Explore "Fire in the Thatch" by Edith Caroline Rivett on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Alf got home to Corner Cottage in time for tea, and Mrs. Dickon gave him a good tea. He had his midday meal at school, but Alf always counted tea as his best meal. The Dickons kept hens, and hens meant eggs: there was also a beehive, and Alf liked honey. Old Mrs. Dickon was one of those women who suspected that all meals cooked in institutions were “rubbidge”—schools, British restaurants, canteens, and cafés all came under her stigma of “rubbidge,” and she saw to it that Alf got at least one good meal a day, and that meal was tea.
When Macdonald got off his bike at Corner Cottage Alf had just come out into the garden in a state of comfortable repletion, and he gazed at Macdonald with the acute appraising stare of the Cockney boy, so different from the ruminating stare of the country children.