In Mrs. Mallum's Store

Her eyes are dim she cannot see
She dropped her false teeth in her tea
She dropped her false teeth in her tea!
Sung to the tune of the Quartermaster's Store
We called it Mrs. Mallum's Store. Mrs Mallum was small and gnarly and wore an apron and a turbin. There was always a half finished cig hanging off the end of her lower lip. She had a nasty way of squinting at you. We hated her. She was the head cook at my school when I was a lowly adolescent and was responsible for some amazingly horrid recipes that resulted in some astoundingly horrible meals.
Every day of the week had it's specials . That is you knew it was Monday because come dinnertime you would be looking down at a plate of boiled fish, boiled potato and stewed tomato, completely bereft of anything but salt and very little of that! To follow would be semolina pud, a tasty concoction of wheat boiled in skim milk with a micro dot of red jam plopped in the middle.
Funny thing was we ate this stuff and some took seconds. Hunger will do that to you. The meal we waited for all week was pies, peas and chips, with sponge pud and custard for afters. We would sneak the little pies down the row of girls and hide them under our jerseys for later in the day. That hunger thing again! This meal was really good. The chips were wonderful and the sponge pud absolute stultifying heaven. We would line up for seconds! We would be so stuffed we could hardly walk. Mrs. Mallum in looking back, seems now to be an idiot savant. Four days of the week you ate to live and Tuesdays you lived to eat.
The nuns would sit at their own table eating the same muck but perhaps they were using it as a penance. The lay teachers sat at their own table too but they wouldn't eat it. They would slop it about on their plates then hare out to the staff room to light up. That would kill the hunger pangs I guess. They all reeked of cigs but then, in those far off days, most people did. That was Mrs. Mallum's secret ingredient. The ash off her ciggie. Well you know what they say. What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.