The Stranger, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY

Mrs Hammond has been ten months away from home visiting her eldest daughter in Europe. Now the ship in which she has been travelling has stopped outside Auckland harbour for no apparent reason. A doctor has been sent for to go on board, and this situation lasts for a couple of hours.

Meanwhile, Mr Hammond, who has come from Napier where he lives, has been waiting with a number of people for the ship docking. Mr Hammond has been very nervous and agitated: he has paced up and down the wharf, he has lifted and girl on a barrel and then forgotten her, he has felt his heart beating… He has wondered if his wife had been ill on board...

Finally, the ship has berthed and is moored. Mr Hammond runs to greet his wife Janey; he goes on board to help her with the luggage. He is very excited because he wants to be alone with her and have some intimacy. He has even left their children at home and has booked a room in a hotel to spend at least a night together before going back to Napier with the family.

But before going away from the boat, Mrs Hammond wants to thank the captain and to say goodbye to her traveller mates, and Mr Hammond realizes her wife is very popular and he feels proud of her and likes her the more. But then, when she wants to say goodbye to the doctor, Mr Hammond is afraid again thinking that perhaps his wife has been ill during the passage, and what is more, he suspects that something singular (he doesn’t know what) has happened.

He longs to get some hours alone with his wife, but her responses to his desires are distant or cold. When they arrive to the hotel, he’s so in a hurry that he didn’t even greet his mates there: he wants to be immediately in their room. Alone with his wife, he doesn’t want to go down to the restaurant to have dinner. But he is a bit confused because of this lack of tenderness in his wife: she’s been ten months away!

In the end, she tells him why she’s in a so melancholic mood: a young passenger has died in her arms. He had felt sick and, according to the doctor, he has had a heart attack. Mr Hammond is more unsettled when he knows she was alone with the young man before and in the moment of his death. And he feels jealous, he feels he won’t be alone with his wife ever more. A dead man has beaten him to the punch, and he’ll never be able to get a rematch.

Jealousy, or envy, is in this case a contradictory feeling, because the object which spurs it doesn’t exist any more; so it’s like striking in the air, it’s a ghost and you’ll never be able to defeat it.

But is he really jealous, or he’s only disappointed because he couldn’t get satisfaction for his intimacy?

 

QUESTIONS

-At the beginning of the story it seems that the ship waiting near the harbour is in quarantine. What do you remember about the quarantine in the beginning of 2020? Where does the word “quarantine” come from (because sometimes means 15 days and in our case lasted 3 months)?

-What resources use the author to give us the impression that Mr Hammond is very anxious to meet his wife?

-When does he start to being jealous? Is jealousy a feature of a character, or it’s something you can feel all of a sudden? Is really a bad thing (morally) being jealous? Is it something you learn, or does it belong to the human nature?

-What can be the difference between “well-meaning envy” and “green envy”? Give examples.

-At the end of the story, we can see that a dead man has “replaced” or “overcame” the husband. James Joyce did something similar in his story The Dead. Why in the story is the bond with the dead man so strong? What do you think of the famous sentence in The Little Prince, by Saint Exupéry, “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed [or saved]”?

 

VOCABULARY

crinkled, galley, stern, snugly, glasses, roped, liner, dent, thrum, wheezed, raked, rot, bee-line, pikestaff, took it all, put off, butting in, chucked, thirsted, hover

SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

SUMMARY

AUDIOBOOK

The Dead, by James Joyce

The Garden Party, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY, by Begoña Devis

At the beginning of this story, Katherine Mansfield tells us how the Sheridan family is preparing a party in the garden of their mansion. The opulent family is made up of the parents and four siblings: one boy, Laurie, and three girls, Meg, Jose and the youngest one, Laura. The latter is the true protagonist, and the narrator will make us see the events through her eyes.

During the preparations, Laura receives news of the death of a neighbour, a carter named Scott, who lives in a neighbourhood next to the Sheridans’, but completely different, indeed. It is a poor, working-class neighbourhood, where people live overcrowded and in poor situation. In fact, Mrs Sheridan cannot explain herself how anyone can live in such terrible conditions, although that doesn’t really seem to worry her at all.

For Laura, it is evident that the party must be suspended; it seems indecent to her that the widow and her five small children, who have lost their father, have to hear the music and merriment of the party. But for both her mother and her brothers, especially for Jose (who enjoys giving orders to the servants, as it is said in the story, and who sings about the hardness of life only to delight herself in her own voice) it is a crazy idea. Just because the neighbours suffer (the death of a man), doesn’t mean that they have to suffer too (cancelling a party). For them, there was no difference between these situations.

Laura sees things differently, she does not believe in absurd class distinctions (she thought that), although the education she has received and her age make her manipulable and naive. At the beginning of the story, when she goes out to talk to those who are going to put up the marquee (this time the mother wants to be another guest, and Laura is delighted to be outside socializing with people of different class), she thinks that the fact of eating carelessly a piece of bread with butter in front of the workers will already convert her in one of them, and now, in the case at hand, just her vision in the mirror wearing a beautiful hat that flatters her a lot is enough to make her believe that her mother must be right. For her, in short, the working class is a blurry vision, something she only knows through newspapers.

This vision will change dramatically when Laura is forced by her mother to bring the Scotts a basket with sandwiches, cakes, and other food left over from the party (which has been a success).

When she enters the poor neighbourhood and sees what state these people really live in, she is ashamed of her luxurious dress, and especially her hat. She wants to leave quickly, but Mrs Scott’s sister politely invites her to go in, and even to look at Mr Scott’s corpse.

And it is this vision that will upset Laura the most. She sees a calm, relaxed man who no longer cares about parties or jobs. She feels deeply disturbed, and leaves there saying only “Forgive my hat.”

On her way home, she meets her brother Laurie, who has gone to look for her, and can’t find words to express what she feels and can only say “Isn’t life…”, to which her brother replies “Isn’t it, darling?”

 

PERSONAL OPINION

This is a story that tells us about the difference between classes, about the futility of a luxurious and easy life compared to a miserable and poor working life, especially at the beginning of the 20th century. The narrator uses Laura as a catalyst for those differences. She thinks with more freedom than the rest of her family, but she is too young and naive to fully understand the problem. But when she visits the poor neighbourhood, and especially when she sees the peace in the face of the carter’s corpse, she has a kind of revelation. Can her high class feel that peace with the meaningless life they lead? Can it be felt by someone who wonders how the poor can live this way without doing nothing to change it, someone who subtly blames them for their situation, as if they had chosen it voluntarily?

I think that when Laura asks for forgiveness for her hat, she is actually asking for forgiveness from her neighbours for belonging to a class that humiliates them and that gives them the leftovers of their food just to make them feel their superiority.

The fact that Katherine Mansfield has once again chosen a woman as the protagonist of a story against the established norms of her time tells us once again about her revolutionary character and her recognized feminism. Laura (a woman) has had a revelation. Laurie (a man) seems to understand his sister when she can’t find words to describe her feelings, but is that true? Can he, who has not entered the house or seen the body, understand Laura’s confusion? We will never know.

QUESTIONS

-They say the girls’ names are after the protagonists’ names in Little Women. What do you know about Little Women? Can you consider it a feminist story?
-Working people and well-to-do people use different levels of language. Is it possible to break the barriers between these two kinds of people? How?
-According to you, who has righter feelings for the dead man’s family, Laura or the rest of the family? Are Laura’s condolences an intrusion in the family’s pain? Do every social class have to limit their sympathy to their own class?

 

VOCABULARY

mowing, marquee, staves, lanky, haggard, looped up, pressing, meringue-shells, castors, playing chase, print skirt, cream puffs, icing sugar, carry one back, yer, shied, relish, prowls, sympathetic, cooed, poky, fray, becoming, frock, palings, crutch

MOVIE

Film (from minute 27:45 on)

SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

CLIFF NOTES

MORE ANALYSIS

The Fly, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY, by Maria A. Feijóo

This story takes place in a very brief time-lapse, at the end of a meeting between two friends. They both are old men, but very different from each other. Nevertheless, they have an important thing in common, as we will learn later in the narrative.
The first character introduced is Mr Woodifield. He is the youngest, although due to his poor health we could think he is the oldest: he has had a stroke, and his life and mental abilities have been affected. He is now retired, and we know that he is married and has at least two daughters, as we are told that they only allow him to go to the City alone on Tuesdays.
One of those Tuesdays, he goes to “the boss’s” office. This character has no other name in the story. We can suppose he really has been Mr Woodifield’s boss. He is five years older than him, but remains very vigorous and active. He also offers the perfect image of social success: he is proud of his house, of his money and of his position. He treats his employees in an authoritarian way, but he seems to have a real esteem for Mr Woodifield. Anyway, there is something that he does not want to talk about: a photography of a young officer that stands on his table.
At the end of their meeting, “the boss” offers Mr Woodifield a glass of an expensive whisky - he insists on that - in the awareness that he usually is not allowed to drink. Maybe due to the alcohol, Mr Woodifield brings out just the only thing “the boss” does not want to hear about. He explains that his daughters have been in Belgium, visiting the grave of their brother, Reggie, and that they also had a look at a nearby grave, the grave of “the boss’s” son, the young officer in the picture. This is what they have in common: both had lost their sons during the war.
After a few banalities, Mr Woodifield leaves his friend’s office. As he remains alone, “the boss” commands his clerk to be let alone for a half an hour. He is very affected and wants to weep. His unique son was the meaning of his whole life: he wanted him to inherit his business, his house, all what he built with so much effort.
But, surprisingly, he is not able to cry as he did at the beginning of his loss. He goes on thinking how great his son was, but six years have passed, and even looking at the photography he cannot really feel again the pain he was intended to feel.
Suddenly, his attention is drawn to his ink pot, where a fly is desperately trying to survive. In what seems a compassionate gesture, he saves the fly from dying by taking the poor animal out of the ink and dropping it on a blotting-paper. He observes the way the fly removes the ink from his body, and suddenly he takes more ink and drop it on the fly. Once more, the little insect removes the ink accurately, driven by its survival instinct. A second and a third time, the boss repeats the cruel gesture, and twice more the fly repeats his laborious task, each time with less energy. The boss continues observing and even talking to the fly, until it dies.
At that moment, the boss throws the exhausted body of the insect into the waste-paper basket. He has a very weird feeling that frightens him, but he calls his clerk and asks him to bring some blotting-paper. And when he tries to remember what was worrying him before, he could not remember. He could not remember anything at all.

 MY OPINION

This short story is very interesting because there are plenty of possible interpretations. The fly can be held as a powerful representation of the nonsense of the war, where young people lose their lives in an absurd way under the command of powerful people. It is also a vivid image of how difficult it sometimes becomes to struggle for life when we have been hurt by destiny. The two human characters are another image of the poor control we may have upon our lives. “The boss” is an especially rich character due to the contrast between his image of a powerful man, able to control his and the other’s life, and his very childish behaviour with the fly as well as his poor emotional ability to face and manage pain.

QUESTIONS

-How has your life changed since you are retired? Or how do you think it’ll be changed?

-Do retired people feel they are a nuisance for other people? In what sense?

-Let’s talk about cemeteries. Are they beautiful places to walk around? Do you know any curious cemetery? Do you go and visit your relatives’ graves?

-Do you think it’s correct to take away things from a hotel? (I mean: shampoo bottles, combs, toothbrushes…) Do you usually do it?

-When you travel, what do you remember best? (People usually tell anecdotes.)

-What kind of crier are you? Do you cry watching films? Are you ashamed of crying? (Kundera kitsch)

-According to your opinion, why do /don’t children go on with their parents’ trade?

-What do you think it’s the meaning of the fly in the story?

-Why did he torture the fly? Is it an instance of the banality of evil?

-Magic numbers; three times the man flooded the fly with ink, and at the third time it died. What do you think of ritual numbers? Do you have one? Why did you choose it?

-“But such a grinding feeling of wretchedness seized him that he felt positively frightened.” Why?

-At the end, he didn’t remember something, like the old man at the beginning. What does the writer tell us about this for?

 

VOCABULARY

snug, pram, City, at the helm, wistfully, muffler, treacle, on his last pins, tamper, rolling in his chaps, nutty, yer, saw ... out, cubby, spring chair, learning the ropes, man jack, tackle, look sharp 

Conversation about The Fly (listen to the audio)

Summary and analysis

Another summary

Notes

Study guide

More analysis

Life of Ma Parker, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma.

Ma Parker lived a hard life. She left Stratford-on-Avon at the age of sixteen and started to work as a kitchen-maid with a cruel woman, the cook, who would not let her read her letters from home and threw them away. She also worked as a “help” in a doctor’s house. After two years, she got married to a baker. This was also a very painful experience. She had thirteen children, seven of them died very early. Her husband also died and left Ma Parker to raise the remaining six children all by herself. When they started going to school, her sister-in-law came to her house, to take care of them. One day, her sister-in-law had an accident and injured her spine, and Ma Parker had to look after this woman who behaved and cried like another baby.

Two of her children, Maudie and Alice, left her and fell into bad ways. Her two other sons went to live in another country, and young Jim joined the army and left for India. Her youngest daughter, Ethel, got married to a worthless, little waiter who soon died, leaving behind a newly born son, Lennie, to be taken care of by Ma Parker.

The story begins when Ma Parker arrives at her work as a maid in the house of a literary gentleman. She had buried her loving Lennie, who was the only ray of light in her sad life, the previous day. After opening the door, the gentleman asks her about her grandson. She informs him that he had passed away the day before. He enquires about the funeral, but Ma Parker doesn’t say anything about it and walks to the kitchen to do her work. After changing her clothes, she puts on her apron in preparation for her duties. While she is cleaning the pile of dishes in the kitchen, she remembers her small grandson persuading her to hand over a cent. She recalls Lennie’s tribulations. He had had a chest infection that he seemed not to be able to get rid of. Even though she has suffered a lot in her life, she has never complained and never broken down, but now, the day after Lennie’s burial, she is overcome and finally wants to cry.

Suddenly, she puts on her jacket and her hat and walks out absent-mindedly, lost in thought. She is unaware of her destination. She really wants to cry. It becomes difficult for her to postpone it any longer. She couldn’t cry anywhere, not at home or on a park bench. She couldn’t cry in the gentleman’s flat. She couldn’t find any location where she could be alone and cry. There is nowhere for Ma Parker to cry. It starts to rain, and she has nowhere to go. The rain can mask her tears, and she no longer has to hide and find a place to cry.

 

SOME REFLECTIONS

The story mixes the past with the present. The past is not a separate entity. Another literary device that Mansfield employs is interior monologue like “Why must it all have happened to me?” The most important, themes are social position and isolation. On the one hand, we see the literary gentleman who does not seem to understand how hard Ma Parker’s life is. He accuses her of stealing and discredits her as “a hag”; on the other hand, we have Ma Parker, a poor, uneducated woman. She pities the poor young gentleman for having no one to look after him.

QUESTIONS

-What are the things we have to say in a funeral? Do we have to tell only how nice the dead person was, or you can also talk their dark side?

-Why do you think the literary gentleman doesn’t have a name?

-In the paragraph “The result looked like a gigantic dustbin. […] or dark stains like tea.” There is a mixture of ideas: the dirty room next to the sad-looking sky. What is the relation between these two pictures?

-The literary man makes a “product called Life”. When do you think literature is Life?

-Katherine Mansfield died of consumption. What do you know about consumption and literature? Can you give us more examples of writers?

-What is the meaning of this sentence: “Then young Maudie went wrong and took her sister Alice with her”?

-Do you trust in the remedies appeared in newspapers? Do you have any anecdote?

-What kind of invalid are you: patient, angry, worried…?

-What would have to be the master’s attitude in front of an ill servant?

-What deeds do you consider that you have to do in private: crying, laughing, coughing…, but also brushing one’s teeth…?

 

VOCABULARY

parding, huskily, hobbled, marmalade, twinge, squashed, deadened, pail, roller towel, hag, area railings, chimley, range, beedles, sold up, loaves, chock-a-block, putting it on, bottils, postal order, stifled, counterpane, fitting by, as like as not

AUDIOBOOK

SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS

SUMMARY

WOMAN WORK, by Maya Angelou

Katherine Mansfield

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 1

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 2

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 3

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 4

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 5

A Picture of KM. BBC. Episode 6

A Portrait of Katherine Mansfield

Short Stories Audio BBC

A BRIEF SUMMARY OF HER LIFE

Katherine Mansfield was born in 1888, in Kaori, near Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand. There are two main islands in New Zealand, the North Island where the capital is and another important city, Auckland, and the South Island, with Christchurch as the most populated city there. But, at that moment, all the New Zealander cities were almost villages.
Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was an Australian who had made his living with business related to gold mines. Then he immigrated to New Zealand and, little by little, achieved a very important position in society and became a magnate of finances, and even he was made a knight for his services to the British Empire.

Katherine had two older sisters and a younger sister and a younger brother. Their parents give them some education and encouraged them to play the piano, to learn how to paint, to read, etc.

You have to remember that New Zealand was the first country in the world where women had the right to vote, in 1893.

At 14, Katherine Mansfield fell in love with a neighbour, Arnold Trowell, a cellist, and from that moment she decided she wanted to be a musician.

When she was 15, her father decided to send his three older girls to London to study at Queen’s College, a very liberal school in Bloomsbury, a neighbourhood in London. Bloomsbury was also the name of a group of intellectuals with a great influence in arts and science.

There she starts her long-life friendship with Ida Baker. It was a singular relationship because Ida (whom Katherine Mansfield called her “wife”) was (perhaps) her lover, her loyal friend but also her slave. Ida Baker wrote a book about Katherine Mansfield with the title Katherine Mansfield, The Memoirs of L.M., being L.M. Lesley Moore, a male name that Katherine Mansfield gave her.

She was at Queen’s College for 3 years; then she had to go back to New Zealand, but she couldn’t stand the provincial life of her native country and, in the end, she convinced her father to allow her to travel again to the UK and stay there with an annual allowance. She was 20.

She accommodated in a student hostel with a lot of freedom.

There she got in contact again with Arnold Trowell, but she fell in love with his brother Garnet, a violinist. She got pregnant, but we don’t know if he knew it. And then, all of a sudden, she got married to George Bowden, a singing teacher 10 years her senior. Nobody knows for sure the reasons of this marriage. The wedding was a surrealistic affair: she wore black, Ida was their only witness, and she left her husband the wedding night without consuming the marriage. George didn’t want to give her the divorce for six years.

She left the idea of being a musician and bet on being a writer.

Her mother knew about all the affair and travelled to London to take her daughter to a small spa in Bavaria. But they quarrelled, and she disinherited her forever, left her there and went back to New Zealand.

In this spa, Katherine Mansfield had a miscarriage. Her stay in Germany was the ground of her book In a German Pension.

She became briefly involved with a Polish translator, Floryan Sobieniowsky, who infected her with gonorrhoea; that was possibly the cause of her bad health during all her life, her rheumatism, her infertility, surely of her tuberculosis and her premature death. But, thanks to Floryan, she knew Chekhov. A story of hers, The-Child-Who-Was-Tired, a version of a Chekov’s short story (Sleep), almost a plagiarism, was published in 1910 in the magazine The New Age and marks the introduction of this Russian writer to the English critics and readers.

She went back to London, and since then, she moved house restlessly, mostly due to shortness of money.

She published In a German Pension, and she met John Murry, an undergraduate from Oxford, editor of Rhythm, who was going to be her partner, lover and husband in a very troublesome relationship. Their relationship began when she accommodated him in her flat and asked him to make her his mistress. Katherine then worked in his magazine writing book reviews.

Murry and Katherine met D. H. Lawrence and his lover Frieda, and went to live together in Cornwall in a kind of commune; but the society only lasted six months. The characters Gerald and Gudrun in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love are the portraits of Murry and Katherine.

In 1914 the Great War started, and in 1915 her brother Leslie, her favourite in her family, died in an army training.

She met people from the Bloomsbury Group. Leonard Bloom published her Prelude, and she had affairs with members of the group. Her relationship with Virginia Woolf was of admiration and jealousy.

At 29, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, but she didn’t want to go to a sanatorium. She went to live in the South of France, where a lot of English people with the same illness tried to recover their health.

These last years of her life were her most productive in literature. She published Bliss in 1918 and The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922.

From the South of France she went to Paris looking for a cure with a famous bacteriologist, and then to Fontainebleau, where a Russian exile (George Gurdjieff) ruled an alternative community that tried to live nearer the nature.

She died from a massive haemorrhage in January 1923.
The Dove’s Nest, Something Childish but Very Natural, her letters and diaries were published posthumously by her husband John Murry.

First on the Scene, by Graham Swift

 SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma

Frame from Jindabyne

This is Terry’s story. Terry is an old man suffering from Parkinson’s. He and his wife Lynne used to take the train almost every week and, after an hour’s journey, they would arrive at a quiet place, where they liked to walk and enjoy the beautiful views.

Because of his illness, he could not drive, and his wife didn’t know how to drive, so the train was ideal for them. In this way, they were able to discover wonderful landscapes that otherwise they would not have known.

When Lynne died, Terry continued going on these walks, taking the same train at the same times. He needed the countryside. On these walks, he did not feel lonely, on the contrary, he imagined that his wife was walking beside him. There was a semi-secret place, where he used to rest with Lynne and have a picnic. One day he thought he should stop there, but he was surprised to see that, this time, the place was occupied. He saw that there was a red patch of clothing. As he approached, he saw that it was a T-shirt worn by a woman in her 20s. She was alone, immobile and dead. She gave the impression that she had been there for some time. It was 10 o’clock of a warm Sunday morning. He stood still and looked at her for a while. There was nobody else there, he was the first on the scene. He was angry to be there alone. Everything had been violently interrupted, his walk, the conversation with his wife. It would be impossible to go this way without her again. His first thought was not to say anything to anyone. He would have to explain the situation and answer questions carefully, because he was there. He thought he could have taken another path, he could have taken another train, or perhaps someone else could have found the girl’s body.

Being the first on the scene could bring him complications, and he would be under suspicion. A young girl, a widower and trembling pensioner, everything seemed to blame him. He was tempted to turn back, return by another road and reach the main road. He even came close to shouting for Lynne, so that she would be his witness, but he knew he couldn’t do that. Then he realized what was his duty. He looked for the mobile phone, which he always carried in case of emergency or difficulty, and made a call. A voice was heard on the other side. He didn’t know how to begin to describe the situation, nor the exact place where he was. It was a terrible thing to be here and now.

 

SOME REFLEXIONS

The short narration is structured around the feelings and thoughts of a man who has just found the lifeless body of a woman. His thoughts make him feel fearful and question whether he should report the discovery or not. Finally, he does his duty and calls.

Reading the short story made me reflect on several themes. On the one hand, it is important to keep our daily routines, despite age and health problems. It is essential at this age to keep ourselves active and lead a healthy life to maintain our social relations and avoid isolation. On the other hand, I also believe that, in certain circumstances, the sense of responsibility is inescapable, and, like our protagonist, we must do our duty.

About the title “First on the scene”, I think he is not only the first one who discovered the girl’s body: being first on the scene gives him a sense of importance which he has never felt before.

QUESTIONS

Which do you prefer, drive or going by public transport? Why?

Do you have a driving licence? What is your opinion about the Spanish driving test?

What do you know about Parkinson’s disease?

Do you have a special place for walking? Why is this place important for you?

“This is as good as it gets”. What is its meaning? Can you tell us some situations in which you’d say this saying?

Have you seen Short Cuts or Jindabyne?

Is it good to talk out loud alone? Why do you think so? Do you do it sometimes?

Do you feel that sometimes something (a book, a place, a film, a piece of music, even a person) you always liked it’s been desecrated? Do you have a personal anecdote? What will you do then?

When do you know something, it’s impossible not to know it anymore. What can you do if you want to forget something?

What is the author’s narrative purpose when he makes an old man, a recent widower, to find a dead young woman?

What do you suppose had happened to the girl? Invent your own story: Was she murdered? By whom and why? Had she had an accident? Why was she there, walking alone? Did she commit suicide?

Are the police going to suspect him, or question him?

Do you have to feel guilty (or responsible) when some accident has happened next to you?

Do you think he’ll go by the same path again?

 

VOCABULARY

handy, miffed, go, tug, woodpecker, kestrel, primroses, moss, ferns, bramble, encroached, glaring, keenly, unmarked, incidental, peered, plights, stumbled, predicament, alibi, pinpoint

Was She the Only One?, by Graham Swift

SUMMARY, by Glòria Torner

The first sentence we read, “was she the only one?” is the repetition of the title, and it appears twice more in this initial paragraph. And with this humdrum question, the writer is introducing to us the memories of an elderly woman, Lily Hobbs, who remembers her complex relationship with her first husband, Albert Tanner, and, one year later, her different second marriage with Duncan Ross and their two daughters, Joyce and Margaret.

Every 25^th of June, Lily remembers her first love. She got married when she was eighteen years old. Her happiness was short-lived because Albert had to leave home to go to war. At that moment, she kept his new white shirt, the last one her husband had worn before leaving home, without washing it. She hung it in the wardrobe as an object of blind adoration. Lily caressed, smelled and put on this “sacred shirt” that reminded her of a magical memory of him with desperate romanticism. Now this shirt means love.

During the war, Albert wrote some letters to Rose, but, when months went by, he wrote her less. After a while, she knew that her husband had had his first leave, but it was cancelled. The shirt is still without washing. And now the shirt also means fidelity.

A few months passed, and then Alfred returned home for fifteen days, but he wasn’t the same man. She was waiting for love, but he didn’t touch her. He was a cold and strange man who didn’t look like a soldier, but a salesman, or almost a criminal. She doubted whether he has injured or is still healthy. Then he explained to her that he was suffering from shell shock, and he has to report to a doctor to evaluate his illness.

This is the moment that Lily hesitates about washing the shirt, but she decides not to do it. At home, Albert, who is very angry seeing the shirt in a poor condition, orders her to wash it because he believes that his wife has had an affair. This climax of suspicion and disturb is increasing in a huge aggressivity. Lily thinks that, perhaps, he is preparing his desertion. Anyway, she washes it, and she thinks that, by doing so, he will calm down and will love her again. The shirt means crisis.

One day, Lily proposes him a plan to go on a boat to Marlow on Sunday. It would be a nice excursion because Lily wants to make love. Lily tells him she wants him to wear the shirt during the trip, and he does it. They were very happy, the weather is fine and they enjoyed being together. Now the shirt means sexual desire.

But suddenly he has a change of mood: he says he wants to go back because he must return to the war. This is the second time the shirt remains hanging in the wardrobe, but now it’s no longer a fetish object. It means sadness.

Later, Lily decides to throw it to the fire. Burning the shirt means heartbreak, poignancy, desperation and hate.

Two days later, Lily receives a telegram telling her that her husband, Albert Tanner, has died “of wounds”, on the 25^th of June, ending the short marriage between Lily and Albert, like an elegy about how the war wasted lives and blasted hopes.

Following the story, she also remembers her second life. Three months later, Lily is going to Reading because of a job as a maid. On the train, she met Duncan. It was a lucky meeting because in him, she finds her new husband, the man who gives her love and sex.

But now she goes on remembering and thinking about the relationship between her sad past, Albert, and her real present, Duncan, who satisfies her desires.

At the end of the story, the first interrogative sentence becomes an affirmative one: that closes the story with this maxim.

 

SOME QUESTIONS AND REMARKS

After reading this sad and melancholic story, there are some questions in my mind:

Is the first marriage a real one, or it is only loneliness? Has she had sexual pleasure only in the second marriage?

Is “Albert” his name before leaving home, and “Bert” after going to war? I don’t know.

The story doesn’t follow any linear order from the beginning to the end. The writer wants to mix memories, sometimes in direct dialogue in third person between, sentences in second person to her second husband, and also with narrative and descriptive writing; and with the adding of “voice-over”, it becomes a complex text.
Finally, the story, “was she the only one”, is a reflexion about how a war can change a man.

TOPICS TO DEBATE

-Is it a film cliché, smelling our beloved clothes in order to remember them? Do you believe pheromones really affect humans?

-What do you know about shell shock? Have you seen the film Benediction or Regeneration or Johnny Got his Gun or Colonel Redl??

-Bert was a little fastidious: do you think his character made him prone to shell shock? Do you think some illnesses are psychosomatic?

-What do you think about military service? Has it to be obligatory?

-What implications does the word “appetites” have when meaning a woman’s sexual desire? Can shell shock cancel sexual desire?

-Did she really wish Albert went back to the front? What was harder for her: her husband’s shell-shock or her husband being in the trenches?

-Do you approve of desertion or shirking?

-What can you tell us about the beginning of the WWI?

-Why do you think he had become a corporal so quickly?

-“Wear this shirt for me” meant for Lily “let’s make love”. Do you remember other expressions from literature meaning “let’s make love”?

-“Hello, Lily. Can I come in?” was a very formal greeting and Lily felt it immediately. Can we discover other people mood only for the words they have chosen? Do you know any example?

-What is now “the height of sexiness”? What does “sexiness” depend on?

-Do you think our sweat smell differently according to our feelings / mood? They say animals are scared when they are going to die and that this fear corrupts their flesh, so we are eating corrupted meat all the time. What do you think about it?

-“He wanted to go back and be really dead”: was it the true reason?

-Why did she think the “intelligence” was hers?

-For children, do you prefer having boys or girls? In some countries there’s a preference for girls, and in some other for boys? Do you know why?

 

VOCABULARY

stud, ripe, fussy, leave, shell shock, measles, MO, lent, fabric, sheer, skulking, bellowed, private, mangle, break down, tub, fumblingly, thwarted, coaxing, tit-for-tat, willow, swan, put-upon, jetty, oars, loll, reeking, flustered, intelligence, cope, swathe, morsel, decoy