Secrets

Content Warning: This section includes graphic descriptions of wartime violence and death.

“He had just left his girlfriend home—they had been studying for ‘A’ levels together—and had come back to the house to find all the lights spilling onto the lawn and a sense of purpose which had been absent from the last few days.”

The description of the protagonist’s homecoming underscores his youth with reference to his level of study; if he’s studying for A-levels, a type of cumulative/qualifying exam, he is somewhere around 17 or 18. The imagery of “lights spilling onto the lawn” suggests a renewed warmth that the house did not have before. This heightens the contrast between fractured familial bonds and the potential for a brighter, more loving future.

“The noise, deep and guttural, that his aunt was making became intolerable to him. It was as if she were drowning. She had lost all the dignity he knew her to have.”

This quote demonstrates the somber mood of the story; Great Aunt Mary’s passing is described realistically, with the physical suffering she is experiencing undercutting her characteristic pride and composure. In retrospect, it’s clear that the protagonist’s childhood memories inform his experience of this moment. He wants to preserve his memory of his aunt’s “dignity,” in part because it is all he had after losing his early closeness to her.

“He was trembling with anger or sorrow, he didn’t know which. He sat in the brightness of her big sitting-room at the oval table and waited for something to happen.”

The mixture of emotions foreshadows the similarly-confused emotions that John/Brother Benignus describes in his letters. Both men feel anger and sorrow simultaneously when confronted with the brutal reality of death.