Flour Babies - Anne Fine [8]
But, no.
‘We’ve done nutrition before, sir. It didn’t have anything to do with food.’
‘It’s all writing.’
‘Choosing recipes.’
Wayne Driscoll did one of his laborious brain searches, and rather triumphantly came up with a phrase unwittingly committed to memory in first year.
‘Well-balanced meals, sir!’
‘What two old codgers with wobbly teeth might have for breakfast.’
‘It’s dead boring.’
‘No cooking.’
‘Just looking at charts and stuff.’
Mr Cartright was mystified. What was the point of the taxpayer lashing out on giant gleaming kitchens in schools all over the country if the pupils didn’t even use them?
‘You must have cooked sometimes,’ he insisted.
The scowl Sajid Mahmoud turned on him would have frightened stone.
‘The only time I got to cook,’ he said, ‘I got a giant great row for scraping it in the bin after it had been marked.’
‘I should think so!’ said Mr Cartright. ‘What a waste!’
‘I couldn’t eat it though, could I? It was meat stew, and I don’t eat meat.’
‘You should have chosen to prepare something different.’
Sajid burned with refreshed outrage at the ancient injustice.
‘Why? Nobody said a thing about eating it! Nobody even so much as mentioned eating it. They went on and on about it being all well-balanced, like Wayne says, and having vitamins and such. But nobody ever said a thing about liking it or eating it.’
He relapsed into furious muttering.
‘And the Old Meanie changed my B to an F. And made me rinse out the bin…’
‘What about the rest of you?’ interrupted Mr Cartright. And with what he thought was real cunning, he offered Simon a chance to shed all the responsibility for having accidentally picked the wrong option in the first place. ‘How about you, Simon? You’d prefer cooking, wouldn’t you?’
Simon gave him a low-grade glower.
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
‘Really?’ Mr Cartright persisted. ‘Surely a growing lad like you enjoys the odd plate of extra fodder.’
But Simon had no intention of letting himself be won over. Nor of letting any of the rest of the class be seduced without remembering the grim facts of yesteryear.
‘We could have starved/ he said. ‘We could have keeled over and died before we got round to actual cooking. First we spent weeks and weeks learning how to change ounces into grammes, and then we spent weeks and weeks learning how to change them back again, and then we were nagged about eating fibroids –’
‘Fibres, surely.’
‘Whatever.’ Simon shrugged off the correction. ‘But we only got to go in the kitchen twice the whole term.’
He couldn’t resist adding bitterly:
‘And, one of those times, half of us got sent out practically right at the start, just for standing quietly in a line.’
Mr Cartright gave him a look.
‘Standing quietly in line? Like in Assembly this morning when I sent you out?’
‘Quieter than that,’ Simon responded virtuously.
‘That’s right, sir,’ Robin Foster backed Simon up.‘We were all queuing.’
‘Queuing to use the food processor.’
‘Needed to slice our tomatoes, didn’t we?’
And, suddenly, Mr Cartright could see it. A vision, as if it were in front of him, as if it were this morning. A whole class of them, mucking about in a line, pushing and shoving and jostling and cat-calling one another. Half of them holding their tomatoes so carelessly that watery red drips wept on the gleaming floor tiles. The rest spurting slimy yellow tomato pips as far as possible up the walls, or into one another’s faces.
‘Queuing,’ he said. ‘Just queuing quietly?’
‘That’s right,’ all the ones who had been there assured him.
Mr Cartright had put up a good fight. But he was cracking now. Simon couldn’t help grinning with pleasure and relief as, watching his form teacher intently, he spotted the very moment at which nutrition, as an option, lost its appeal.