Another theme would be youth and age, youth represented by Kerry and Sandra and age represented both by Mrs Rutter and briefly by Pat who ran the club. Although Pat is a lot younger than Mrs Rutter as she calls her a “Dear old thing”. Mrs Rutter looks like a sweet old lady “composed of circles, a cottage-loaf of a woman, with a face below which chins collapsed one into another, the author uses a metaphor to describe her face comparing her face to a pool “A creamy smiling pool of a face in which her eyes snapped and darted”, so she was plump at least with a round smiley face yet with very alert eyes “eyes investigated, quick as mice” which is a simile as mice dart around very fast we can imagine her eyes well with this description. This makes the reader think oh how sweet, not knowing the bitterness and vengefulness inside her which is how we find she is later on in the story.
Sandra who is the first character we meet is a young girl still at school a teenager though as it refers to thoughts of the woods when she was twelve and what she would be doing in next couple of years “One day, this year, next year, sometime, she would go to places like on travel brochures and run into a blue sea”. This is possibly when she is working so it seems she is about 15 possibly nearly 16. She is a pretty girl according to Mrs Rutter and someone at some point in her life had told her she had pretty feet although in one place the author says she has plump feet then goes onto saying she had “neat and slim” feet later on and she has bare brown legs so likes to be outside in sunshine, she is a handy girl being able to sew her own clothes and capable of doing the housework and washing etc. She seems a fairly happy sunny girl barely a care in the world apart from being a little “nervy”. Thinking of the future, past and present while she is strolling through the grass. Sandra is important in the story as it is her observations mostly, she grows up slightly through the course of the story from a young girl believing in witches wolves and tigers, to a young not fully grown woman who sees the horrors and evils in the world a real darkness in mankind and its behaviour to one another after she hears Mrs Rutter’s story. She doesn’t wish to talk about death, war, dark woods because she is nervy as her mother says, also she doesn’t want to think of the pain and fear the man was experiencing she also realised the world as she knew it is “unreliable” not quite as it seems towards the end of the story. She also finally realises “You can get people all wrong” as she did with Kerry Stevens.
Kerry was a youth of roughly the same age as Sandra, he was not very endearing to look at, his early description was quite negative with his “Blacked licked-down hair and slitty eyes” and uses the metaphor “His chin was explosive with acne” our skin doesn’t not actually explode which sounds bomb like, “Pale chilly flesh” which makes us imagine cold fishy flesh the poor boy sounds rather off putting, not someone you wanted as your friend particularly and Sandra and her crowd didn’t think much of him. He sounds like he is probably a bit of a loner in some respects at first but still a kind hearted boy helping the elderly people and getting on with the jobs needed doing, he doesn’t shirk work. He is probably a lot nicer than people see on the outside that is why it is said “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. He is the same age group as Sandra and is quite pleased with the fact he will be starting at the garage “The Blue Star” in July he had obviously been thinking of this as a job as he and been helping out there on and off.
Kerry also grows during the story “he had grown, got older and larger” in Sandra’s eyes this is more positive view of the boy figuratively speaking because he can hardly have physically grown within such a short space but mentally he has grown with the passing of judgement on Mrs Rutter, he looked, he heard and he found her wanting.
The author sets the mood of one of the settings - the woods by using words such as rank place, bones, and nasty, creepy, shadows, murky undergrowth, dark slab of trees, all words that suggest darkness and something to be feared of we can almost feel a chill reading this.
Another setting is in the past the time of the 2nd World War this brings another theme into play the theme of time – past, present and future, this section deals with the past and refers to the German plane possibly a Messerschmitt (which contrasts with the beginning of the play in which Sandra idealizes the future with grand dreams of travel and then to the present day for the characters). Mrs Rutter knew nothing about planes or their makes to be able to confirm this to Kerry, her we find out about the poor German gunner pilot that was trapped in the back unable to get out. The author uses words and phrases such as “It wasn’t pretty” “raw” “night” “Squeamish” “Hurt pretty bad” we can almost feel his pain, the weather was freezing wet rain “Teeming down” but Mrs Rutter didn’t help him even though he was trapped unable to get out, she calmly walked away while he cried for his mother crying out “Mutter…Mutter” a young man in his twenties, in agony she is heartless “Tit for Tat” she said to Dot her sister, she “licked her lips” as she told them this suggests she was relishing telling them how she left him alone to die with only the view of the woods at night and his dead comrades as company this was heartless and cruel, she was making the lad pay for what happened to her husband for the fact she “Was a widow at thirty-nine”. She even collected souvenirs from the wreckage but obviously rated them as unimportant as she mislaid them.
I think Mrs Rutter is the antagonist in the story as she definitely causes the conflict with her bitter vengeful nature and Kerry is the protagonist as starts off as un-endearing but ends up showing a caring nature (helping the aged) and strength of character when he gets up and says “I am going” he doesn’t say goodbye to Mrs Rutter he is way to disgusted and horrified by her action so long ago and the fact there is no remorse for the man she effectively killed. His heart goes out to “That poor sod” being left two nights to die in the way he did. It made him physically sick and he could listen no more. The story is written in the third person from Sandra’s viewpoint mainly she is like a reporter of events almost although we hear other people’s views within it too; we hear Mrs Rutter’s view on the German airman when she says “He must have been a tough bastard, like I said. He was still there in the evening, but next morning he was dead” and when she said “Oh no you had it coming to you mate, there’s a war on” and Dot’s view “Bang goes some more of the bastards” they never took in the view that those Germans where just men conscripted into fighting for their country whether they liked it or not much the same as the English soldiers. There was no kindness in these women. This story reflects mans inhumanity to his fellow creatures much the same to me as the film “Passions of Christ” both show how easily mankind can deviate from all that is good and how easily we can embrace the negative side to our natures and become inhumane, after all we wouldn’t treat a dog that way so why a fellow human being?
