Mid Term Break Flashcards
Counting bells knelling classes to a close
Repeated ‘L’s’ - sounds like bells
Knelling is only used for funeral bells not school bells but they sound like that because the death of his brother is all he can think about
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Image of isolation - H needs time to think
In the porch I met my father crying
He had always taken funerals in his stride
A shock to H - men don’t usually cry and he’s never seen his dad cry before - he’s never cried at other funerals before either
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow
A ghastly pun - shows how difficult it is to say something in this sort of a situation
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
The baby’s pleased to see H but it’s a bit weird because everyone else is so solemn
And I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
H is embarrassed because it is unusual for an older person to stand up before a younger person
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’
‘Sorry for your loss’
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest
- strangers to H
- repeated ‘S’s’ - sounds like whispering
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers
There’s a gap in between the lines which could signify that H’s mum is reaching out to him with her hand because she doesn’t want to lose him as well - could be also an act of comforting H
And coughed out angry tearless sighs
She’s all cried out - she physically can’t cry anymore - shock
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses
‘Corpse’ is more shocking than ‘body’, for instance
‘Stanched’ - patched up
Next morning I went up into the room
Definite article - makes it special - scary - big deal for H
Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
Snowdrops represent innocence an purity and the candles make the room less scary
First time we found if it is a boy or girl - no longer ‘the corpse’ because everything’s calmer
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple
It’s like he’s wearing it temporarily because he’s honing to wake up any minute
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot
Shows the boy’s age
