The Fourth Pig by Naomi Mitchison Marina Warner Page B

worth it for the amount of vegetables he brought home.
    Mrs. Jones was fed up. She couldn’t help it. She’d had to make do all her life and it didn’t seem somehow as if any of it had been worth living, especially the last six or seven years. She was a bit short-sighted too, but they couldn’t afford glasses for her. So she was mostly cross to Billy and Minnie and they were frightened of her. Their father was nicer to them, especially when he’d made a bit, betting. He used to have a threepenny double most weeks, and sometimes it came off. Those days he used to bring back a penn’orth of mixed drops for the two children, and tell them stories; he told them fairy stories, like I’m telling you. They used tosit on his knee, smelling his breath all beery like it was every time when he’d won, and suck their sweets, and listen to the stories. But mostly Mrs. Jones was crosser than ever those days.
    One afternoon she went over to the shop at the comer to get some rice and dried beans on tick, and she left Billy and Minnie at home. She told Minnie to peel the potatoes and mind she peeled them thin, and she told Billy to get on with scrubbing the kitchen floor and mind he didn’t use up the soap. And then she put on her coat which was one she’d got at the Church Jumble three years back, and used to belong to the vicar’s mother, who was shorter and fatter than Mrs. Jones was, but somehow, what with Mr. Jones and the children, she’d never had time to alter it, and then she went out.
    After a bit Billy looked up from the floor where he was kneeling to scrub on an old wad of newspapers, and he said: “Me knees is wet. Mum won’t be back, not for hours. I don’t like scrubbing, Min’.” “We’ve got to help Mum, ain’t we?” said Minnie, going on with the potatoes, “or the P.A.C. man’ll catch us.” “Our Min, always going on about helping Mum!” said Billy. “Proper little angel, ain’t you?” Minnie threw a potato at him and he jumped up and threw the wad of newspapers from the floor at her, and she squealed because it was all squashy and cold. Then the two of them fought, oh real wicked!—and they broke one of the knobs off the fender, though goodness knows how they did it, but there, us mothers know what real tigers a pair of kids can be!
    Well after that they rolled about on the floor, scrapping and biting and tearing each other’s clothes, and then Minnie bumped her head on the table leg and began crying. Then Billy got sorryand gave her his dead frog that he’d got tied onto the end of a string and stuffed into his pocket—the nasty little thing—but there, you know what boys are—and they got playing with the dead frog, and Billy left off his scrubbing in the middle, and Minnie hadn’t got half the potatoes done, and they were as happy as could be. And then all of a sudden Mrs. Jones came back from the shop.
    She wasn’t half wild with them when she saw the mess they’d got the place into, and how the floor wasn’t near washed nor the potatoes near peeled, and she lammed into young Billy. He ducked under the table and she hit out, and she broke the milk jug. Now, the milk was what she’d been saving for the kids’ supper—she’d done without it in her own tea for weeks now except on Sundays when she had a drop of condensed—and the jug was one she’d had for a wedding present and it belonged, as you might say, to the times when she’d thought life was worth living. And there it was all to bits on the floor, and a nasty mess to pick up, and those two kids were laughing as if it was all a joke, for breaking things mostly is a joke, to kids. So Mrs. Jones caught Billy by the collar and gave him a good smack on the face that set him off blubbering, and she shook Minnie till she’d shaken all the laughing out of her, and she called them names