The Wheatleys: appearance and reality

At the beginning of the book, when Stephen introduces Keith´s family, it is clear that he regrets having been born a Wheatley and would have liked to be a Hayward instead. Keith´s parents have a glamour his own parents don't seem to have: “I think I feel a brief pang of admiring jealousy for yet another demonstration of his unending good fortune. A father in the Secret Service and a mother who´s a German spy- when the rest of us can´t muster even one parent of interest!” As for her own mother, Stephen believes “There's something so hopelessly ordinary about her that it's difficult to take account of her existence.” As regards his father, he considers Mr Wheatley´s job was “too dull to describe”, and that his father´s appearance is as “unsatisfactory” as his own. Besides, his father uses words which are “embarrassingly private” as nobody else in the Close uses them. Stephen seems to envy even the way in which Mr Hayward punishes Keith, as he comments about his own father: “ (...) the worst punishment he could contrive was a generalised swipe at their heads, which they effortlessly ducked.”

Stephen´s hypotheses on what is going on in chapters 4 and 5

         All along the novel, Keith and Stephen create different hypotheses about the adult world and all the events they can´t understand. Sometimes, these hypotheses can be illogical and childish, but they can also help us construct our own theories of what is going on. As in a real investigation, the children gradually gather new pieces of information, which make their hypotheses transform. The evolution of these changes can be clearly seen in chapters 4 and 5.

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.

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?