The tittle of the novel

  The title of the novel  may describe different characters. The most important spies in the story are Keith and Stephen. However, the curious thing is that they become spies because they  believe Keith´s mother is a German spy. So they spy on a spy! They start observing all her moves and following her around. They believe Mrs Haywards may be spying on neighbours in the Close and passing information to the Germans.
At the end of the story, we discover that Mrs Haywards is not a spy at all and that she behaved suspiciously due to the fact that she was having an affair with Uncle Peter, who had deserted from war and was hidden at the Barns. We also found out that the real spy in the Close was the character we least suspected from: Stephen´s father. He was a German Jew who was helping the British side with his knowledge of the German optical industry.
   

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 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.

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.