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?

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.