7. Free School Meals

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

A WIDOW WOMAN Part 7

Jane was troubled.

She was told that her children might well be entitled to free school meals on account of her being a widow existing on nearly nothing, but that troubled her.

It was the Reverend Jonah Pyke who told her. He called, out of the blue, and knocked her door because he’d buried her man and needed to be sure there was nothing else he could do seeing as he never saw her among his congregation on Sundays and rather hoped she’d be there.

“The good Lord provides,” he said in his best pulpit voice, “there is plenty for the little ones and it is quite wrong that they should suffer because their father was thoughtless enough to die before his three score and ten years were up.”

“But the stigma,” muttered Jane, “what people will say to little Roger or our Betty. What of that?”

“You mean, it might upset them if they think they’re being fed by charity?” asked Jonah, frowning.

“Sort of. But it’s more what the other kids might say. They might point at them and call them names and … and make them feel different, and it’s bad enough being different because their dad’s dead without having to defend themselves on account of having no dinner money!”

He looked at her for a few seconds, and then shook his head. “I wouldn’t be concerned about what the ignorant might say,” he murmured, “as long as your children know that it’s because they’ve lost their father that they’re given the right to have free dinners. It’s a sort of compensation given by the state in order to counteract the problems of only having one parent.”

“I wish there was something to compensate me…” sighed Jane.

They were still standing on her doorstep and he would like to have seated himself somewhere in her house in order to prolong any conversation to the point of mentioning Sunday services.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

Jane nodded. It did seem a bit rude keeping him standing on the doorstep when he seemed to have come round with the view of making sure she and her children were all right and wanting to be genuinely helpful. So she led him into the sparse and inadequate kitchen and offered him a chair at the table.

He looked around, and sniffed. The vicarage, which housed only himself, had quite a specious kitchen and this poky room was hardly in the same class at all. He couldn’t help wondering how she managed to do anything in so cramped a space.

“Cosy,” he said, “meaning small and poky.

“You were saying about free school dinners,” she murmured.

“There are quite a few children who qualify,” he told her, “those whose fathers sacrificed their lives during the war. There are one or two of those. It’s a cruel world we live in.”

“George wasn’t a fighting man,” she reminded him, “he passed away through ill health. He died in hospital.”

“I know,” he nodded, then smiled. “You wanted something to compensate yourself too, you were saying.”

“It’s a lonely life,” she said, pouring boiling water into a tea pot. “I’m mashing a pot if you want a cup,” she added.

“By lonely?” he queried, nodding gratefully.

“When George was alive,” she said slowly, “of an evening, with the kids being in bed, we’d sit in our chairs by the wireless and listen to what’s going on in the world, or George would wind the gram up and play a few songs. He liked his music, did George, the bands and their singers. And we’d talk about stuff. About what’s going on, how much better it will be when the new Health Service gets under way. That sort of thing. And the new houses they’re going to be building any day now. He was looking forward to getting one of those off the council instead of this place ‘cause this place is falling to bits!”

“It’s a shame that he missed out on it then,” murmured the vicar. “Was there anything else you need compensating for?”

“Well, marriage things,” she replied uncomfortably.

“You mean?” He wanted hee to be explicit. It excited him when he imagined he could get a glimpse through a window into a life he’d never known. Even when he’d been a lad living at home it hadn’t been as if his parents were man and wife. His dad saw to that. He was a man of God and anything worldly had no place in his home. Jonah sometimes wondered how it came that he himself had been conceived, and then, one day, his mother was no longer there. Not dead, but she had gone off with another man, the window cleaner of all people, and that was that. His father hardly seemed to notice that she wasn’t there, but he did preach a vitriolic sermon in which window cleaners figured prominently.

“You know, talking. Private things. This and that about the kids. And being together.”

“Sleeping together?” he dared to suggest, and Jane was outraged.

“Really, Reverend, there’s no need to talk about such things!” she snapped, pouring two cups of tea and developing a sudden nervous twitch that caused her to splash some on the table.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” he replied, eating humble pie.

“I know what you meant!”

And she did. Of course she did, because whereas when George had been alive and well there had been all sorts of little pleasantries that had preceded sleep once they’d gone to bed at night. Things she didn’t want to think about or discuss with the vicar, who, incidentally, might well have been just about young enough to be her own son. And the conversations they’d had, conversations that were sometimes brought into being by their very physical proximity. It was a small bedroom in the ramshackle place they called home, and they both thought that maybe a slightly larger bed would be more comfortable sometimes, when its very smallness wasn’t an actual advantage.

But none of the little memories and regrets that swam through her mind had anything to do with the vicar.

Though, looking at him (there was no egg on his shirt, for a change, and he did look almost respectable) he was a man and men had their uses for more than earning a crust and mending the fire, didn’t they?

Just because she was a widow it didn’t mean that her nature had gone away, did it?

Even in the good old days of riding off with Gwennie on their bikes and sleeping in fields under canvas there had been talking and jesting before sleep overcame them.

Now there was just her. And she couldn’t help thinking, sometimes, that it was just too lonely for words.

Dared she?

With a man of God?

On a morning like this? What would folk say if they knew that she even thought it!

But she was only human, wasn’t she?

“Can I show you something upstairs?” she asked, “something you might be able to advise me on, being a man of the church…?”

Half an hour later they sat back at the kitchen table and he was nodding his head’

“You are right,” he mumbled, “they being a boy and a girl and growing older day by day. They ought to have beds of their own, or at least some sort of screen between them…”