Higher,
Summary of what we have read so far. Feel free to write it into your notes but it will be provided in a study park nearer exams. Here for your reference though.
Chapter 1
The brothers, Neil and Calum, are high in the trees gathering cones. The wood is to be cut down for the war and will be re-seeded with the cones. Calum is clearly completely at home in the trees whilst Neil is less assured. Calum helps his brother down. On the ground, Calum’s deformity makes him clumsy.
Calum is compassionate to animals, sensitive to their pain and has caused the brothers to fall foul of the keeper, Duror, because Calum has released rabbits from the keeper’s traps. Duror hates both brothers but especially Calum. He wants them out of the wood.
When the brothers come across a snared rabbit with its front paw broken, Calum is upset at the animal’s plight but cannot kill it – not even to put it out of its misery. Duror kills the rabbit with a single blow.
Duror, in ‘an icy sweat of hatred’ (p 11) watches them and aims his gun at ‘the feeble minded hunchback grovelling over the rabbit.’ (This is typical of the way he refers to Calum.) The wood which has been his refuge has become polluted for him by this ‘freak’. If he pulled the trigger, ‘the last obscene squeal of the killed dwarf would have been for him, he thought, release too, from the noose of disgust and despair drawn, these past days, so much tighter.’ (p 11) He says that they are defiling the area around their hut with refuse; he calls them sub-human; and he spies on them obsessively.
The dominant emotion of these early pages is Duror’s savage hatred of the brothers.
Chapter 2
Duror meets the local doctor , Dr Matheson, who seems preoccupied by food – or the lack of it due to wartime restrictions and rationing. However, the doctor is shrewd and suspects that Duror is hiding seething emotions behind an apparently calm surface.
Duror’s home-life is desperately unhappy. His wife, Peggy, is grossly fat and bed-ridden and, in her own way, deformed: ‘The sweetness of her youth still haunting amidst the great wobbling masses of pallid fat that composed her face added to her grotesqueness a pathos that often had visitors bursting into unexpected tears.’ (p 25)
‘Her wheedling voice reminded him of the hunchback’s.’ (p 25)
His hostile mother-in-law, Mrs Lochie, accuses him of speaking to his dogs more often than to her daughter.
Mrs Lochie tells him that Lady Runcie-Campbell, the mistress of the estate, wants a deer-hunt organised for her brother, Captain Forgan, who is home on leave. Duror sees this as an opportunity to get rid of the brothers. He concocts a plot to have them drafted in as beaters knowing that Calum is likely to disgrace himself in front of Lady Runcie-Campbell. After all, if he cannot bear to see a rabbit in a trap, how will he cope with the violence of a deer-hunt? His hope is that Lady Runcie-Campbell will dismiss them.
Enjoy,
Miss Purdon
