Free England's Lane by Joseph Connolly

brown eyes grow larger with greed as she approached him. Not though, naturally, from love or affection—she wasn’t a fool. Nor even recognition, not of herself; but even for one’s bounty to engender just any sort of a desire in a single living soul … well that could be something too. Champion, his name is. Champion the Wonder Horse—so silly to call him that: he’s sweet, but it’s not as if he were a steeplechaser or anything. But they got it from an American program on the television, Paul was telling me—a sort of a cowboy show, I can only imagine, but I really wouldn’t know a thing about it. Don’t really seem to get much time for the television these days, although I don’t really know quite why that should be: other people seem to. I used to love it when Paul, of an afternoon, would cuddle up beside me on the sofa, happily waiting for
Watch With Mother
. Were we sitting comfortably? Yes we truly were.I’d have a nice cup of tea and a digestive, and Paul would be sucking on a chocolate finger until it threatened to play mayhem with his clean white shirt. Much too old for all that sort of thing now, of course, my little Paul—but sometimes if he’s home from school on a Friday promptly, we’ll still watch that cartoon show he so much adores. The sailorman. Popeye, that’s it, that’s the fellow. And his skinny girlfriend, Olive—she does makes me laugh. In the early days, Paul—he begged me to buy him lots of tins of spinach from the United Dairies, which I was more than happy to do because to get him to eat up any vegetable at all apart from peas and potatoes is little less than a miracle from heaven, quite frankly. And it seems so funny now, but golly—I wasn’t best pleased at the time, I can assure you of that: well he refused to have anything to do with them, didn’t he? Those three large tins I’d got for him—and Smedley’s, so it wasn’t as if they were cheap or anything. And why? Because he couldn’t squeeze them open with the pressure of his hand. In the cartoon, he was wailing—just like a silly baby—Popeye does that and the spinach whooshes right up into the air and he catches it all in his mouth. Yes I know Paul, I said to him—but that’s a cartoon, isn’t it? It’s not real life, is it Paul? It’s just a cartoon.
    So that was me eating all the spinach for it seemed like years. I really didn’t care for it. I tried it on Jim, but he just eyed the wet green mound of it on his plate as if it were about to reach up and throttle him. “What’s this muck?” he wanted to know. Anything not familiar—anything that isn’t a pie or a roast or a fry-up—all of it’s just “muck,” in his eyes. Once I bought some real Italian spaghetti from Bona, and my golly was that expensive. It was terribly long, in a bright-blue paper wrapper and a diamond-shaped label I couldn’t make head or tail of. I’ve kept it in my drawer, the label, as a sort of souvenir. I only got the stuff because I’d seen this recipe in
Woman’s Own
, and all it needed was tomatoes and a bit of mince. Make anice change from cottage pie, I thought. Well you just should have heard the furor: “We fought the b-word Eyeties all through the War! Those b-word Eyeties—they’re all b-word fascists!” he was ranting away. Yes well, I said—not you personally, Jim. You were in Munitions in Minehead, if you remember: not too many Italians to fight in Minehead, I shouldn’t have thought. Wrong thing to say, of course, but I was really very peeved with him, if you want to know the truth. I’d been to quite a lot of trouble over that supper—set the table nicely with the floral cloth and the proper cruets and even a cupful of marigolds from some pots I had in the backyard, at the time. Refused even to so much as try it. When I urged him,