A Cold Hearth

[tectak]

Thank you all for your comments.  Tom, I have made a couple of semantic improvements based on your suggestions, thank you.  

Tom, when the rooster crows in the dead of winter and you're supposed to be out of bed, breakfasted, dressed and ready to catch the bus for the two-hour ride to school, you bloody rally, I assure you!  One is instantly "revived" from sleep to wakefulness.  It always amazed me how much volume that little bantam rooster could achieve.

Mother is Mother.  Father is Father.  Father doesn't call Mother Mother, he calls her much less savoury names.  I would capitalise it if the mother was instead Mum, so it must be Mother.  I would not capitalise it if I'd said "their mother", but I didn't, so I have  ...and Excel calls this a circular arguement

The stew, suffering savoury deficiency, is uneaten.  Thus it has been left to congeal.  I didn't think this unclear but perhaps it is.  Bully for you and your Mr Fancypants separate kettle and teapot -- we couldn't afford such a thing.  Indeed, I was well into school years before we got an actual kettle instead of just using a billy.  I still prefer billy tea though.  

We always called it "setting the teepee" -- such that I thought the image was fairly self-explanatory.  That's what it looks like, after all, politically correct or not.  We watched a lot of Westerns  Every morning, if the fire hadn't been banked, we would set it up in exactly that fashion and relight.  I've done Jenny and James a favour by allowing them a kindling box indoors -- ours was in a shed about 50m from the house and I remember several trips in my dressing gown and gumboots, crunching over the frost.  Often I'd find that the kindling was running low and would have to employ the tomahawk, which is the reason I learned the hands-under-the-armpits trick, because you don't want to slip with that sharp little beastie.

Since Jenny is the only "she" with any action, I feel perfectly justified in using the pronoun.  It doesn't confuse me and I suspect it doesn't really confuse you either.  The next sentence begins and ends just fine -- or would if you hadn't typed over it.

Brownlie, I have no idea why a maternal figure and a poem about the working class should be mutually exclusive.  Do working classes not have mothers?  Also, I am not sure what you mean by "stereotypical mother" -- perhaps you could clarify?