Marie Biscuits
He was always hungry. He had his two full meals a day plus bread and tea in the morning, but with no pocket money, it was sweets, peanuts, lemonade, chocolate, biscuits, cakes etc…that he hankered after.
He had a few illicit ways of combating this, but it was not easy. When his father became terminally ill in hospital, a partial solution to his woes appeared.
His mother arranged for someone to visit the sick man regularly, and it was his welcome duty to take the bus once every two weeks, with a basket of fruits, biscuit and Vichy water for him. He was provided with the bus fare, seventy cents for the two bus journeys. He had discovered that if he got down three stops from the hospital, he could save five cents on the fare. Times two. Serendipity!
But there were more. It took about forty minutes to walk the last tranche to hospital, and he felt a little hollow in his stomach. In the basket there was an unopened packet of Marie. The first time, the struggle between his conscience and Satan was quite hard, but the fiend won. He opened the packet, took two biscuits out, convincing himself that he would stealthily commit the near full packet into the patient’s cupboard, and no harm done. It was unlikely that his semi-conscious old man would notice anything. However before he reached his destination, half of the biscuits had gone the way of the first two. A quick tussle with his conscience resulted in his deciding to hang on to what was left for the return trek.
This was repeated a number of times.
The guilt took fifty years to surface.
