Sorry, not hungry...

I just read a blog post by Lotta Joy that reminded me of a story that my grandad used to tell me. I have posted this story before, but it was a long time ago and I suspect that it will be new to most of you.   He did not talk about his childhood very much - we just knew that the woman who brought him up (not his mother) did not make life easy for him, and his main memories seemed to focus on hunger and beatings, but this story always had him crying with laughter.

One day he was playing in the back yard (paved garden lacking grass, flowers, etc) with his younger brother.  They did not have much in the way of toys and they would play with what they could find. 

On this day they found a dead rat.

So they played a game where they would throw the rat as high up in the air as they could and then try and catch it.

Great fun was being had.

Then the impossible happened.

The rat was making its decent from a very good throw, and went down the chimney.

The boys went inside to see if they could rescue their toy, but instead they found the woman at the fire, cooking a pan of sausages.  This would have been in about 1910, a lot of poor families cooked in this way.  Now the woman did not have good eyesight, but in the dim light the boys could clearly see their toy laying there in the pan alongside the sausages.

At this point the woman called out that dinner was ready.

"Sorry, not hungry!" was the hurried reply, and they were off.

I am not aware of any comeback regarding this, so what happened to the rat will never be known.  I am sure that my grandad, fond of the Old Testament as he was, hoped that the woman ate the thing - a little bit of payback for what she put him through.

Hope you haven't got sausages for dinner   :-)