2. What happens in the story?
• Three children are left to look after
themselves at home during the summer
holidays while their mother is at work. One of
the children, Therese, steps on a wasps’ nest
and is attacked by the wasps, which
foreshadows further danger that the children
have to deal with in the summer, as they
discover a teenager’s hand buried by their
garden fence.
4. Language:
• Metaphors are used to compare the wasps to more positive images, which
contrast the threat of the wolves to religious imagery ‘a halo of angry
wasps blurring her shape’
• Personification is used to show how much the girl tries to escape the
wasps ‘her pigtails dancing.’
• Present tense verbs are used to show how immediate the danger of the
buried body is ‘the arm growing up through the soil’ this also creates the
image of the arm being a plant.
• Negative adjectives are used to describe the hand that the children
discover ‘The skin was mauve in places, the fingernails chipped and
clogged with soil’ The alliterative and repetitive ‘chipped’ and ‘clogged’
highlights the fact that the buried girl has possibly been buried alive and
has tried to dig her way out. The way that the children use the dye from
red Smarties demonstrates their naivety and longing to grow up quickly,
but they’re clearly not ready to, as they fail to do the right thing and tell
the police about the body in Mr Mordecai’s garden ‘Pouting Smartie-red
lips, I told them Mum was at work, wouldn’t be home until six. I held my
right hand behind my back.’ The fact that the narrator holds her hand,
which has the ring on it, behind her back, demonstrates that she knows
she should tell the police, but chooses not to. We can argue that the
children aren’t as innocent as they seem.
5. Structure:
• simple sentences are used to demonstrate that the
narrator wants to move on quickly from the situation
with the police and have them leave.
• pathetic fallacy is used to demonstrate threat for the
children: ‘The heat was all anyone ever seemed to
speak of’; ‘The chemist sold out of after-sun that
summer, and flower beds dried up’; ‘ache of cars
moving slowly in the hot sun’
• Wigfall foreshadows the major threat of Mr Mordecai
by including the wasps and heat at the opening of the
story ‘We heard screams...Her screaming, the way it
broke the day, so shocked me that I dropped a glass’
6. Links to other short stories:
• Pathetic fallacy used to highlight feelings in:
‘Something Old, Something New’ (negative),
‘Compass and Torch’(negative), ‘...the 100%
Perfect Girl...’ (positive), ‘The Darkness Out
There’ (negative), ‘Anil’ (negative).
• Childhood naivety (innocence) in: ‘Anil’,
‘Compass and Torch’ and ‘The Darkness Out
There’
• Threat in: ‘Anil’ and ‘The Darkness Out There’
• Parenting in: ‘Anil’, ‘Compass and Torch’ and
‘Something Old, Something New’
