Keith and Stephen’s Relationship

All along Chapter 3, there are many sentences that suggest that Stephen is convinced of Keith’s total superiority and that he accepts it blindly, disregarding any evidence that points to the contrary. His low self-esteem and his sense of inferiority can account for this conviction.

The narrator uses a clear metaphor to describe Keith and Stephen´s asymmetrical relationship: Keith is the “hero” whereas Stephen  is just his “sword bearer”. Therefore, Stephen`s role is limited to follow, help and obey his friend´s orders.  At times, Stephen´s subordination is shown in the way he copies his friend's words:  “‘Nothing´ says Keith. ‘Nothing’ I confirm.” But mostly, Stephen´s voice seems to be annihilated by Keith´s, as the following quotations illustrate: “One of my tasks as his sword-bearer, though, is to prompt his imagination by offering useless suggestions.” “If theories involving secret passages, rockets, time travel, and the like are to carry conviction, they have to be uttered in his voice, not mine.” Moreover, Keith seems to have the power not only to silence Stephen but also to govern his behaviour and thoughts: “(…) I humbly wait for Keith to announce what we’re to think and what we’re to do”.Evidently, their relationship seems to be more an autocracy than a democracy.

Stephen´s admiration for Keith goes so far as to speak of him as a deity: “(...) he is more than a protagonist in the events we are living through- (...) he is in some mysterious way their creator.” Like God´s in the Book of Genesis, Keith´s words have creating power: “In each case he uttered the words, and the words became so. He told the story and the story came to life” The six words “my mother is a German spy” generated a new world for the children, as well as the story of the novel. Stephen does not possess this same power. When he says his father is also a German spy, the only reaction Keith has is a faint movement of his lips in  “a slight dismissive amusement”

If Keith is a God, Stephen is his most faithful acolyte. Not only does Stephen praise Keith all the time in these chapters, but he even silences any doubt he may have about the legitimacy of his friend's  leadership: “I have private reservations about the spelling but keep them to myself, as I do any of the other small occasional reservations I have about his authority.” His low self-esteem and his inferiority complex are the two conditions for this admiration not to be shaken by any conflicting evidence. If Keith misspells a word, Stephen dismisses his doubts, and blindly accepts Keith´s spelling. In chapter 5, he is even ready to own up to his friend's mistakes as if they were his own: “I want to lie and say it was me to spare Keith´s shame (...)”.

Will Stephen´s subservience continue all along the book? Well, that is the question we will have to answer as we go on reading.

The "X" in chapter 5

Click on this link  to see a Flowchart with different possible interpretations of the X

Stephen´s family´s opinion and the narrator´s reliability

While reading further and further through chapter 4, we can clearly see how many of the characters in the story underestimate and even mock Stephen and Keith's activity of spying, each character in its own way.

In Stephen's own family, both his mother and his brother Geoff disapprove the fact that Stephen gets together with Keith as often as he does. His mother probably doesn't like this because she sees Keith as some sort of bad influence for Stephen, and this is why she doesn't allow him to go to Keith's house most of the time, as she expresses by saying "Fidget, fidget! What's got into you?" as well as "Now where are you off to? You're not going to Keith's house again tonight, let me tell you that right now". By saying this, the reader is able to realize that what she probably wants is for her son to do other activities rather than getting together with Keith. She even looks for excuses to make him stay: "Anyway, tonight you can just stay in for once. It is Friday after all" and "Also Daddy's home–he never sees you!".

When it comes to Geoff, he doesn't disapprove as strictly and strongly as his mother, but he does it in such a silly way that it's as if he were mocking Stephen and Keith's activities. First, he asks if they're going "after the ape-man on the golf course," and then he hurtfully ridicules Stephen: "I've seen you, chum! Hanging around Mr. Gort's house, looking for ape-men! It's hell's own pathetic, you know, at your age". This demonstrates that he considers their projects to be a waste of time.

Stephen's familys opinion reinforces our belief at this point of the text that Stephen and Keith's activities are no more than a childish game.  We assume Stephen's narration is hyperbolic, as he exaggerates the importance of what they do as if they were going to somehow save tyheir country with their investigation. It just gives us more proof (this time from characters in the story) that their projects might seem great to them but to us (and this time even to Stephen's family) they are just part of an unimportant and insignificant game they've made up in their minds.

As a conclusion, the only thing the whole family's disbelief does is add to the narrator's unreliability. If we already doubted his reliability, both Stephen's mother and Geoff's opinion are going to reinforce our doubts, because they express some of the same disbelief we already had. Like them, we discredit the children's investigation and at this point of the novel we feel really skeptical about their chances of finding anything important.

Stephen´s adventures with Keith and his school life

Stephen's adventures with Keith have different effects on Stephen's school life.

On the one hand, his spying activities act as a safety valve for him to escape from his school problems. As Stephen is bullied at school, his adventures with Keith help him to distract himself from this reality. The fact that he knows something that shouldn’t be revealed gives him the strength to resist the abuse he has to suffer from his classmates:  “In the lunch hour, Henning and Neale perform their current routine of seizing my ears and rocking my head back and forth as they chant, “Weeny weedy Whitley” and for once I feel sustained against them by sheer importance of the secret knowledge lodged between those two abused ears of mine”.

However, on the other hand, his spying adventures also act as a distractor. Stephen doesn’t pay attention at school because he cannot stop thinking about his investigation, as this quote ironically proves:  “How can I think about the economy of Canada when I know there's a foreign agent somewhere out there in the evening sunshine studying the geography of his very neighbourhood?” When his father questions him about his studies, it becomes clear that Stephen is not making any progress at school. His intelligence is only focused on finding out a solution to the problem he is investigating with Keith.

To conclude, what is proved by these ideas is the importance that Keith assigns to his investigations. They seem to occupy most of his time and his thoughts. Nothing outside them seems to matter. School life, which is so important at Stephen's stage of life, counts to nothing compared to his investigations.

Minor characters in chapter 3

  Mrs.Elmsley was Mrs Hayward's housemaid. She seemed suspicious to Stephen just because she has a moustache and a wart in the middle of her forehead, and she speaks very softly. Stephen had never wondered before why she looked like that, but after Keith accused her mother of being a German spy,  the children considered all the characters to whom she spoke possible accomplices.

   Another character who seemed suspicious to Stephen was Mr. Hucknall, the butcher. He sung humorously loud and tossed the sniking brass weights from hand to hand.Stephen thought his behaviour was just pretence to conceal his true nature and that the mutton chops in his orders could be a secret code.

   To conclude, Stephen was just a boy with a fertile imagination. After his friend uttered the six words, even these two minor characters, Mrs. Elmsley and  Mr. Hucknall become suspicious for him so the reader can't help doubting the reliability of his perspective.

Our Attitutude Towards Keith and Stephen´s projects in chapter 3.

In the book, Stephen and Keith seem to have discovered a very dark secret: Mrs. Hayward is a German spy. Throughout chapter 3, we read how the two imaginative kids spy on Keith's mother. At many points in this chapter, we, readers, doubt about the seriousness of the children´s investigation. We can not share their beliefs because we are aware that they don´t fully understand how the world works, and so we start having a cynical and distrustful attitude towards their projects.

To begin with, everything that they are spying on are ordinary events that they previously took for granted (Mrs Hayward´s excursions to the shops or the post, her conversations with the butcher or the maid, etc) The fact that they suspiciously inspect and doubt every single action or person that are related to Mrs. Hayward  gives us the impression that the whole investigation is just a figment of their vivid imagination. However, Stephen and Keith, believe that there is a real problem going on in the Close and their task is of the utmost importance . This is shown when Stephen thinks "But then what can we do, if she's a German spy? We have to make sacrifices for the War Effort" or when he says "We have to defend our homeland from its enemies". These quotes show that they think that they have a significant role in the war, which we only see as part of their naive perspective.

Keith's ability to invent new mysteries for them to investigate is another reason that accounts for our lack of trust in their ideas. For example, they have already looked into the alleged crimes of Mr Gort. Their discovery of buried bones in his backyard lead them to write a letter  to Mr MacAffee, whom Stephen describes as "a kind of policeman",  Their expectations that Mr MacAffee would arrest Mr Gort was not fulfilled, which proves that the whole investigation was only part of their childish imagination.  This previous experience leads us to think that Keith's mother being a German spy is not any more true than Mr Gort´s murder story.

All this attitude is related to Franco Molina's posts on the reliability of the narrator. In his post he argues that we can not completely rely on the narrator not only because the old Stephen doesn´t remember the order of events clearly but also because he tells many parts of the story from young Stephen´s perspective, i.e. a perspective which is affected by his lack of knowledge and experience and by his inferiority complex.

In conclusion, in this chapter, our attitude towards the kids' activities is one of mistrust. We believe that all their investigation is part of their lack of understanding of the adults´ world and a creation of their childish imagination.

Keith's Spelling

Keith had a lot of spelling mistakes in comparison with Stephen. Although Keith went to the "right" school and Stephen to the "wrong one", Keith's spelling was far from perfect.

There are many examples of these mistakes in chapter 3. When Keith and Stephen found the exercise book that they were going to use to record their investigations, Keith wrote on its cover: "LOGBOOK -SECRIT" meaning secret. One of the first entries in that logbook was  Keith's mother conversation with Mr. Hucknall, the butcher: "1053 hrs. Phones. Asks for 8087. Mr. Hucknall. 3 muten chops. Not to fat", meaning "mutton" and "too" Another example of Keith's spelling mistakes was when he wrote "Privet" on a tile at the entrance of the passageway. He didn't want to refer to the plant, what he really meant was "private".

These mistakes clearly show that Keith is not superior to Stephen in all aspects, as Stephen believes, As we have said in other posts, that is Stephen´s opinion, but he is not a reliable narrator as -among other reasons- his point of view is tainted by his low self-esteem. 

Stephen knew the spelling of these words was wrong but he preferred to keep it to himself because he felt inferior. He was used to being "the led" and to accepting anything Keith said. He never dared to question the leader. Keith is like a god to Stephen and he admires him and he thinks that whatever he does is right and should be humbly accepted.

Dramatic irony

According to Enciclopaedia Britannica, dramatic irony is defined as “ a literary device by which the audience’s or reader’s understanding of events or individuals in a work surpasses that of its characters.” (http://www.britannica.com/art/dramatic-irony)

In chapter 3 of Spies,  dramatic irony occurs when Keith and Stephen discover the x´s and the !´s in Mrs. Hayward´s diary. These events are described by young Stephen, who has the innocence of a little kid, but we -readers- understand their findings in a different way because we have more knowledge and experience.

The x´s appear in Mrs. Hayward's´diary once a month, some months 2 days earlier or later than others. We realise immediately what meaning the x´s have: they mark Keith´s mother´s menstrual period. However, Keith and Stephen have no knowledge of this so they relate them to their belief that Keith´s mother was a German spy. They conclude that the x´s record her meetings with the Germans. Besides, her menstrual period coincide with the nights of no moon: "Yes, the x´s are approximately keeping step with the lunar calendar. Each month the x is close to the same sign, the full black circle. The night of no moon". So the children infer that dark nights are ideal for these meetings.

After working on the hypothesis about the meaning of the x´s, the children find the little exclamation marks: "The exclamation marks however, happened only 3 times so far this year, and at irregular intervals- on a Saturday in January, on another Saturday in March and on a Tuesday in April. These last date, I´m somehow disturbed to see, is also marked "wedding anniv.""  Keith and Stephen are not able to build up any consistent  theory about  these exclamation marks, but we assume that they keep track of Mr. Hayward and Mrs. Hayward's´sexual activity, which was important in case of pregnancy.

To conclude, there is a gap between our deductions and Stephen and Keith´s due to the character's lack of information about sexual matters. That explains why it is possible to speak about dramatic irony in this chapter.

Guiding questions (Chapter 5)

Spies- chapter 5 (up to “(...) one single familiar letter: X")

Guiding questions:

1. Comment on the first sentence. Where has it appeared before? What does the sentence announce the narrator is going to  do in the following paragraphs?
2. At the beginning of this chapter, is Stephen still focusing on his childhood memories or has he shifted onto the narrative present?
3. Was the Close old when Stephen was a child?
4. How had the village been born? What used to be there before?
5. What was there at the end of the Close when you turned right?
6. What was there at the end of the Close when you turned left? Does the landscape there look the same as in Stephen´s childhood?
7. What about the tunnel? How did it use to look? How does it look today?
8. What was it like to cross the tunnel and visit the world beyond it?

After describing the place, the narrator shifts to the memories of his childhood adventures again.

1. What did Stephen and Keith find out about Mrs Haywards´ outings? Where did she go? What evidence did they have? What hypotheses did they come to in order to explain those trips to themselves?
2. What did they finally see with their own eyes? What did they find hidden in the undergrowth? What was there inside?

The Close

Here is a picture of the close:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2uJMEM03R8XY25Ic3NnNGI3eTA/view?usp=sharing

Barbara Berrill

Barbara Berrill lives at number 6. She has a round face with big brown eyes and a big mocking smile. Her hair is curled and it falls onto her cheeks. She is a year older than Keith and Stephen.

She doesn't go to the same school as the boys, so she wears  blue and white summer checks,  puffy summer sleeves and  white summer socks. She has a purse slung around her neck in which she takes her bus and milk money.

She has an elder sister, Deirdre, who "hangs out" with Geoff, Stephen´s eldest brother. The Berrill girls´ father is away in the army and most people in the Close say that they are running wild.

Stephen and Keith despise Barbara because she is a girl, and they are not interested in the opposite sex yet. They don't even understand female behaviour: “ Why are girls like this?” Stephen says she is below their notice and thinks that everything about Barbara is soft and "girlish". For them, she is sly, treacherous and dislikable.  To make matters worse, Barbara tries to intrude into their private male kingdom. Barbara begs the boys to tell her about their new mission because she wants to join them, but they refuse to let her in. So she starts to shout that they are spying on people, which the boys find most humiliating.

Barbara´s reaction to the boys´  adventure is surprising and interesting. She wants to know what they are doing, even though she thinks it is a stupid little boys´ game. She uses the words “playing” and “game” to refer to the boys´adventure, and she suggests their lookout is just a “camp”. Besides, she links this new enterprise with their worthless past investigations: “´Who is it?´ She demands. ´Not Mr Gort still?´”

Barbara´s comments make us -readers- doubt that the children´s new project is serious. They even shatter Stephen and Keith´s convictions: “I know now that the whole thing- the disappearances, the secret marks in the diary, everything- was just one of our pretend games. Even Keith knows it.” At this point, both the narrator and ourselves align with Barbara Berrill, and  we dismiss the whole adventure as just a flight of childish imagination. Girls are generally considered to be more mature than boys, so we believe Barbara is right: This can't be more than a silly game. But...Is it?

Quiz (chapters 1 to 3)

Spies.Quiz (chapters 1 to 3).

Designed by Senior III-B students under the guidance of their teacher, Karina Zanetti.

1-What is young Stephen´s best friend´s name?

2- What is Stephen´s job?

3-At what stage of life is he?

4-What is the setting at the beginning of chapter 1?

5-What does the smell remind him of?

6-Who tells Stephen where the smell comes from?

7-Why does Stephen repeat the word “liguster”?

8-What city does he go to for a few days?

9-How does he feel when he returns there?

10-What does Stephen and Keith think about Keith´s mother?

11-What are the six words Keith said at the end of chapter 2?

12-How does Stephen feel about this?

13-Who lives next door to Stephen?

14-Name all Stephen´s neighbours.

15-In which war did Keith´s father fight?

16-Who does the bayonet belong to?

17-Whose diary does Stephen find?

Auntie Dee

Auntie Dee was Keith's mother´s sister. She was formally known as Mrs. Tracey. Only Keith's family called her Auntie Dee .She was married to Uncle Peter, who was away because of the war. They had a daughter called Milly.  Her house was very untidy, most probably because of the absence of Uncle Peter: "The grass on the untended lawn was as high as the rusting croquet hoops left over from earlier summers". Even though Keith disapproved of the neglect of her house, Stephen considered it had an almost sacred quality as it  “reflected the glory of Uncle Peter”

Her family lived three houses down Keith's so Mrs Hayward would often sent his son with food for Auntie Dee. Although Keith's mother and Auntie Dee were sisters, they were different both in appearance and personality: "Keith's mother was tall, Auntie Dee was short. Keith's mother was unhurried and calmly smiling; Auntie Dee was always in a rush and smiling, not calmly at all but with a reckless display of white teeth and cheerfulness"

Stephen seemed to like Auntie Dee for many reasons. First of all,  Auntie Dee addressed Stephen as well as Keith: "She'd speak, not just to Keith, but quite directly to both of us, as if I existed as much as Keith did"  Secondly, she was Uncle Peter´s wife, and Stephen clearly admired him. Last but not least, she was his friend´s aunt, and anything that belonged to Keith was admirable for Stephen, specially because it was different from what he had: “ “Would even Uncle Peter have been quite such a perfect uncle if Stephen himself hadn´t had to make do with a handful of obscure aunts in flowered dresses?”

Braemar

            In Spies there is a very special place where Keith and Stephen used to play together: Braemar. It used to be Miss Durrant´s house but very little remained of it as it had been destroyed by a stray  German incendiary bomb. The kids used it as their hideout and lookout and they planned all their games and adventures there.

              To start with, this "secret" place was full of vegetation due to the thick shrubs that used to be the front hedge of Mrs Durrant´s house. However, Keith and Stephen were able to pass through it and get to the middle of the undergrowth. Besides, among the shrubs there was the privet which the narrator  remembered and was looking for in the first chapter. The smell from these bushes is important because it is the catalyst for the whole story.

               For Keith and Stephen, Braemar was a secret place where they could get away from adults´ surveillance: "There´s only one place we can talk without being observed or overheard".There, they were away from the constraints imposed on them by the adults, and they were able to act following their own rules. It was as if they entered  a completely different world:  "Once we get there we´re across the frontier into another country altogether" They had to leave behind the refinement, luxury and politeness that governed Keith´s house: "We´ve come a long journey from the chocolate spread and the silver picture frames"

           Everything was different between the bushes, where the children´s imagination flowed. On the one hand, objects acquired a new meaning and importance. A  broken piece of metal from a shot-down German plane, the remains of Miss Durrant´s life or the units of ammunition Keith had traded at school were considered precious treasure  and were kept in a locked tin box. A long carving knife found out in the rubble of the house became the famous bayonet with which Mr Hayward had killed five Germans. On the other hand, the children´s behaviour turned wilder and more aggressive there. Stephen was made to take an oath on the sharpen “bayonet” that he would never speak about their investigations or his throat would be cut. This is the first instance in the novel in which they considered hurting each other dangerously.

             In the last part of chapter 2, Keith misspelt "private" and wrote "privet" instead. In Stephen´s memory, the two concepts were linked:  "privets" and their private place. It was only in this privacy (created by the privets)  that they could start their adventure. Their findings would be related to something private as it concerned one of their families and, as Keith made Stephen promise, it should remain private. The story stems both from the smell of the “privets” that are in a private place and from the children´s nosing into private matters.

Picture of Stephen

Click here to see Victoria Milin´s picture of Stephen

Tags by: Miguel Garcia Haiyashi

Memory and reliability

We have already seen how the narrator's point of view can affect reliability in any type of narration, but memory also plays an important part in its reliability, just as much or even more than vantage point. Depending on how well the narrator remembers what happened, the atmosphere and the message transmitted to the reader changes significantly.

In the case of 'Spies', there's a particular event in the story which changes its course significantly, and while Stephen tells it he tries to recall the order in which things happened. Even though he ends up making clear what the conclusion of all the incident was ( Keith's uttering the six words: “My mother is a German spy”), he doesn't really make up his mind on when, or how it was that this happened. He remains doubtful about the day in which everything occurred, stating "When is this?... Still May, perhaps? Why aren't we at school? Perhaps it's a Saturday or a Sunday. No, there's the feel of a weekday morning in the air...". This doubt in his thoughts makes the reader suspect of just how reliable what Stephen is telling actually is. He does remember what happened, but he can't seem to put the pieces together chronologically, so he is not completely sure of what order things occurred in, as he well expresses "...Or have I got everything back to front? Had the policemen already happened before this?". He even questions the possibility of making up a story : "It's so difficult to remember what order things occurred in--but if you can't remember that, then it's impossible to work out which led to which, and what the connection was".

This, as a whole, shows how the memory of a narrator when explaining a particular event can sometimes make the reader distrust his reliability. In Stephen's case, he makes us suspect something in his way of narrating  Keith's confession is wrong, because he seems to have forgotten the date and the chronological order the facts have happened in.

Stephen's and Keith's bedrooms

The story is narrated by Stephen, who is always comparing  Keith with himself. One of the comparisons he makes in chapter 2 focuses on their rooms, and shows a lot about their characters.

As it happens with the rest of the house,  Stephen´s description of Keith´s playroom focuses on its luxury and perfection. Keith´s playroom is neat, organized and impeccable. Besides, as he is an only child, he has  his toys all for himself: "All Keith's toys are his own, neatly ranged in drawers and cupboards, often in the boxes they came in" There is a great variety of expensive and elaborated toys and  all of them are in working conditions. Stephen´s admiration is clear all along the description.

In contrast,  Stephen doesn´t have a playroom. He has to play in his bedroom, which he shares with his brother Geoff. Therefore his space is smaller than Keith´s. His toys are all broken, and his toy cupboard is a mess. Besides, the room seems untidy, disorganised and neglected. All over the place there is "a hopeless tangle of string and plasticine and electric cord and forgotten socks and dust, of old cardboard boxes of mouldering butterflies and broken birds´eggs left over from abandoned projects in the past". The description is very negative and shows how disagreeable and shameful his room is for him in comparison to Keith´s.

In conclusion, these two rooms reflect the personality and family background of each character. Keith is methodical and structured, probably because of the influence of his father. His toys show the comfortable economic position of his family as well. Instead, Stephen´s possessions are damaged and dirty. His room is messy, and proves that neatness and looks are not his family's main concern. Besides, Stephen´s low self-esteem makes him look up on Keith and his family, whom he considers superior in all aspects, and the view he has of his friend's room is no exception to this. In Stephen´s opinion, Keith´s room is admirable, while his own is just humiliating.