The Midwife's Apprentice

Content Warning: This section of the guide depicts animal cruelty, difficult childbirth experiences, and pregnancy loss.

“Boys. In every village there were boys, teasing, taunting, pinching, kicking. Always they were the scrawniest or the ugliest or the dirtiest or the stupidest boys, picked on by everyone else, with no one left uglier or stupider than they but her.”

These lines set up how Alyce initially thinks of herself, as well as the struggles she faces living alone on the streets. Alyce dislikes the village boys because they are cruel and violent, and she makes a note that it is always the ugly, stupid boys who act this way, which is her way of saying that the boys who torment her are doing so to make up for their own senses of inadequacy. They choose to pick on Alyce because she is an easy target and because the boys feel she is inferior. Alyce does not yet know that she will end up befriending one of the boys, Will, later in the novel.

“Once she found a nest of baby mice who had frozen in the cold, and she left them by the fence post for the cat. But her heart ached when she thought of the tiny hairless bodies in those strong jaws, so she buried them deep in the dung heap and left the cat to do his own hunting.”

This passage introduces Alyce’s relationship with the cat, as well as her capacity for caring. The mice Alyce finds are dead, but even so, she can’t stand the idea of them being broken further. So instead of offering them to the cat, she tends to their burial, which both shows The Power of Kindness, as well as how independence in relationships helps one grow. Alyce hasn’t yet befriended the cat, but she understands the value of surviving on one’s own merits.