There's an Egg in My Soup by Tom Galvin

stomach. Tripe, I think my grandmother called it.
    Most of these dishes were served with mashed potato containing strange foreign bodies of dubious colour, but at least the potato was, on the whole, familiar. Every meal was accompanied by small pickled cucumbers, which I went on to call ‘slugs’.
    The supper was okay – bread, boiled egg, ham or sausage, all served with a mug of black tea straight from a large plastic bucket – but I rarely bothered. I think it was the slosh of that tea-bucket that finally turned me off the supper. It had a prison ring to it that did my imagination no good.
    Breakfast saw the return of the slop-out tea-bucket, along with bread, more boiled eggs and sausage. The sausages, incidentally, were those big mothers, the size of a policeman’s truncheon. When you cooked them on a pan, you could grease the axle of a combine harvester with the amount of fat that was left behind. Very tasty, but no prizes for guessing why there’s a serious problem with heart disease here.
    Of course, once on the plate there was little you could do but eat whatever it was, or face the wrath of the largest of the women in the kitchens. One in particular kept a beady eye on the third hatch andobserved the plates coming back with alarming alacrity. A large woman with a blue apron and beefy red arms, if my plate wasn’t cleared, out she’d come and point at me, then down to my plate, throwing her hands in the air as if apologising to the Lord for the wanton waste of good food. Then she’d stare at my face and pull at her cheekbones, clearly implying that I was a skinny little bastard and needed every scrap before winter fell. It was all in jest of course, and she was a very kindly old soul, but with gangs of laughing kids at the tables behind me it didn’t do much for my confidence. I always did my best to get the food down, or if it was really too bad I’d hide it in the plant pots beside the tables. I eventually decided to pretty much steer clear of the place altogether and take my chances in the shops.
    Another area of the boarding building I learned to give a wide berth to was the main laundry room. This was located down in the basements. To get to it you had to descend a dark and very steep set of stairs, dropping so precipitously that you really had to sidle down tentatively sideways, like a crab. There in the steamy depths was where all the laundry for the boarding school was done, everything from sheets and blankets to the cooks’ aprons, clothing, rugs, the lot. The job was left to one old woman, who toiled daily at massive machines that hissed and steamed and together created a room temperature of about thirty degrees Celsius. It reminded me of ghastly scenes in moviesabout Russian submarines. I didn’t envy the poor woman, but neither was I quite sure what to make of her. My doubts were more from ignorance than anything else.
    As a guest I was invited to have my clothes and sheets washed there once a week. So every Friday morning, with some trepidation, I’d descend those steps to face the mood swings of this woman, who either smiled graciously or tutted and swore and muttered under her breath as she inspected my clothing. This went on for a couple of weeks, until I decided that it just wasn’t worth it. It was much later that I realised the poor woman was only being paid a pittance each month, and a simple tip of a couple of quid from me – even as a token of appreciation – would have meant the world. It honestly never occurred to me. I thought that my clothes were just part of her job but, as it turned out, I was an extra workload for her – one that, I’m sure, she could very easily have done without.
    Since laundries didn’t exist in the town, the substitute for the steamy basement was my bath. I filled it with hot water and detergent every Friday, dumped the dirty clothes in and stirred for twenty minutes with the handle of the