseparable from the possibility of separation.

Daisy responds with generosity even as the prospect hurts her. She encourages Sunday to take the position if she likes it, putting her friend’s chance of a better life ahead of her own fear of being left behind. Sunday, in turn, promises to visit Daisy and Tommy after attending church on Sundays. She insists that they are like family to her, and the promise makes clear that leaving the workhouse would not, in her view, cancel their relationship. Their support is reciprocal: Sunday protects and plans for them, while Daisy helps her accept a chance to leave and Tommy entrusts her with his sister’s care.

Protection, loyalty, and separation

Sunday’s protective instinct is not only a private comfort; it shapes what she does when others are threatened. When Cissie Burns is being taken away to Hatter’s Hall, Sunday intervenes, despite the risk that the men will take her too. Later, recounting what happened to Lady Lavinia, Sunday describes Cissie’s fear and the failed promise that she would be allowed to care for her baby. These episodes do not make Cissie part of the siblings’ bond, but they show the wider ethic behind it: Sunday resists the treatment of vulnerable people as disposable and speaks up when authority threatens to divide them from those they love.

The bond among Sunday, Daisy, and Tommy cannot guarantee their safety. Later, while holding Sunday captive, Miss Frost admits that she killed Daisy and reveals that Daisy was pregnant. Sunday responds with anger at the thought of Daisy’s fear, a reaction that brings the earlier promise to protect her into painful contrast with what Sunday could not prevent. The chosen family has offered real consolation and purpose, but it has not made the siblings invulnerable to the violence surrounding them. Daisy’s death is therefore not simply a loss within the group; it is the shattering of a future they had repeatedly imagined together.

Meaning of the chosen family

The trio’s bond gives the idea of family a lived meaning that does not depend on shared blood or a secure home. Sunday has no known family of her own, yet she becomes a sister through attention, responsibility, and promises kept in difficult circumstances. Daisy and Tommy, meanwhile, do not only receive her care: Daisy encourages Sunday’s opportunity, and Tommy places his trust in her. Their relationship is made through these acts of reliance, not through a formal arrangement.

Later, Sunday’s reconciliation with Lady Lavinia Huntley broadens rather than cancels this understanding of kinship. With Tom Branning’s encouragement, Sunday approaches Lady Lavinia on Mothering Sunday and offers her flowers as her mother. The scene points toward a family life that can include both recovered birth ties and attachments formed through loyalty. Against the workhouse’s threatened separations, Sunday, Daisy, and Tommy’s shared promises remain the foundation of her understanding that family is also something people make for one another.