2
Mrs Widger has let the back bedroom to a young married couple possessed of a saucer-eyed baby that cries lustily whenever its mother is out of its sight. How they succeed in living, sleeping, baby-tending and doing their minor cookery in the one pokey little room, already half filled by the bedstead, is difficult to understand. They do it. We see little of them, except just when we had rather see nothing at all.
For dinner and the subsequent cup o' tay, Mam Widger allows one hour. But usually, before even the pudding is out of the oven, first one of us, then another, glances round to make sure that the kettle is well on the fire.
MRS PERKINS
Nowadays, however, when the kettle is beginning to sing, Mrs Perkins, the baby in her arms, comes downstairs and proceeds to cook for her husband a couple of small chops or a mess of meat-shreds and bubble and squeak. She stirs and chatters; she holds forth on the baby's beauty and goodness, its health, its father's love of it—and, in short, she talks to us as if we were delighted to see her and her baby. Tony's good manners triumph comically over his desire to get his cup o' tay and put away an hour up over. (He likes to take every chance of making up for wakeful nights at sea.) We all wish she would go quickly. Meanwhile, we feign an interest in what blousy, skirt-gaping, slop-slippered, enthusiastic maternity has to say.
And when she does go, it is with a most joyful haste that we move the kettle to the very hottest part of the fire.
3
The family hubbub over Tommy's stay in the Plymouth Eye Infirmary has hardly died down yet. Recognizing with uncommon good sense that his double squint would bar him from the Navy or Army (he shows an inclination towards the latter), Mrs Widger took him to Plymouth; and on hearing that an operation would cure him, she did not hesitate, did not bring him home to think about it; she left him there. Then.... What a buzz! The child is to return very thin. Mrs Widger's cousin declares loudly that she would rather lead her boy about blind (he squints excessively) than let him go to one o' they places. Tony says, "Aye! they may feed 'en on food of a better quality like, after the rate, but he won't get done like he is at home." Several times daily he wants to know how long they will keep Tommy there, and when Mrs Widger replies, six weeks, he asks in a woe-begone voice: "Do 'ee think 'er'll know his dad when 'er comes home again?"
All of which is easy to laugh at.
No doubt hospitals are a godsend to the poor, immediately if not ultimately. At the same time, it cannot be said that the prejudice against them is wholly unreasonable. Poor people declare that they are starved in hospital, and it is, in fact, now recognized in dietetics that comparatively innutritious food, eaten with gusto, is better assimilated than the most scientifically chosen but unpalatable nutriment. A man, a poor man especially, can be half starved or at all events much thinned, on good food, who would do well on the habitual coarse fare that he enjoys. His life is a long adventure in a land where every other turning leads to starvation, but his adventurousness seldom extends to new sorts of food.