Ramage and the Guillotine

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Ramage reached across the breakfast table for the silver bell, shook it and waited. After more than a year at sea in one of the King's ships (when meals were usually dreaded as unimaginative variations on a theme of salt beef or salt pork, and bread was a polite name for hard biscuit that an honest baker would disown and a potter would proclaim a credit to his oven) his stomach still rebelled at the rich fare that old Mrs Hanson insisted on providing for every meal, including breakfast.

She had been the family cook and housekeeper at the London house for as long as Ramage could remember, and her short-sighted husband was the butler, a timid and wispy-haired man whose life seemed to be a sheepish hunt for his mislaid spectacles.

Mrs Hanson firmly believed that all sailors, be they admirals or seamen, lowly lieutenants like Ramage or portly masters, were deliberately underfed by a scheming Admiralty which calculated the scale of rations on the principle that fighting cocks were starved for hours before being put into the cockpit to battle for their lives. It seemed to Ramage that whenever he came up to London on leave she was determined to cram enough food into him to last another year at sea.

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