"Want to join a brewing company?" asked the boy across the table.
"What's a brewing company?" inquired Wilf.
"We buy sausages and cook 'em in saucepans over the fire—when we can find a fire."
"Yes, you can count me in," said Wilf. So it didn't make so much difference after that, if he couldn't eat what was set before him at the table.
But usually the boys brought robust appetites to their meals, for they went in heavily for all forms of athletics. The boys who didn't make the teams had to drill in the gymnasium or run round and round an open air track a mile and a half long. If you shirked, the boys themselves saw to it that you got punished.
When Wilf came home to Cheshire for the long vacations he found some poor little ragamuffins who had no fun in their lives, and started a club for them in his own house. There were no boy scouts in those days, when Sir Robert Baden-Powell and Ernest Thompson Seton were little boys themselves. It was just taken for granted that boys would be boys, and it was hoped that they would grow up to be good men, if after school hours they were allowed to run loose in the streets. But Grenfell had a different idea.
He turned the dining-room on Saturday evenings into a gymnasium.
He pushed aside the table and chucked the chairs out of the window.
"Now any of you fellows who want to can get busy on the parallel bars," he told them, "or if you like you can go out into the back yard and pitch quoits. I'll take on anybody who wants to box with me."
The boys thought it was heaps of fun. They could hardly wait for Saturday night to come, because it meant the rare sport of banging another boy in the nose, which was much more satisfactory than throwing stones at a policeman.